Gender & Society
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Intersectionality and Global Gender Inequality
Christine E. Bose
Gender & Society 2012 26: 67
DOI: 10.1177/0891243211426722
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PATRICIA HILL COLLINS SYMPOSIUM
Intersectionality and Global Gender Inequality
CHRISTINE E. BOSE
University at Albany, SUNY
P atricia Hill Collins’s cutting edge scholarship on intersectionality and
interlocking systems of oppression has had an enormous impact on
the sociology of gender; on studies of race, racism, and ethnicity; and on
inequality research in the 20-plus years since Black Feminist Thought
(1990) was first published, surpassing the intellectual influence most
scholars will have over our entire lifetimes. Indicators of her influence are
found in the vast number of “Google Scholar” hits generated by her name,
or by her name in combination with “intersectionality,” as well as by the
fact that her work is cited by virtually every graduate student on sociology
comprehensive exams in gender, race and ethnicity, or stratification.
The development of intersectional theory significantly advanced research
on women of color and about others who experience multiple forms of
oppression in society (McCall 2005). Indeed, few contemporary scholars
have been so adept or successful at instigating a paradigmatic change in
how we understand our world. This shift is especially visible in work by
U.S. scholars who focus on various types of inequality, with somewhat
more muted ripple effects in other sub-fields such as demography or
political sociology.
Furthermore, since their introduction, the concepts of intersectionality
and matrices of domination have not remained static. Scholars have applied
this approach to dimensions beyond the original foci on race, ethnicity,
gender, and class to incorporate citizenship, sexuality, religion, age, and
other dimensions of subordination, across many different social settings.
Indeed, the concept has found a place in the intellectual toolkit of scholars
around the world, whether they live in their home countries or in national
diasporas, and is used to interrogate problems and policy issues in their
national or regional settings. My contribution to this symposium is to
examine some of these global applications with which U.S. readers may
be less familiar.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 26 No. 1, February 2012 67-72
DOI: 10.1177/0891243211426722
© 2012 by The Author(s)
67
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68 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2012
Worldwide, the concept of intersectionality has proved fruitful in law
and policy, or theory and methods, as well as in research studies on specific
inequalities. U.S. scholars should not be surprised that an intersectional
approach is useful to European, Asian, or African scholars studying ine-
qualities in nations with diverse native populations or polarized class
structures, or with increasing numbers of migrants and contract workers
from other countries. And although intersectionality is rarely thought of
as a policy issue in the United States, feminists in European Union (EU)
countries, where gender mainstreaming is common and where cross-
national equality policies are being developed, view intersectionality as
directly useful for such policies and considerably better than approaches
that tend to foster a sense of competing oppressions (Kantola and Nousiainen
2009). Indeed, in 2009 an entire issue of the International Feminist
Journal of Politics was devoted to various aspects of “Institutionalizing
Intersectionality in the European Union.”
There is also a substantial international literature that engages in elabo-
rating the concept of intersectionality. For example, Yuval-Davis (2006)
compares the debates around the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and
gender in Britain in the 1980s with those surrounding the 2001 UN World
Conference against Racism, focusing on their implications for feminist
politics. Meanwhile, Staunaes (2003) writes on how to bring together the
concepts of intersectionality and subjectification, and Rahman (2010)
focuses on “queer” as intersectionality.
Despite the rapid worldwide adoption of intersectionality as both a
concept and a research approach, there is no consensus on exactly how to
carry out an intersectional analysis (Choo and Ferree 2010). Indeed, Choo
and Ferree (2010) identify three different understandings of intersection-
ality that have been used in sociological research, with each producing
distinct methodological approaches to analyze inequalities. Their typol-
ogy of group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered practices
provides a useful framework for examining the global usage of intersec-
tionality, and a way of thinking intersectionally about variations in politi-
cal approaches to gender.
Choo and Ferree (2010) identify the first, and probably initial and most
common, style of intersectionality research as including the perspectives
of those who are “multiply-marginalized” and placing these groups at the
center of the analysis. They argue that this practice is important for giving
voice to those who previously were excluded, but that it can easily stop at
creating a “content specialization” on particular disadvantaged groups or
subgroups (Hancock 2007), and may not look at the groups in power. There
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Bose / INTERSECTIONALITY AND GLOBAL GENDER INEQUALITY 69
are many, and wide-ranging, global intersectional projects examining par-
ticular groups. For example, Sylvain (2011) researches the intersectional
discrimination experienced by San (Bush) women in Namibia, describing
how their self-construction makes it hard for them to work with interna-
tional groups of indigenous people. Or consider Nakamura’s (2002) argu-
ment about deafness in Malaysia as an intersectional identity that is
structured by language, religion, and ethnicity, among other issues.
The second, process-centered, practice of intersectionality (Choo and
Ferree 2010) focuses on analytic interactions in a nonadditive fashion,
while paying less or more attention to statistical main effects (and the
“unmarked categories”) as well. This often involves a comparative and
contextual analysis of inequalities, and the examination of selected interac-
tion effects among the various intersectional dimensions. Quantitative
studies of immigrants in the United States, both historically (Bose 2001)
and in the contemporary period (Torres Stone, Purkayastha, and Berdahl
2006) have used census data to research the intersections of race, ethnicity,
gender, and class in occupational segregation and/or earnings inequalities
across a wide range of groups. In contrast, qualitative methods have been
used in the growing global research literature on allegations of sexist
behavior that are made against a racialized “othered” group, and which
become one basis on which that group is treated as backward. To take a few
examples, Bilge (2010) uses an intersectional approach to analyze Western
discussions about migrant, veiled Muslim women and to argue that we need
to move away from dichotomous interpretations of the veil as signifying
either subjugation to (sexist) men or resistance to Western hegemony; Choo
(2006) examines the gendered construction of citizenship for North Koreans
in South Korea, noting how patriarchal attitudes are attributed to the north-
erners as a kind of ethnic marker that they are expected to give up as they
“modernize”; and Gianettoni and Roux (2010) use attitudinal research to
describe the confounding of sexism with racism by native-born residents of
Switzerland in their conceptions of other groups.
The third, system-centered, practice of intersectionality (Choo and
Ferree 2010) works to disassociate specific inequalities with specific insti-
tutions (e.g., equating the economy with social class or the family with
gender) and demonstrates how the systems themselves generate intersec-
tional effects. One recent and influential international example of this
approach is Walby’s (2009) Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity
and Contested Modernities. Several international activist-research groups,
such as Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN),
also use this intersectional model in their work for global South economic
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70 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2012
and gender justice. DAWN members research and create policies to deal
with complex, multi-institutional interactions such as those among
violence, discrimination, and state neglect or between maternal mortality
and human rights (www.dawnnet.org). Similarly, the Central American
Women’s Network (CAWN) has the goal of promoting gender equality and
equity and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women,
as well as helping Central American women’s voices be heard in Britain,
the European Union, and internationally (www.cawn.org). Recently, CAWN
published a report on “intersecting violences” (Muñoz Cabrera 2010),
arguing that an intersectional approach is vital to understanding how mul-
tiple macro-level structures, like economic neoliberalism, politics, and
patriarchy, operate at a regional and national level and are linked to the
micro-level of local economic, social, sexual, or cultural forms of violence
against women and women’s poverty.
As a U.S.-based scholar interested in global gender inequalities, I find
myself drawn to this third, complex system approach. But rather than
using the system model, in its more typical way, to understand inequalities
among groups of people within a single nation, I use this approach to
develop an intersectional framework for analyzing variation in the forms
of gender inequalities across many nations (Bose 2011). I find this trans-
national angle on intersectionality a useful alternative to the broad brush
that paints national-level gender inequalities as fundamentally all the
same, differentiated only between the global North and South, or all unique.
Not only is the global North/global South dichotomy a poor depiction
of reality, as geographic mapping of many gender inequalities reveals
(Seager 2009), but theoretical developments over the past several decades
have begun to expose the intersectional variation across issues and regions
of the world and have illustrated how geographic dichotomies can homog-
enize real conditions.
Just as there is diversity among individual women, based on their inter-
secting axes of age, race, ethnicity, class, marital status, sexual orientation,
religion, or other characteristics, there is diversity across countries in their
national-level gender inequalities based on intersecting axes of transna-
tional, regional, cross-cutting, and unique national issues that structure
gendered differences and concerns (Bose 2011). Truly global dynamics,
such as neoliberal economics, migration, or violence, intersect with
regional dynamics, such as histories of nation-building or gendered ine-
qualities in education and property ownership, to produce two interrelated
foundations on which broad gender inequalities are built. Additionally,
unique national trajectories and broader cross-cutting themes, such as
health, religion, or militarization, which are found in a few nations in
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Bose / INTERSECTIONALITY AND GLOBAL GENDER INEQUALITY 71
every region, contribute two more levels of variation to those basic ine-
qualities (Bose 2011).
Of course, to date, much of the global research that explicitly uses an
intersectional framework or enhances intersectional theory is focused on
the diversity within particular nations or regions, rather than globally. But
the fact that so much research makes use of Patricia Hill Collins’s ideas
is a tribute to the importance of her scholarship. Her work has become
indispensable for analyzing the numerous global gender inequalities that
persist, and the multiple dimensions of globalization processes that have
created both adverse conditions and favorable prospects for women
around the world. Addressing these gender-differentiated impacts will
need multiple types of intersectional approaches in shaping present and
future research agendas.
REFERENCES
Bilge, Sirma. 2010. Beyond subordination vs. resistance: An intersectional approach
to the agency of veiled Muslim women. Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (1):
9-28.
Bose, Christine E. 2001. Women in 1900: Gateway to the political economy of the
20th century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Bose, Christine E. 2011. Globalizing gender issues: Different voices, different
choices. Sociological Forum (forthcoming, December).
Choo, Hae Yeon. 2006. Gendered modernity and ethnicized citizenship:
North Korean settlers in contemporary South Korea. Gender & Society 20:
576-604.
Choo, Hae Yeon, and Myra Marx Ferree. 2010. Practicing intersectionality in
sociological research: A critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institu-
tions in the study of inequalities. Sociological Theory 28 (2): 129-49.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge.
Gianettoni, Lavinia, and Patricia Roux. 2010. Interconnecting race and gender
relations: Racism, sexism, and the attribution of sexism to the racialized other.
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Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition:
Examining intersectionality as a research paradigm. Perspectives on Politics
5:63-79.
Kantola, Johanna, and Kevät Nousiainen. 2009. Institutionalizing intersectionality
in Europe: Introducing the theme. International Feminist Journal of Politics 11
(4): 459-77.
McCall, Leslie. 2005. The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 30:1771-1800.
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72 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2012
Muñoz Cabrera, Patricia. 2010. Intersecting violences: A review of feminist theories
and debates on violence against women and poverty in Latin America. London:
CAWN (Central American Women’s Network).
Nakamura, Karen. 2002. Deafness, ethnicity, and minority politics in modern
Malaysia. Macalester International 12:193-202.
Rahman, Momin. 2010. Queer as intersectionality: Theorizing gay Muslim identi-
ties. Sociology 44 (5): 944-61.
Seager, Joni. 2009. Penguin atlas of women in the world, 4th ed. London: Penguin
and Myriad Editions.
Staunaes, Dorthe. 2003. Where have all the subjects gone? Bringing together the
concepts of intersectionality and subjectification. NORA–Nordic Journal of
Feminist and Gender Research 11(2): 101-10.
Sylvain, Renee. 2011. At the intersections: San women and the rights of indige-
nous people. The International Journal of Human Rights 15 (1): 89-110.
Torres Stone, Rosalie A., Bandana Purkayastha, and Terceira Ann Berdahl. 2006.
Beyond Asian American: Examining conditions and mechanisms of earnings
inequality for Filipina and Asian Indian women. Sociological Perspectives 49
(2): 261-81.
Walby, Sylvia. 2009. Globalization and inequalities: Complexity and contested
modernities. London, UK: Sage.
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of Women’s Studies 13: 193-209.
Christine E. Bose is Professor of Sociology, Women's Studies, and Latin
American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies; University at Albany, SUNY.
She is Past President of SWS (2006) and ESS (2011), and Past Editor of
Gender & Society. Her most recent book, with Minjeong Kim, is Global
Gender Research (Routledge 2009).
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