Intersectionality: A Situated Approach to Dominance

Who must explain their identity, and who can appear as an ordinary person without race or class? Mara Viveros Vigoya’s Spanish-language paper returns intersectionality to relations of domination. The question is not how many identities someone possesses, but how unequal positions emerge together through history, institutions and everyday judgments. Published in Debate Feminista in 2016, the article combines conceptual genealogy, theoretical disputes and the author’s earlier Colombian research. Intersectionality becomes a way to examine both inequality and feminism’s own exclusions.

Privilege has race, class and gender

Viveros does not reduce intersectionality’s history to the invention of a term. She connects Black feminist organizing and knowledge, Latin American feminist debates, and Crenshaw’s intervention in antidiscrimination law. Their problems are not identical: legal institutions overlooking Black women and movements treating white heterosexual women as the default subject require different investigations. Both unsettle a single, supposedly universal women’s experience.

A crucial distinction concerns intersecting social positions and people’s awareness of them. Wealthy white women also occupy positions constituted through race, class and gender. They may seldom have to notice those positions precisely because they are treated as normal. Asking only marginalized people to explain their identities leaves privilege at an unexamined center. Intersectionality must therefore also ask whose safety, respectability and freedom depend on burdens assigned to others.

This is why the article emphasizes the mutual constitution of social relations. Class does not first exist independently and then acquire gender; race is not an extra layer added to a complete gender identity. Institutions and practices make these relations operate together. The Spanish article distinguishes this relational analysis from fixing categories into a checklist.

Who counts as a respectable man or woman?

Returning to her research on masculinities in Quibdó and Armenia, Viveros shows that gender hierarchies also differentiate men. She contrasts valued images of responsible providers and present fathers associated with white-mestizo men in Armenia with stigmas of absent fatherhood, irresponsibility and infidelity attached to men in Quibdó. These are racialized models of judgment, not demonstrated population characteristics of two cities. The analytical question is how race, region and class confer unequal legitimacy on positions all called “men.”

Another example comes from her earlier research on interracial couples in Bogotá. A white-mestiza woman with a Black male partner recounts people explaining her relationship through supposedly excessive sexual desire and treating her as sexually available. In this example, marriage’s usual promise of female respectability is altered by the partner’s racial position. Gendered judgment and racialized sexual imaginaries operate together; separating them into unrelated prejudices misses their mechanism.

Both examples move intersectionality beyond an abstract ranking of identities. Inquiry must explain how judgments are produced, who assumes a right to cross boundaries, and which relationships offer protection. Counting oppressed identities cannot answer those questions. The article revisits concrete material from prior research; it offers neither nationally representative estimates for Colombia nor a description of every interracial couple today.

Coalitions need shared practice and disagreement

The political question is how alliances can emerge when women occupy different positions. Viveros discusses challenges to feminism’s political subject from Black feminism and Indigenous, Afro-descendant and lesbian feminisms in Latin America. Adding people to an existing list is insufficient: movements must reconsider their agendas, knowledge authorities and relationships with other social movements.

Shared subordination does not automatically create a unified political subject. The article warns that coalitions organized around oppressed identities can treat those identities as a group’s inherent property, forgetting the changing social relations that produce them. Emancipatory discourse can reproduce internal boundaries. Intersectionality itself can become an obligatory institutional slogan that leaves practice intact.

A practical tension remains: how does openness become a concrete investigation or action? Each inquiry still needs to explain which relations matter, why they matter, and who gets to decide. This is a theoretical intervention rather than a standardized diagnostic instrument. Its value lies in requiring analysis to remain answerable to particular situations.

Three paths for further inquiry

Pair the article with Crenshaw’s 1989 legal paper to see why assessing race and sex separately can make discrimination disappear within legal classifications. Hirata’s paper on gender, class and race takes mutually constituted relations into care labor and employment arrangements. The Combahee River Collective Statement returns these questions to organizers articulating demands and building alliances. Together, law, labor and political practice provide ways to test what intersectionality explains and what further evidence an inquiry needs.