Consub­stantiality vs Inter­sectionality?

Does describing someone as a woman, a worker and a racialized migrant explain the relations through which those positions are produced? Elsa Galerand and Danièle Kergoat argue that it does not. Their intervention compares conceptual frameworks rather than reporting a new survey. It asks how feminist sociology can investigate exploitation and conflict without turning historically changing social groups into fixed identity boxes.

Relations make categories

The authors develop consubstantiality of social relations: relations of sex, class and race are distinct, but cannot be understood as independent systems that meet only afterward. The term does not mean that every domination is identical. It directs analysis toward how relationships of power shape one another and produce the groups whose identities may then appear self-evident.

This is a methodological shift. An inventory of disadvantaged identities can document something important while leaving the organization of work and appropriation unexplained. The materialist question is who controls resources and labor, through which arrangements, and with what possibilities of collective resistance.

The article’s historical example concerns Filipina domestic workers organizing through PINAY against Canada’s live-in requirement. A contract could formally limit working hours while compulsory residence kept the worker continually available to the employer. The discussion on pages 56–57 shows why a wage and a contract do not by themselves establish control over one’s labor. This describes the programme discussed in the paper, not current Canadian immigration law.

Concepts have political histories

Galerand and Kergoat connect the development of consubstantiality to women workers’ struggles and French debates over class and sex. They contrast that setting with the histories through which Black feminism and intersectionality developed in the United States. Crucially, this is not a claim that race matters only in America. They explicitly discuss the prolonged exclusion of racial and colonial relations from French sociology, including feminist sociology.

The French original deposited at UQAM thus calls for contextualizing concepts without making national traditions self-sufficient. A category translated across borders may retain its name while referring to a different history of law, labor and collective struggle. The analytical work is to reconstruct those relations, not to decide in advance that one country supplies the correct model for all others.

A debate, not a contest for the winning label

Despite the question in its title, the paper argues that turning consubstantiality and intersectionality into competitors would be unproductive. Intersectionality includes diverse approaches, some close to the authors’ own. The substantive dispute concerns what is being related: pre-existing categories, experiences of domination, or the social processes that constitute them. Using either word does not answer that question automatically.

The framework is demanding because relations change while researchers describe them. A useful tension is how to investigate a specific institutional mechanism without pretending to capture an entire social totality. Conversely, a detailed category map may be strategically useful in a discrimination case even if it cannot explain every mechanism of exploitation. Different research questions can require different analytical resolutions.

Read Crenshaw’s legal intervention for what disappears when discrimination is separated into race or sex, then Hirata’s comparison for the connection to care work. The journal issue is labelled spring 2014; the online publication record is dated 23 March 2015. Keeping these dates distinct preserves the difference between a bibliographic issue and its online release.