patricia hill collins black feminist theory

Origin stories, conceptual mappings, narratives of “coinage,” possessive investments, and academic citation practices have arguably functioned to distort and conceal as much as they have revealed about intersectionality. Rather, goal is to offer an alternative telling of intersectionality's story that is more closely aligned with the critical traditions of resistant knowledge projects” (124). As such, Collins's “intent is neither to set the story of intersectionality straight . nor to defend intersectionality from commodification by academic poachers. If, in this community, reaching “consensus” about the meaning of intersectionality “is likely to remain elusive” (23), this book contributes to an approach that grounds intersectional critical social theory in concrete experiences and promotes practices of theorizing that can “accommodate heterogeneous points of view” (23). We have yet to fully understand the potential of the constellation of ideas that fall under the umbrella term intersectionality as a tool for social change” (2). For Collins, the “heterogeneity” of intersectionality “is not a liability, but rather may be one of its greatest strengths” (5): “I take the position that intersectionality is far broader than what most people, including many of its practitioners, imagine it to be. It issues an invitation to form a community: to engage with, and thereby transcend the “definitional dilemmas” (to use Collins's own term) in which the field of intersectionality studies has been mired for the past decade, and to reconstitute intersectionality as a “broad-based, collaborative intellectual and political project with many kinds of social actors” (5).

Patricia Hill Collins's long-awaited monograph on intersectionality does something remarkable.

Patricia hill collins black feminist theory