Male Power and power relations are key concepts of analyzing societal structures and social interaction through feminist perspectives. Investigating violence, dominance, homosocial power play and configurations of hegemonic masculinities relates to different theoretical approaches to gender and to masculinity which at the same time encompass a common perspective: pointing out the significance of gender hierarchies and social inequalities within the gender order. Gender is a main axis of social inequality and a basic structure of power and oppression – an assumption which has been interrogated not only by bringing forward intersectionality.
The contribution will reflect on how intersectionality challenges these theoretical perspectives and – the other way round – how theorizing masculinities and male power can enrich the conceptualization of intersectionality.

Intersectionality emerged within law as a metaphor to solve a particular set of challenges. I will reflect on these challenges as an effort to ground the term in specific debates, and will subsequently raise questions about how to best engage the process by which traveling terms sometimes “phone home” in surprising ways.

The concept of intersectionality emerged in the USA during the early 1980’s, primarily in response to Black feminist critiques of the lack of attention to issues of race and racism within feminist theory. Since then, the concept has travelled across the globe, particularly within Europe. It has been taken up, rearticulated, and deployed in very different ways and for very different purposes. My talk explores some of the differences in the theoretical production and reception of intersectionality. After situating these differences in the historical, academic, and ideological contexts on both sides of the Atlantic, I draw some conclusions concerning the usefulness of intersectionality for feminist theory in a globalizing world.

In this presentation I explore the debate(s) on intersectionality in relation to men. This involves review of how critical studies on men and masculinities have developed through engagement with analyses of patriarchy/ies and multiple masculinities. More specifically, attention is focused on some neglected intersectionalities: age/ing, virtuality, transnationality. In different ways, such intersectionalities may shift debate towards transsectionality,1 and the abolition of “men” as a category of power.

As soon as we stop celebrating the well-coined term of Intersectionality it will become visible that hard work still lies ahead. Intersectionality does not make a theory in and by itself but must be placed into a larger framework. The topic of intersecting experiences and identities of actors has to be connected to questions of societal structures, power relations and discourses on a global scale. This paper will attempt to outline some of the corner-stones (including a few stumbling-blocks) on the long road the concept of Intersectionality has yet to travel on its tedious way to "a full fledged theory".

My paper will discuss some of the theoretical challenges that accompany the Black feminist triad of race, class, gender and the concept of intersectionality. Posed as a systematic perspective of study, the categorical set of race/ethnicity, class and gender/sexuality calls for a re-inspection of European modernity. An integrated socio-historical analysis could help correct the false assumptions, self-deceptions and simplifications underlying many theories of modernization as well as theories of inequality. Dealing with the methodological and theoretical implications of intersectionality brings to the fore the importance of context and history, including the contextuality and historicity of the categories of analysis.

Drawing on organisationally situated accounts of racialised, gendered experience in the workplace the paper will explore the strengths and limitations of the concept of intersectionality and consider how the ways in and extent to which it offers a conceptual bridge between lived experience and representations of that experience.

This introductory lecture will look at some of the main arguments which are used in the feminist debate in favour or against intersectionality. I will try to clarify why the concept has been embraced by certain scholars and rejected or heavily challenged by others. While intersectionality has made a ‘brilliant career ‘ in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian discussions, it was and is met by much more reservation in the German Gender Studies debate. While I share some of the scepticism of my German colleagues, I am also a pronounced advocate of Intersectionality. Looking at advantages and disadvantages I will sketch the high potential of the concept not only for the further development of Gender Studies but also for those studying social inequalities in various national and transnational contexts.

To contribute to a discussion whether or not to move towards a fully fledged theory of intersectionalities, and what this implies, my paper will, on the one hand, discuss the ways in which reflections on intersections of gendered power differentials and identity markers cut across different strands of feminist theorizing such as feminist historical materialism, feminist postcolonialist and anti-racist thought, lesbian and queer feminism, (some strands of) sexual difference feminism, cyborg feminism, eco-feminism etc. On the other hand, I will reflect upon the ways in which intersectional thought reflects tensions and power struggles both within and between feminism and other social movements. In a genealogical perspective, I will launch a distinction between explicit feminist intersectionality studies, which use the concept as theoretical tool to carve out new theoretical and political spaces for analysis and action, implicit feminist intersectionality studies, which theorize intersections between gender and other social categories without using the concept of intersectionalities, and feminist intersectionality studies, which conceptualize intersecting power differentials and identity markers via other concepts. Following an anti-essentialist and mobile approach to distinctions of research subjects, objects and theoretical "tools", I will suggest that the notion of intersectionalities, can be considered as a theoretical nodal point and frame of reference which may enable dialogues and negotiations between different branches of feminist thought, and lead towards new synergies and more complex in-depth understandings of the doing of intersectionalities. But I will also stress that use of the concept of intersectionality should not be an excuse for homogenizing moves, where differences, including power differentials within and beyond feminism, are glossed over or just added to each other without consideration of their mutually transformative effects.

The language of intersectionality invokes “race, class and gender” as dimensions of inequality that operate in and through each other, but American understandings of inequality have historically obscured the political significance of class relations and instead emphasized race as the lens for viewing all forms of inequality. Translating the American approach to intersectionality into Europe therefore often implies bringing in more attention to race, ethnicity and nationality as dynamic and interactive forces, but this one-way transfer neither reanimates awareness of class injustices in the US nor challenges the diversion of class politics into a cultural struggle over social exclusion in European politics. In this increasingly racialized struggle, gender equality takes on a special symbolic meaning and feminists are polarized over how to proceed. I present this polarization as two differently intersectional ways of framing progress in gender relations. I contrast a race-centered framing of gender equality as the outcome of dismantling stereotypes and ending discrimination with a class-centered framing of gender equality as the outcome of effective government actions to promote women’s full participation in governance and in the enjoyment of social goods. I compare the outcomes for women who conform or fail to conform to conventional gender expectations when discrimination or exclusion dominates the framing of the problem of gender inequality, highlight the resultant minority/majority split in the focus on civil society or government as the actor who needs to change, and ask how awareness of racialization as an active and contested process might help to de-polarize feminist strategies.

One of the major contributions of intersectional analysis is that it has made it commonplace to recognise that it is crucial to analyse the ways in which people are simultaneously positioned in multiple categories. Intersectionality thus holds the promise of enabling theorisation and analyses that are non-essentializing and reflect the complexity of everyday life, rather than reducing it to simple and single analytic categories. How best this can be achieved, however, remains at issue and is subject to debate.
This paper will argue that intersectional analyses require an interdisciplinary, psychosocial approach. This does not mean, however, the end of disciplines, but that those working within disciplines such as psychology and sociology, for example, have creatively to refuse individual-social and structure-agency binaries. The paper draws on accounts from a study of adults looking back on three sets of ‘non-normative’ childhood experiences: serial migration; language brokering and living in visibly ethnically different households. It examines how psychosocial analyses can illuminate the situated, contingent, nature of (reconstructed) experience and identity and how individuals can only be understood within the specific social contexts they negotiate.

For gender studies and feminist approaches, the body has always been a tricky issue. It's conceptualized equally as realm of a liberated Utopia as it is seen as prominent site of domination and repression. By now, it's become quite clear that the body (of gender or of class) does not exist beyond its existence as regulative norm (Butler). Thus, especially for (Post-)Foucauldian perspectives - as in the recent governmentality studies - the body tends to be reduced to a mere effect of disciplinary discourses, leaving aside the singularities, ambivalences and complexities of embodiment as social process. In my talk, I want to take these processes as a starting point for a sociological hike through intersectionality and its pro's and con's as methodological concept. I want to show that intersectionality comes in handy when trying to grapple the complexity of embodiment - which is always and necessarily marked by complex and entangled (dis- and mis-)identifications with the social. But I also want to point out the risks of replacing empirical complexity by a (apparently) new concept. There will be some tentative empirical examples from the field of popular cultures and media in order to illustrate the points made.

In this lecture, I will highlight and analyze intersectionally recent and historically more distant moments in Dutch multi-ethnic society. Central in my understanding is that current social formations cannot be understood without taking the Dutch colonial archive into account. Whereas the Dutch have, by and large, preferred to forget about and to gloss over "race" and the Dutch colonial Empire, - evident among other things in presences, absences and the organization of education; in the discourses discernible in current debates about society and in multi-ethnic families, I will – in line with Toni Morrison's dictum – show how the colonial archive has not forgotten about the Dutch.

The paper explores the usefulness of the notion of intersectionality for sociological theories of stratification and claims that intersectionality should not be seen simply as a feminist analytical tool but as one which should inform any attempt to analyse social power relations.

Various forms of violence against men (including sexual violence) in contemporary wars increasingly challenge feminist dichotomies of omnipotent violent masculinities and vulnerable femininities. Multiple vulnerabilities of specific groups of men in wars seem to be both ever more visible, and carefully tucked away from public eyes. This paper uses intersectional analysis to ask: what the visibility means, under which conditions it appears, and what remains in the dark when lights turn on to some of the violated male bodies?
Social theoretical perspectives on Intersectionality.