La réception de la notion d’'intersectionnalité dans le débat en France. Construction théorique, implications politiques et usages pratiques
Résumé
The recent paradigm of ‘intersectionality’ reissues struggles about ‘identity,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘experience’
and ‘agency,’ as well as the structures of social inequalities that pervade theoretical and
methodological discussions in the sciences humaines et socials and beyond. The ‘intersectionality’
metaphor anticipates a multi-dimensional perspective. It aims at analysing, as capacious as possible,
the positioning of subjects/persons and their courses of action in historical contexts, i.e. within a
heterogeneous, but by no means arbitrary field of discourses, institutions and social practices.
Due to their multi-perspectivity, intersectional approaches have to be seen as parts of a current shift
of emphasis within cultural sciences and the humanities which is significantly related to ongoing
reflections on processes of globalization and the “spatial turn”. This scientific orientation can be
characterized by its attempt to explore multiple forms of crossings, blurrings, and transgressings of
‘borders’ and ‘spaces,’ as prevalent concepts like ‘transculturality’ and ‘transnationality’ demonstrate.
In this sense, intersectionality studies share certain similarities with the “histoire croisée,” which was
inititated as a heuristic device by Bénedicte Zimmerman and Michael Werner. According to the
“histoire croisée,” no object in history exists as an isolated entity, or independent of interrelations
with other phenomena. Thereby, we deal with a processual activity which constantly produces new
interrelations between already interrelated objects. What needs to be distinguished in this heuristic
perspective is, on the one hand, the interrelations of different perspectives that guide the views on
the interrelated objects, and, on the other hand, the interrelations of analytic practices performed by
researchers. While the “histoire croisée” focuses on diachronic ‘space-time’-structures, intersectional
approaches seem to emphasize synchronous relations of social and geographical ‘locations.’ In this
constellation, the organizers see the need for clarification especially in two regards. First, concerning
the question of the historicity of “axes of inequality” (Klinger, Knapp) and, second, concerning the
use of intersectionality as a methodology within the heterogeneous fields of transnational cultures of knowledge