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In fact, in our age of media-produced attitudes, the ideological insistence of a culture drawing attention to itself as superior has given way to a culture whose canons and standards are invisible to the degree that they are "natural," "objective," and "real."-Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic
I am speaking as a member of a certain democracy in a very complex country which insists on being very narrow-minded.
Simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue along with sincerity.
-James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro
Intersectionality-an integrated approach to analyzing the complex, matrix-like interconnections among patterns of discrimination based on race, gender, and other social identities, with the goal of highlighting how resulting inequalities are experienced-has many implications for exploring the relationship between knowledge and experience and for understanding identity and its role in scholarship and teaching. Overarchingly, it has the potential to reveal the power dynamics within the melting pot, whose hegemonic place in the American imagination has continually thwarted our achievement of a complex, pluralistic, relational national identity. Building such a national identity is necessary if we, as a country, are to realize the generative diversity that arises from the conflictual and complementary complexities of democracy.
In this short article, I explore the significance of intersectionality to a liberal education curriculum in both general education and the major, at two- and four-year colleges and universities, and its potential for undoing what I call the violent conundrum of our national identity. To paraphrase Edward Said, quoted in the epigraph above, that violent conundrum has become "natural," "objective," and "real" in its insistence on a binary understanding of people, their identities, and their ideas as either superior or inferior.1 By denying the contextual, interconnected, and relational dimensions of individual, group, and national identities, such an approach facilitates the dismissal of those identities as signifiers of essentialist identity politics, ultimately distorting the humanity of all. While not a panacea for binary thinking, intersectionality is a necessary framework for methodological and pedagogical engagement with complexity and conflict. It allows us to embrace diversity-in teaching, research, and scholarship; in student and faculty development, recruitment, and retention; and, ultimately, in our everyday political experiences as citizens.
To many, intersectionality is a troublesome term. In...
