The term intersectionality has now entered gender and development literature and practice in order to take into account the ‘intersections’of gender with other social categories and identities such as race, age, class, and caste. The concept of intersectionality allows us to analyse how racism, patriarchy, class oppression, ability and other systems of discrimination create inequalities and structure relative gender positions.
An intersectional approach highlights the intersections between axes of oppression and privilege and helps us to explore distorted representation of experience when it is focused on only one marker of difference. In this way gender and development scholars recognize intersectionality as a tool for analysis and identifying policy options in efforts to combat exclusion and acknowledge diversity. It is an important issue to discuss as we rethink inequalities and geographic and other boundaries in international development made even more relevant with the current high level of global displacement of peoples.
Given the importance of the conceptual work on intersectionality for gender and development scholars this EADI-Nordic Conference Gender and Development Working Group sessions will be devoted to papers that employ intersectionality in their analysis and research.
Accordingly, the Gender Working Group welcomes papers that take an intersectional perspective to global gender and development issues in research that explores overlapping systems of oppression in global international development.We invite researchers to submit papers for the session that set out in specific locations how we can better understand the ways in which globalisation effects gender relations in inherently intersectional ways.
Papers can be on research undertaken in either the global South and North, and can be either case studies, discussion on development policy or more analytical explorations of intersectionality in gender and development discourse.
Conveners
Wendy Harcourt, Joy Clancy and Natalie Holvoet