Towards an intersectional theology

NOTE - this entire article was generated with LLMs and is for mockup purposes only.

Introduction

As feminists, womanists, and other liberation theologians have highlighted for decades, all theology emerges from a particular social location.  Theologians do not produce ideas from an objective, neutral space outside social realities.  Rather, interpretations of religious texts and traditions necessarily reflect the context of the interpreters themselves.  Feminist standpoint theory further notes that dominant groups occupy privileged social locations that are taken to represent universal perspectives.  The presumed neutrality of dominant discourses obscures the ways power and privilege shape assumptions.  Intersectional analysis builds on feminist and other critical approaches to focus on intersections between race, class, gender, sexuality and other differences in examining mutually constituting systems of privilege and oppression. This article outlines key concepts in intersectionality and explores the implications of applying an intersectional framework to Christian theology.   We propose that intersectional analysis offers vital insights and possibilities for expanding and enriching theological discourse, disrupting normative assumptions, and enabling more just and liberative approaches.

Intersectionality:

Key Concepts and DebatesEmerging from Black feminist thought, intersectionality recognizes that distinct yet interconnected aspects of identity shape each individual’s social location within interlocking matrices of domination and resistance.  The term itself was coined by critical race scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw in her seminal 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”1   Crenshaw highlighted how antidiscrimination law frameworks addressing either race or gender discrimination as separate categories failed to account for Black women facing compound discrimination.  Intersectionality provided language to capture the complex dynamics of intersecting race and gender biases that shaped Black women’s experiences.

While Crenshaw named intersectionality as a concept, Black feminist thinkers including the Combahee River Collective had been articulating an intersectional perspective for years prior.2  In 1977, the Combahee River Collective Statement asserted “the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” Intersectional analysis recognizes that multiple marginalized identities intersect to shape unique modes of marginalization.  Crenshaw explains that intersectionality provides a lens for seeing the way “various forms of inequality often converge.”3

Some critics have argued that intersectionality overemphasizes categories of identity versus structures of power.  Yet as Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd notes, “intersectionality is concerned first and foremost with power.”4  Structural intersectionality examines how institutions shape complex dynamics of subordination, as Crenshaw applied intersectionality in analyzing violence against women of color.5  Intersectionality is fundamentally concerned with interrogating power within its complexity.

Another debate centres on whether intersectionality has an essential subject.  Critics say intersectionality represents only specific groups like Black women and thus lacks broad applicability.  However, Patricia Hill Collins responds that intersectionality provides a way of thinking applicable across diverse contexts and differences, although situated knowledges are vital.6

Essentially intersectionality brings attention to the fact that aspects of identity are not independent and unidimensional, but multiple, overlapping, and mutually constitutive, shaping complex realities.  All individuals have intersectional identities.  What differs is the operation of power and privilege within these intersections.  Intersectional thinking disrupts tendencies for scholarship to focus on single axis frameworks that render certain intersections invisible.

Toward an Intersectional Theology

Applying intersectional analysis to theology and biblical interpretation surfaces vital insights and questions.  Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Shaw argue intersectional theology recognizes that theology is always socially situated, impacted by the theologian’s contextual location.  The assumed neutrality of traditional European and North American theology obscures the biases that arise from its roots in elite white male experience and privilege.  Intersectional theology embraces multiplicity, recognizing that diverse perspectives expand understandings of God rather than diminish them.  It includes voices that dominant discourses have marginalized.7

Intersectional theology values complex nuance rather than false universalism that erases diversity by claiming limited perspectives apply globally.  No group has a monopoly on truth.  Moreover, what research suggests about a particular context is always partial and tentative. Yet those with privilege often assume dominant narratives represent comprehensive absolute truth.  Intersectional theology demands interrogating assumptions, disrupting normativity, and hearing excluded perspectives.

Monica Coleman explains that womanist theology responds to the limitations of both white feminism and Black theology through intersectional analysis.8   Womanists like Emilie Townes and Kelly Brown Douglas highlight the interconnections between sexism, racism, capitalism, and heterosexism that shape Black women’s experiences.  No single category like gender defines womanist thought.  Rather than simply adding considerations of race or class, womanists emphasize relations between these systems.

Latin American mujerista theologians similarly apply an intersectional perspective.  Ada María Isasi-Díaz critiqued the tendency of both feminist and liberation theology to focus on male perspectives.  She emphasized the need to examine ethics through the intersections of Hispanic women’s daily lives, attending to class, ethnicity, and gender.9

Asian and postcolonial feminist theologies also exemplify intersectional perspectives by exploring intersections between colonialism, globalization, poverty, racism, and patriarchy in Asian women’s contexts.10    Kwok Pui Lan calls for a “postcolonial imagination” that challenges imperial underpinnings of much theology.

These contextual theologies show how social locations created by intersecting difference distinctively shape theological questions, methods, and perspectives. They reveal subjugated knowledge excluded by narrow applications of dominant theology.

Applications to Theological Concepts

Applying an intersectional lens prompts important critical questions that can expand and transform theological concepts:

• How has power shaped traditional understandings and uses of this idea?
• What assumptions does it make about identity locations and experiences?
• How might it change if considered from the margins?
• What complexity does intersectionality reveal in this concept?

For example, womanist scholar Delores Williams critiques atonement theology for its implications justifying surrogacy and violence.  Intersectional analysis reveals how notions of redemptive suffering through the cross have been imposed on Black women.11

Queer theology questions heteronormative assumptions around gender and sexuality embedded in theology.  Intersectionality complicates singular notions of “shared” LGBTQ experience by examining distinctions shaped by race, class, nation, and religion.12

Disability theology notes assumptions that certain bodies are inherently “normal.”  Intersectionality asks how disablism intersects with gender, race, class, and sexuality in marginalizing bodies.13

Postcolonial theology problematizes Eurocentric interpretations shaped by colonialism.  Intersectionality asks how the colonized negotiate imperialism and indigenous cultures to shape distinct theologies.14

These examples demonstrate how applying intersectionality fosters more complex, nuanced analysis to uncover biases within concepts, disrupt false universals, and make space for excluded subjectivities.

Intersectional Readings of Scripture

Intersectionality offers vital insights for biblical interpretation as well.  It reveals interpreters’ social locations and asks how these shape readings. Kwok Pui Lan’s postcolonial feminist reading of Ruth considers how the story problematically promotes assimilation yet also reveals agency.15 Intersectional analysis unpacks how race, gender, class, and nation intersect in this narrative.

Womanist readings foreground perspectives of women like Hagar, whose experience parallels African-American women’s surrogacy and struggle.16  Intersectionality asks which characters, experiences, and themes have been ignored and what questions arise from centering them.

Queer interpretation disrupts hetero-patriarchal assumptions, locating dissonances and gaps that challenge gender and sexual binaries. Intersectionality examines what difference race, nation, and class make in queer engagement with the text.17

Intersectional approaches recognize that biblical interpretation has often reinforced structures of domination.  Commitment to liberation compels interrogating these oppressive deployments and discerning emancipatory possibilities.

Theologies of Praxis and Justice

Ultimately intersectional theology aims to link theory to transformative action.  Intersectionality examines relations between scholarship and activism, recognizing that academic production takes place amid power structures. Chandra Mohanty advocates “feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles” that connects intellectual work to broader movements.18 Intersectional theology seeks not just to understand but to change oppressive conditions.

This commitment to praxis means intersectional theology cannot remain an abstract thought exercise for theologians alone. Its liberative meaning emerges through collaborative action between the academy and communities facing marginalization.  Intersectional theology lives in service of justice movements.  It stands in solidarity at the intersections.

Conclusion

This brief overview introduces key concepts in intersectional theology. Of course volumes could be written explicating applications to doctrine, biblical studies, spirituality, ethics, pastoral care, and preaching. We have sought to demonstrate intersectionality’s vital insights and transformative possibilities. Fundamentally, intersectional analysis compels greater attentiveness to the complexity of human experience and social relations in all its multiplicity. It calls for raising voices typically excluded and suppressed. Intersectional theology offers tools to imagine more just, equitable, and liberative possibilities that honor the fullness of creation.

1 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139-168.

2 The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

3 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color,” in Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 178.

4 Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era,” Feminist Formations 24, no. 1 (2012): 91.

5 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-1299.

6 Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015): 15.

7 Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw, Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018).

8 Monica Coleman, “Must I Be Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18, no. 2 (2002): 85.

9 Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Orbis Books, 1996).

10 Kwok Pui Lan, Introducing Asian Feminist Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000).

11 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2013).

12 Susannah Cornwall, Theology and Sexuality (London: SCM Press, 2013).

13 Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994).

14 R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

15 Pui Lan Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).

16 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2013).

17 Ken Stone, editor, Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001).

18 Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.