240059 SE VM7 / VM4 - Examining Intersectionality (2022W)

Intersectionality developed as a framework that describes how overlapping social identities relate to social structures of racism and oppression (of gender and class) since the late 1970-s. Intersectionality became important in the 1990-s as a feminist theory of “merging” identity markers, including, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, and more to create a more complex way to see identity. However, Black and ChicanX/LatinX US-feminists opposed viewing intersectionality as a theory of “diverse” identities. Instead, both US-Black and European feminists suggested an intersectionality theory involving the systematic analysis of the ways multiple oppression and multiple social categories (e.g. race, class, sexual orientation, age, nationality, citizenship etc.) intersect in historic specific contexts. The course gives an overview of the early approaches to the analysis of multiple oppression (US Third World feminism; Critical Race Theory) up to intersectionality as a “critical”, explicitly feminist social science theory of inequality (Bilge/Hill Collins 2020; Winkler/Degele 2009). Based on a conceptualization of social inequality as relational and of categories not being just binary but intersecting and mutually constituting one another, a focus of the course is on Patricia Hill Collin’s (1998) queer approach to intersectionality, which has received comparatively little attention.
The course aims
- to create an understanding of intersectionality as a queer theory
- to differentiate between diverse and structural categories of (social) inequality
- to critically question sources and literature from a gender / intersectionality perspective

Teaching methods: direct instructions; cooperative learning (presentations, discussions, group work)