Intersectionality E-Book

Patricia Hill Collins

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 484

Beschreibung

The concept of intersectionality has become a central topic in academic and activist circles alike. But what exactly does it mean, and why has it emerged as such a vital lens through which to explore how social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and ethnicity shape one another? In this fully revised and expanded second edition of their popular text, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge provide a much-needed introduction to the field of intersectional knowledge and praxis. Analyzing the emergence, growth, and contours of the concept of intersectionality, the authors also consider its global reach through an array of new topics such as the rise of far-right populism, reproductive justice, climate change, and digital environments and cultures. Accessibly written and drawing on a plethora of lively examples to illustrate its arguments, the book highlights intersectionality's potential for understanding complex architecture of social and economic inequalities and bringing about social justice-oriented change. Intersectionality will be an invaluable resource for anyone grappling with the main ideas, debates, and new directions in this field.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Front Matter

Abbreviations

Preface

1 What Is Intersectionality?

Using Intersectionality as an Analytic Tool

Core Ideas of Intersectional Frameworks

Notes

2 Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry and Praxis

Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry

Intersectionality as Critical Praxis

The Synergy of Inquiry and Praxis

What Does It Mean to Be Critical?

Notes

3 Getting the History of Intersectionality Straight?

Intersectionality and Social Movement Activism

Intersectionality’s Institutional Incorporation in the Academy

What’s in a Name?

Notes

4 Intersectionality’s Global Reach

Intersectionality and Human Rights

A Closer Look: Intersectional Frameworks and Human Rights Policy

Intersectionality and Reproductive Justice

Digital Debates: Intersectionality and Digital Media

Notes

5 Intersectionality, Social Protest, and Neoliberalism

Intersectionality and Global Social Protest

The Coercive Turn in Nation-States

Securitization: A Problem for Everyone?

Intersectionality, Social Protest, and Far-Right Populism

Notes

6 Intersectionality and Identity

Hip-hop, intersectionality, and identity politics

Intersectionality and Identity Debates in the Academy

Then What Kind of Identity for Intersectionality?

Notes

7 Intersectionality and Critical Education

A Critical Convergence: Intersectionality and Education

Multicultural Education, Diversity, and Urban Public Schools

Intersectionality, Diversity, and Higher Education

Intersectionality, Critical Education, and Social Justice

Notes

8 Intersectionality Revisited

Social Inequality

Intersecting Power Relations

Social Context

Relationality

Complexity

Social justice

Coda

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Contents

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Intersectionality

2nd edition

Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

polity

Copyright © Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge 2020

The right of Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2016 by Polity PressThis second edition first published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3969-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hill Collins, Patricia, author. | Bilge, Sirma, author.Title: Intersectionality / Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge.Description: Second edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Series: Key concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In this fully revised and expanded second edition of their popular text, Hill Collins and Bilge provide a much-needed introduction to the field of intersectional knowledge and praxis for students new to the field”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019036788 (print) | LCCN 2019036789 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539673 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539680 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509539697 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Intersectionality (Sociology) | Critical theory. | Sociology. | Interdisciplinary research.Classification: LCC HM488.5 .H55 2020 (print) | LCC HM488.5 (ebook) | DDC 301--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036788LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036789

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

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Abbreviations

AAPF

African American Policy Forum

AIWA

Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

AWUC

Asian Women United of California

BIWOC

black, indigenous, and women of color

CBSA

Canadian Border Security Agency

CRC

Combahee River Collective

EU

European Union

FIFA

Fédération Internationale de Football Association (International Federation of Association Football)

IACHR

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

IAF

Industrial Areas Foundation (Texas)

IAHRS

Intersectionality in the Inter-American Human Rights System

IBPA

Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis

ICT

information and communications technology

IMF

International Monetary Fund

ISA

International Sociological Association

LGBTQ

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer

MBK

My Brother’s Keeper

NBFO

National Black Feminist Organization

NGO

nongovernmental organization

OAS

Organization of American States

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OWAAD

Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent

PAR

participatory action research

SFNM

Strong Families of New Mexico

STEM

science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

UN

United Nations

USSF

United States Soccer Federation

WCAR

World Conference Against Racism

WIR

World Inequality Report

WNBA

Women’s National Basketball Association

YWU

Young Women United

Preface

The time is right for this new edition of our book. People around the world face new and unprecedented social issues concerning the environment, women’s reproductive issues, the resurgence of far-right politics, food security, militarism, and migration. This context of global social change is a major catalyst for this new edition, in which we revisit and sharpen our analyses of intersectionality. In making our revisions, we opted to leave the structure of the original book intact and instead deepen our main arguments and conclusions by providing new case studies, updating information, and placing more emphasis on global issues. We make intersectionality’s growing global reach more visible and, by doing so, highlight its analytical and political usefulness for addressing important social issues.

This new edition continues our process of developing ideas in conversation and writing collaboratively. Intersectionality mandates doing this kind of dialogical intellectual work. Because our collaboration can be taken as an example of intersectionality’s global reach, we thought we would share a bit about our process. We first met in 2006 in Durban, South Africa, at the 16th World Congress of Sociology, the first meeting of this international group of delegates from more than 150 countries to be held in continental Africa. Patricia was a keynote speaker early on in the week-long event, and Sirma, a new assistant professor, was a presenter in the intersectionality session organized by Nira Yuval-Davis. By happy coincidence, we took the same bus on a field trip to the Kwa Muhle Apartheid Museum and to townships that bore the effects of apartheid. We had our first – albeit all too brief – conversation during that tour. Six years later, we met again at the 6th International Congress of French-Speaking Feminist Research (Congrès international des recherches féministes francophones) in Lausanne, Switzerland. This grouping had been meeting since the mid-1990s in different cities across the French-speaking world, from Paris to Dakar to Rabat to Ottawa. The Lausanne conference, with its theme “Interlocking power relations and the discriminations and privileges based on gender, race, class and sexuality,” brought together some 610 delegates, feminist scholars, and activists from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East. This time, we were both on keynote panels. Afterwards, we struck up a conversation that we continued during a visit to the Musée de l’art brut, a small but striking museum that contained work by groups that had been considered outsiders, such as the art of psychiatric inmates. During this visit, we discovered that we shared similar perspectives not just on the conference and our sensibilities concerning intersectionality; we learned that Sirma is a painter, that Patricia is a dancer, and that the arts infuse our intersectional sensibilities. While we didn’t know it then, our collaboration for this book had already begun.

This book, then, is the result of a true collaboration. Neither one of us could have written it alone. We felt the need for a book that would introduce the complexities beyond the audiences with whom we both felt comfortable. We started our conversation from our different locations within inter-sectionality and worked our way toward carving out points of connection. Sirma writes about intersectionality in French and English within a francophone academic context of the linguistically restless Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) situated on the unceded Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) territory, where the competition between French and English overshadows indigenous language struggles. Acutely aware of the problems of translation across her three languages of Turkish, French, and English, Sirma brings a commitment to situating intersectionality within global frameworks and the geopolitics of knowledge. Always mindful of her roots in a working-class, African American neighborhood in Philadelphia, Patricia writes for academic audiences and general readers in US and UK contexts. Her work is widely recognized, yet the demands of helping to institutionalize intersectionality in the academy has limited her involvement in activist settings. During many conversations, we hammered out the arguments that we felt would be most useful to our readers.

We could see how we complemented one another and knew that the ideas that could travel across the kinds of differences that shaped our own lives were likely to be the strongest ideas for intersectionality. One core premise of intersectionality concerns the relationships between ideas, practices, and, in this case, the execution of this book. This entailed working through and across many differences. Yet we quickly found out that dialog is hard work. In a sense, we lived our material via the process we chose to follow in writing this book. Don’t get us wrong! It is not as easy as it sounds, and there is nothing romantic about that. It involves labor and it creates tension – but generative tension.

There were so many moving points to this kind of conversation and, by implication, to the kind of work that intersectionality must do. The process involved getting fluent in each other’s language of intersectionality, in each other’s ways of putting things together, in each other’s perspective and perception. We also needed to speak several languages, for intersectionality is everywhere, and it is polyglot: it speaks the language of activism and community organizing as much as it speaks that of academia or of institutions. It speaks to young people through social media and popular culture and to established scholars through journals and conferences. These different fields of practice of intersectionality do not engage each other as much as they should, perhaps because they lack a common language. If such is the case, then our book needs to speak to these different constituencies in ways that are not mutually exclusive, in a language that is audible and makes sense for them.

Consider this book an invitation for entering the complexities of intersectionality. We provide some navigational tools for moving through intersectionality’s vast terrain. The book is a road map for discovery and not a portrait of a finished product. We simply could not include everything in one volume. You may find that some of your favorite authors are barely mentioned and that authors of whom you have never heard are discussed at length. We mention many areas of intersectionality, but could not include an extensive discussion of public health, epistemology, environmental issues, the arts, and many other areas where people have taken up the ideas of intersectionality. Just as we brought different areas of expertise and interest to the process of writing the book, yet learned to listen to one another and translate along the way, we encourage you to do the same as you pursue these areas.

Just as our collaboration was crucial for the book, so we value the support of others who helped us along the way. We both thank the team at Polity for shepherding this project through unexpected delays. Thanks to Louise Knight, our editor, who brought the idea for this book to us and trusted our ability to get it done; to Evie Deavall, production editor at Polity; editorial assistant Inès Boxman; and copyeditor Sarah Dancy. We also appreciate the comments of the two anonymous reviewers whose critical eye greatly strengthened this text, as well as anonymous scholars who have used the first volume of our book in their teaching and who gave Polity feedback.

First and foremost, Sirma wishes to thank her partner Philippe Allard, who always stood by her through the ups and downs of all her writing projects, and her sister Gönenç Bilge-Sökmen and her mother Figen Bilge for their unfailing love and support, despite the great physical distance that separates her from them. Sirma thanks graduate students who attended her past and present seminars at the Université de Montréal for being a constant reminder of the utter necessity of pursuing critical work, and for making her feel intellectually and emotionally less out of place. They are far too many to list here. Their reception and critical engagement with the first edition of this book in Sirma’s graduate seminar on intersectionality have been invaluable. Her appreciation also goes to colleagues in the sociology department at the Université de Montréal, with special thanks for their support to Anne Calvès, Christopher McCall, and Marianne Kempeneers, the department’s head, and librarian Catherine Fortier. Sirma expresses heartfelt gratitude for the friendship and solidarity of some amazing scholars and activists, for many impassioned conversations: thanks especially to Sara Ahmed, Paola Bacchetta, Leila Bdeir, Leila Ben Hadjoudja, Karma Chávez, João Gabriell, Eve Haque, Jin Haritaworn, Suhraiya Jivraj, Yasmin Jiwani, Délice Mugabo, Jen Petzen, Julianne Pidduck, Malinda Smith, Michèle Spieler, and Rinaldo Walcott. Arashi needs to be thanked for bringing feline grace and mandatory playtime to her life. Last but not least, Sirma wishes she could thank her father, Ugur Bilge, for his constant support, for never failing to ask, “Isn’t it finished yet?” and for prompting her to translate it into Turkish. Ugur Bilge, who planted the passion for reading in Sirma’s life first through the children’s books of Iranian Marxist Samed Behrengi, suddenly passed away in 2014; Sirma dedicates this book to his memory.

Patricia would like to thank Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, whose strong leadership of the department of sociology at the University of Maryland provided a welcome backdrop for this project. She also is indebted to the many graduate students who contributed to this work: Les Andrist, Melissa Brown, Kathryn Buford, Rod Carey, Nihal Celik, Valerie Chepp, Michelle Corbin, Paul Dean, Rachel Guo, Tony Hatch, Nazneen Kane, Wendy Laybourn, Chang Won Lee, Angel Miles, Allissa Richardson, Jillet Sam, Dina Shafey, Michelle Smirnova, Margaret Austin Smith, Danny Swann, Kristi Tredway, Kevin Winstead, Laura Yee, and Sojin Yu. Patricia extends special thanks to Ana Claudia Pereira and her many new colleagues and friends in Brazil for numerous wonderful conversations about intersectionality and black feminism. She also thanks her many colleagues who, over the past several decades, have contributed to the success of this book. She wishes she could thank them all, but she particularly thanks Margaret Andersen, Juan Battle, Cathy Cohen, Brittney Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jessie Daniels, Angela Y. Davis, Kristi Dotson, Michael Eric Dyson, Joe Feagin, Cheryl Gilkes, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Sandra Harding, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Dorothy Roberts, Graham Hingangaroa Smith, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Catherine Knight Steele, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Lynn Weber, and Nira Yuval-Davis. Finally, Patricia could not have finished this project without the support of her family and friends: Roger, Valerie, Lauren, and Patrice. Her amazing grandsons Harrison and Grant are the light of her life, and she dedicates this book to their generation.

1What Is Intersectionality?

In the early twenty-first century, the term “intersectionality” has been widely taken up by scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists in many places and locations. College students and faculty in interdisciplinary fields such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, American studies, and media studies, as well as those within sociology, political science, and history and other traditional disciplines, encounter intersectionality in courses, books, and scholarly articles. Human rights activists and government officials have also made intersectionality part of ongoing global public policy discussions. Grassroots organizers look to varying dimensions of intersectionality to inform their work on reproductive justice, antiviolence initiatives, workers’ rights, and similar social issues. Bloggers use digital and social media to influence public opinion. Teachers, social workers, high-school students, parents, university support staff, and school personnel have taken up the ideas of intersectionality with an eye toward transforming schools of all sorts. Across these different venues, people increasingly claim and use the term “intersectionality” for their diverse intellectual and political projects.

If we were to ask them, “What is intersectionality?” we would get varied and sometimes contradictory answers. Most, however, would probably accept the following general description:

Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytic tool, intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, class, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age – among others – as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Intersectionality is a way of understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.

This working definition describes intersectionality’s core insight: namely, that in a given society at a given time, power relations of race, class, and gender, for example, are not discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but rather build on each other and work together; and that, while often invisible, these intersecting power relations affect all aspects of the social world.

We begin this book by recognizing the tremendous heterogeneity that currently characterizes how people understand and use intersectionality. Despite debates about the meaning of this term, or even whether it is the right term to use at all, intersectionality is the term that has stuck. It is the term that is increasingly used by stakeholders who put their understandings of intersectionality to a variety of uses. Despite these differences, this broad description points toward a general consensus about how people understand intersectionality.

Using Intersectionality as an Analytic Tool

People generally use intersectionality as an analytic tool to solve problems that they or others around them face. Most colleges and universities in North America, for example, face the challenge of building more inclusive and fair campus communities. The social divisions created by power relations of class, race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and ability are especially evident within higher education. Colleges and universities now include more college students who formerly had no way to pay for college (class), or students who historically faced discriminatory barriers to enrolment (race, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, citizenship status), or students who experience distinctive forms of discrimination (sexuality, ability, religion) on college campuses. Colleges and universities find themselves confronted with students who want fairness, yet who bring very different experiences and needs to campus. Initially, colleges in the US recruited and served groups one at a time, offering, for example, special programs for African Americans, Latinx groups, women, gays and lesbians, veterans, returning students, and persons with disabilities. As the list grew, it became clearer not only that this one-group-at-a-time approach was slow, but that most students fit into more than one category. First-generation college students could include Latinos, women, poor whites, returning veterans, grandparents, and transgender women and men. In this context, intersectionality can be a useful analytic tool for thinking about and developing strategies to achieve campus equity.

Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that they need better frameworks to grapple with social problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, African American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs concerning jobs, education, employment, and healthcare simply fell through the cracks of antiracist social movements, feminism, and unions organizing for workers’ rights. Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and action above others; for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within feminism, or class within the union movement. Because African American women were simultaneously black and female and workers, these single-focus lenses on social inequality left little space to address the complex social problems that they face. Black women’s specific issues remained subordinated within each movement because no social movement by itself would, or could, address the entirety of discriminations they faced. Black women’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool emerged in response to these challenges.

Intersectionality as an analytic tool is neither confined to nations of North America and Europe nor a new phenomenon. People in the Global South have used intersectionality as an analytic tool, often without naming it as such. Consider an unexpected example from nineteenth-century colonial India in the work of Dalit social reformist Savitribai Phule (1831–97), regarded as an important first-generation modern Indian feminist. In an online article titled “Six Reasons Every Indian Feminist Must Remember Savitribai Phule,” published in January 2015, Deepika Sarma suggests:

Here’s why you should know more about her. She got intersectionality. Savitribai along with her husband Jyotirao was a staunch advocate of anti-caste ideology and women’s rights. The Phules’ vision of social equality included fighting against the subjugation of women, and they also stood for Adivasis and Muslims. She organized a barbers’ strike against shaving the heads of Hindu widows, fought for widow remarriage and in 1853, started a shelter for pregnant widows. Other welfare programmes she was involved with alongside Jyotirao include opening schools for workers and rural people, and providing famine relief through 52 food centers that also operated as boarding schools. She also cared for those affected by famine and plague, and died in 1897 after contracting plague from her patients.

Phule confronted several axes of social division, namely caste, gender, religion, and economic disadvantage or class. Her political activism encompassed intersecting categories of social division – she didn’t just pick one.

These examples suggest that people use intersectionality as an analytic tool in many different ways to address a range of issues and social problems. One common use of intersectionality is as a heuristic, a problem-solving or analytic tool, much in the way that students on college campuses developed a shared interest in diversity, or African American women used it to address their status within social movement politics, or Savitribai Phule advanced women’s rights. Even though those who use intersectional frameworks all seem to be situated under the same big umbrella, using intersectionality as an analytic tool means that it can assume many different forms because it can accommodate a range of social problems.

In this book, we examine multiple aspects of intersectionality but, for now, we want to show three uses of intersectionality as an analytical tool. In line with Cho et al.’s argument that “what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term ‘intersectionality,’ nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations,” our focus is on “what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (2013: 795). Our cases of how intersecting power relations characterize international football, the growing recognition of global social inequality as an intersectional phenomenon, and the emergence of the black Brazilian women’s movement in response to specific challenges of racism, sexism, and poverty illustrate different uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool. Specifically, they suggest how intersectional analyses of sports illuminate the organization of institutional power, how intersectionality has been used to diagnose social problems, and how intersectional responses to social injustices enhance activism. These cases both introduce important core ideas of intersectional frameworks and demonstrate different uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool.

Power plays: the FIFA World Cup

Across the globe, there is no way of knowing exactly how many people play football. Yet surveys by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) provide a good guess: an estimated 270 million people are involved in football as professional soccer players, recreational players, registered players both over and under age 18, futsal and beach football players, referees, and officials. This is a vast pool of both professional and amateur athletes and a massive audience that encompasses all categories of race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, nation, and ability. When one adds the children and youth who play football but who are not involved in any kind of organized activity detectable by FIFA, the number swells considerably.

Intersectionality’s emphasis on social inequality seems far removed from the global popularity of this one sport. Yet using intersectionality as an analytic tool to examine the FIFA World Cup sheds light on how intersecting power relations of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality organize this particular sport, as well as sports more broadly. Rich nations of the Global North and poor nations of the Global South offer different opportunity structures to their youth to attend school, find jobs, and play sports, opportunity structures that privilege European and North American nations, and that disadvantage countries in the Caribbean, continental Africa, the Middle East, and selected Latin American and Asian nations. These national differences align with racial differences, with black and brown youth from poor countries, or within neighborhoods within rich ones, lacking access to training and opportunities to play. Girls and boys may want to play football, but rarely get to be on the same teams or compete against one another. As a sport that highlights physical ability, football brings a lens to the phrase “able-bodied” that underpins analysis of ability. At its foundation, football is big business, providing financial benefit to its backers as well as to a small percentage of elite athletes. Differences of wealth, national citizenship, race, gender, and ability shape patterns of opportunity and disadvantage within the sport. Moreover, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the patterns of their intersection determine which individuals get to play football, the level of support they receive, and the kinds of experiences they have if and when they play. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool illuminates how these and other categories of power relations interconnect.

Because it is a global phenomenon, the FIFA World Cup is a particularly suitable case to unpack in order to show how intersecting power relations underpin social inequalities of race, gender, class, age, ability, sexuality, and nation. Power relations rely on durable, albeit changing, organizational practices that, in this case, shape the contours of FIFA World Cup soccer regardless of when and where the games occur and who actually competes. Four distinctive yet interconnected domains of power describe these organizational practices – namely, the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal. These domains of power are durable across time and place. FIFA’s organizational practices have changed since its inception and have taken different forms in Europe, North America, continental Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Yet FIFA is also characterized by tremendous change brought on by new people, changing standards, and a growing global audience. Using intersectionality to analyze the FIFA World Cup sheds light on specific intersections of power relations within the organization; for example, how gender and national identity intersect within FIFA writ large, as well as the specific forms that intersecting power relations take within distinctive domains of power. Here we briefly discuss intersecting relations within each domain of power within FIFA, thereby laying a foundation for analyzing intersecting power relations.

The structural domain of power refers to the fundamental structures of social institutions such as job markets, housing, education, and health. Intersections of class (capitalism) and nation (government policy) are key to the organization of sports. In this case, ever since its inception in 1930, the World Cup tournament has grown in scope and popularity to become a highly profitable global business. Headquartered in Switzerland, FIFA enjoys legal protection as an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) that allows it to manage its finances with minimal government oversight. Managed by an executive committee of businessmen, FIFA wields considerable influence with global corporations and national governments who host the World Cup. For example, for the 2014 games in Brazil, FIFA succeeded in having the Brazilian parliament adopt a General World Cup Law that imposed bank holidays on host cities on the days of the Brazilian team’s matches, cut the number of places in the stadiums, and increased prices for ordinary spectators. The law also allowed beer to be taken into the stadiums, a change that benefited Anheuser-Busch, one of FIFA’s main sponsors. In addition, the bill exempted companies working for FIFA from Brazilian taxation, banned the sale of any goods in official competition spaces, immediate surroundings, and principal access routes, and penalized bars that tried to schedule showings of the matches or promote certain brands. Finally, the bill defined any attack on the image of FIFA or its sponsors as a federal crime.

Hosted by different nations that compete for the privilege years in advance, FIFA events typically showcase the distinctive national concerns of its host countries. Brazil’s experiences illustrate how national concerns shape global football. Fielding one of the most successful national teams in the history of the World Cup, Brazil has been one of a handful of countries whose teams have played in virtually every World Cup tournament. In 2014, the potential payoff for Brazil was substantial. Hosting the World Cup signaled its arrival as a major economic player on the global stage, minimizing its troubled history with a military dictatorship (1964–85). A victorious Brazilian football team promised to enhance Brazil’s international stature and foster economic policies that would help its domestic population. Yet the challenges associated with hosting the matches began well before the athletes arrived on the playing fields. Brazil estimated having to spend billions of US dollars in preparation for the event. The initial plan presented to the public emphasized that the majority of the spending on infrastructure would highlight general transportation, security, and communications. Less than 25 percent of total spending would go toward the 12 new or refurbished stadiums. Yet, as the games grew nearer, cost overruns increased stadium expenses by at least 75 percent, with public resources reallocated from general infrastructure projects.

In several Brazilian cities, the FIFA cost overruns sparked public demonstrations against the increase in public transportation fares and political corruption. On June 20, 2013, 1.5 million people demonstrated in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolitan area, protesting the exorbitant cost of stadiums, the displacement of urban residents, and the embezzlement of public funds (Castells 2015: 232). As the countdown to the kickoff began, Brazilians took to the streets in more than 100 cities, with slogans expressing objections to the World Cup, such as “FIFA go home!” and “We want hospitals up to FIFA’s standards!” “The World Cup steals money from healthcare, education and the poor. The homeless are being forced from the streets. This is not for Brazil, it’s for the tourists,” reported a Guardian article (Watts 2014). This social unrest provided the backdrop for the games in which, despite making the semifinals, Brazil suffered a historic loss to Germany.

Because FIFA is unregulated, it should come as no surprise that for years it has been accused of corruption. Disputes over where to hold the event, the competition of nations and their financial backers, have characterized the World Cup since its inception. Corporate sponsors, wealthy backers, and the global media outlets appear to be the primary beneficiaries of the World Cup’s global success. There appears to be little if any financial benefit to countries that actually host the World Cup – South Africa recouped approximately 10 percent of its outlay on stadiums and infrastructure for the 2010 World Cup, and many of the 12 stadiums that Brazil constructed for the 2014 event were investigated for graft. Yet nations may have reasons beyond financial gain for hosting the games. Qatar was granted the right to host the 2022 World Cup, suggesting that the fiscal and political controversies that characterize FIFA’s operation will persist.1

An intersectional analysis of capitalism and nationalism sheds light on structural power relations that enabled FIFA as a global business to influence the public policies of nation-states that host the games. But other categories of analysis in addition to class and nation are also hardwired into FIFA’s structural power relations. Take, for example, gender inequalities. Sports generally, and professional sports in particular, routinely provide more opportunities for men than for women. Thus far, we’ve focused on FIFA’s male athletes, primarily because the first FIFA World Cup held in 1930 was restricted to men. Yet since 1991, when the first women’s games were held in China, FIFA has also administered women’s World Cup soccer. When the US hosted the landmark 1999 World Cup, only a few countries were considered contenders. Since then, women’s World Cup soccer has grown in popularity, reaching unprecedented global audiences by the 2019 event in France. Despite this growing interest, financial benefits that accrue to elite female football players pale by comparison with those offered their male counterparts. These gendered structures within football – for example, the men’s FIFA World Cup launched in 1930 and the women’s FIFA World Cup launched 60 years later in 1991 – foster accumulated advantages and disadvantages based on gender within FIFA’s structural domain of power.

The cultural domain of power emphasizes the increasing significance of ideas and culture in the organization of power relations. The FIFA World Cup is an excellent example of how the power of ideas, representations, and images in a global marketplace normalize cultural attitudes and expectations concerning social inequalities. Significantly, the World Cup is the most widely watched sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games. For example, FIFA’s audit of the 2018 World Cup in Russia reports that a combined 1.12 billion viewers worldwide watched the final. Over the course of the games, a combined 3.572 billion viewers – more than half of the global population aged 4 and over – tuned in to watch some aspect of the games at home on TV, in public viewing areas of bars and restaurants, and on digital platforms. From the perspective of FIFA’s organizers and financiers, the possibilities of reaching this massive global consumer market of sports fans are limitless.

Given the growth of mass media and digital media, it is important to ask what cultural messages concerning race, gender, class, sexuality, and similar categories are being broadcast to this vast global audience. In this case, promoting and televising football offers a view of fair play that in turn explains social inequality. Broadcast across the globe, the World Cup projects important ideas about competition and fair play. Sports contests send an influential message: not everyone can win. On the surface, this makes sense, but why is it that some individuals and groups of people consistently win whereas others consistently lose? FIFA has ready-made answers. Winners have talent, discipline, and luck, while losers suffer from lack of talent, inferior self-discipline, and/or bad luck. This view suggests that fair competition produces just results. Armed with this worldview concerning winners and losers, it’s a small step toward using this frame to explain social inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as their intersections.

What conditions are needed for this frame to remain plausible? This is where the idea of a level or flat playing field, one advanced by professional football and sports in general, becomes crucial. Imagine a tilted football field installed on a gently sloping hillside with the red team’s goal at top of the hill and the blue team’s goal in the valley. The red team’s players have a clear advantage: when they try to score, the structure of the playing field helps them. No matter how gifted they are, because they are helped by the invisible force of gravity, their players need not work as hard as those from the blue team to score. In contrast, the blue team’s players have an ongoing uphill battle to score a goal. They may have talent and self-discipline, but they have the bad luck of playing on a tilted playing field. To win, blue team members may need to be especially gifted. Football fans would be outraged if the actual playing field were tilted in this way. Yet this is what social divisions of class, gender, and race that are hard-wired into the structural domain of power do – we all think we are playing on a level playing field when we are not.

The cultural domain of power helps manufacture and disseminate this narrative of fair play that claims that we all have equal access to opportunities across social institutions, that competitions among individuals or groups (teams) are fair, and that resulting patterns of winners and losers have been fairly accomplished. This myth of fair play not only legitimates the outcomes of the competitive and repetitive nature of major global sporting competitions such as the World Cup and the Olympics, it also reinforces cultural narratives about capitalism and nationalism. Mass media spectacles of all sorts reiterate the belief that unequal outcomes of winners and losers are normal outcomes of capitalist marketplace competition. Sporting events, beauty pageants, reality television, and similar popular competitions broadcast on a regular basis the idea that the marketplace relations of capitalism are socially just as long as there is fair play. By showcasing competitions between nations, cities, regions, and individuals, mass media reinforces this all-important cultural myth. As long as they play by the rules and their teams are good enough, 195 or so nation-states can theoretically compete in the FIFA World Cup. Yet because rich nations have far more resources than poor ones, a handful of nation-states can field men’s and women’s teams, and even fewer can host the World Cup. When national teams compete, nations themselves compete, with the outcome of such competitions explained by cultural myths.

These mass media spectacles and associated events also present important scripts of gender, race, sexuality, and nation that work together and influence one another. The bravery of male athletes on national teams makes them akin to war heroes on battlefields, while the beauty, grace, and virtue of national beauty pageants are thought to represent the beauty, grace, and virtue of the nation. Women athletes walk a fine line between these two views of masculinity and femininity that draw meaning from binary understandings of gender.

Why is this myth of fair play so durable? Because many people enjoy sporting events or play sports themselves, sports often serve as the template for equality and fair play. Football is a global sport that theoretically can be played almost anywhere by almost anyone. Children and youth who play football typically love the sport. Football does not require expensive lessons, or a carefully manicured playing field, or even shoes. Recreational football requires no special equipment or training, only some kind of ball and enough players to field two teams. Compared with tennis, American football, ice skating, or skiing, football seemingly creates far fewer barriers between individuals with athletic talent and access to opportunities to play the game.

The fanfare granted to the World Cup is a small tip of the iceberg of how football draws upon categories of class, gender, and race, among others, to shape cultural norms of fairness and social justice. From elite athletes to poor kids, football players want to compete on a fair playing field. It doesn’t matter how you got to the field: all that matters once you are on it is what you can do. The sports metaphor of a level playing field speaks to the desire for fairness and equality among individuals. Whether winners or losers, this team sport rewards individual talent, yet also highlights the collective team nature of achievement. When played well and unimpeded by suspect officiating, football rewards individual talent. In a world that is characterized by so much unfairness, competitive sports such as football become important venues for seeing how things should be. The backgrounds of the players should not matter when they hit the playing field. What matters is how well they play. Mass media spectacles may appear to be mere entertainment, yet they are essential to the smooth working of the cultural domain of power.

The disciplinary domain of power refers to how rules and regulations are fairly or unfairly applied to people based on race, sexuality, class, gender, age, ability, and nation, and similar categories. Basically, as individuals and groups, we are “disciplined” to fit into and/or challenge the existing status quo, often not by overt pressure, but by ongoing disciplinary practices. Within football, disciplinary power operates when some youth are forbidden to play, others are discouraged from playing, whereas others receive top-notch coaching in first-class facilities to cultivate their talent. Many are simply told that they are the wrong gender or lack the ability to play at all. In essence, intersecting power relations use categories of gender or race, for example, to create pipelines to success or marginalization, and then encourage, train, or coerce people to stay on their prescribed paths.

Within athletics, intersections of race and nation are important dimensions of disciplinary power. For example, South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup highlights the obstacles that African boys face in playing professional football. Lacking opportunities for training, development, and even basic equipment, African youth look toward European clubs. European football clubs offer salaries on a par with those offered within US professional football, basketball, and baseball to play for teams in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. The surge in the number of Africans playing at big European clubs reflects the dreams of young African football players to have successful professional careers. Yet the lure of European football also makes youth vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous recruiters. Filmmaker Mariana van Zeller’s 2010 documentary Football’s Lost Boys details how thousands of young players were lured away from their homelands, with their families giving up their savings to predatory agents, and how they were often left abandoned, broke, and alone, a process that resembles human trafficking.

The increasing racial/ethnic diversity of elite European teams that recruit African players, other players of color from poorer countries, and racialized immigrant minorities may help national teams to win. But this racial/ethnic/national diversity of elite football teams also highlights the problem of racism in European football. The visible diversity among team players upends longstanding assumptions about race, ethnicity, and national identity. When France’s national team defeated the Brazilian team to win the 1998 World Cup, some fans saw the team as non-representative of France because most of the players were not white. Moreover, although white European fans may love their teams, many feel free to engage in racist behavior, such as calling African players monkeys, chanting racial slurs, and carrying signs with racially derogatory language.2

FIFA’s gendered rules also reflect disciplinary power in ways that produce significantly different experiences for male and female athletes. An intersectional analysis suggests that the convergence of class and gender translates into pay inequities and differential opportunities after a professional soccer career. Beyond the initial division between male and female athletes, different rules that set FIFA policy reflect gendered assumptions about women and sports. Recognizing the disparity of support for men’s and women’s soccer, on March 8, 2019, International Women’s Day, the US players filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), the national governing body for the sport. In response, in a legal filing, the USSF denied unlawful conduct, attributing gendered pay differentials to “differences in the aggregate revenue generated by the different teams and/or any other factor other than sex.” In other words, from the perspective of USSF, any gendered economic inequality reflects marketplace structures and cultural norms that lie outside FIFA’s purview, not gender discrimination within FIFA itself.

The fight for equal pay within US soccer generated considerable attention, especially since the US women’s team had consistently outperformed the men’s team, on the field, in media interest, and in revenue. The US men’s team failed to qualify for the 2018 games, whereas the women’s team won the World Cup in 2015 and 2019. Viewership for the women’s team also outpaced that for the men’s team. In 2015, some 25 million people watched the US women’s team win the World Cup final – at that time, a record US audience for any soccer game, with their 2019 victory breaking that record. But while important, gender-only frameworks miss intersectional dimensions of how both the rules as well as the tools for fighting social injustice discriminate. In 2019, the US women’s team was paid less than the men and had the legal rights and means to file a lawsuit. In contrast, the Reggae Girlz of Jamaica, the first national soccer team from the Caribbean to qualify for the World Cup, had difficulty raising the funds to attend the games. They fared better than the Super Falcons, the Nigerian national team, which, even though they were nine-time winners of the Africa Cup, were not paid at all. Chronically underfunded, the Super Falcons protested at the house of Nigeria’s president and eventually received increased financial support to attend the games.

These gender differences between men’s and women’s soccer intersect with differences of race and class within both the men’s and the women’s game. The rules of soccer in turn shape team rankings that discipline players through differential expectations. Rankings among the women’s teams correlate with race and nation and, by implication, with the different levels of support provided to women athletes in rich and poor countries. Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in continental Africa, South Africa sent its first women’s team to the 2019 World Cup, joining Nigeria and Cameroon as one of only three African teams that qualified. All three were ranked at the bottom of the list of teams that qualified and lost in the first round to better-funded teams. Intersections of race and gender characterize both men’s and women’s football, with important financial implications for all players.

The interpersonal domain of power refers to how individuals experience the convergence of structural, cultural, and disciplinary power. Such power shapes intersecting identities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and age that in turn organize social interactions. Intersectionality recognizes that perceived group membership can make people vulnerable to various forms of bias, yet because we are simultaneously members of many groups, our complex identities can shape the specific ways that we experience that bias. For example, men and women often experience racism differently, just as women of different races can experience sexism differently, and so on. Intersectionality highlights these aspects of individual experience that we may not notice.

For the FIFA World Cup, intersecting identities are hypervisible on a global stage. New information and communications technologies (ICTs) have increased the visibility and scope of individual identities, in the case of FIFA offering sports competitions that are designed to entertain and educate, but that also provide a window into people’s lives. Like everyone else, FIFA’s athletes must craft their identities within intersecting power relations. Moreover, the visibility granted athletes’ bodies within sporting competitions means that the embodied nature of intersecting identities is on constant display. Much is at stake in cultivating the right image and brand. The ways in which athletes handle their identities can result in lucrative endorsements, contracts as sportscasters, and opportunities to broker their excellence and visibility in coaching and ancillary opportunities. Given the global scope and mass media intensity of the FIFA World Cup tournament, individual players have to decide not only how they will play the game, but how their individual image both on and off the pitch will be received by fans. As the aforementioned name-calling and racist commentary within European football suggests, fans can be fickle, rooting for the home team that has players of color, yet hurling racial epithets at players on the opposing team. The commodification of identity is big business.

Because gender is a foundational social division in everyday life, managing identities of masculinity and femininity takes on larger-than-life significance in this global public area. Regardless of sport, women have faced an uphill battle to play sports at all, to do so on an elite level, and to receive equitable compensation for doing so. Moreover, because women’s sports ostensibly disrupt longstanding norms of femininity, the treatment of women athletes in sports where they have managed to establish well-paying careers as is the case of women’s tennis – or a living wage as is the case of women’s basketball – offers a lesson to the female athletes in World Cup football. Women’s sports have been fraught with consistent efforts to manage women’s dress and appearance.

The treatment of women athletes who appear to violate norms of femininity offers a window into the broader issue of how elite athletes deal with hegemonic masculinity and femininity in professional sports. As more women play professional sports, they increasingly contest the rules of het-eronormativity. For example, tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams have been legendary in challenging the dress code of women’s tennis and both have been accused of being overly masculine because they ostensibly play like men. At the inception of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the league’s overwhelmingly black female players were encouraged to model traditional femininity to counter accusations of lesbianism. Athletes attended to their hair and makeup and brought children and male partners to games to signal their sexual orientation. As the league has matured, players are increasingly embracing an androgynous fashion style that is more in tune with contemporary notions of gender fluidity.

As individuals, FIFA athletes may have comparable talent, aspire to the same things, or hold similar values. Yet norms of heteronormativity are closely aligned with these disciplinary practices that shape individual decisions about identity, masculinity, and femininity. Playing an elite sport is one thing. Being accepted by the fans that fund that sport is another. Intersecting identities and experiences reflect power plays across the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal domains of power, identities that play out in everyday social interactions as well as public images. Overall, professional football is not just a game, but rather offers a rich site for using intersectionality as an analytical tool.

Economic inequality: a new global crisis?

When it comes to highlighting global economic inequality as an important social problem, 2014 was a pivotal year. Drawing more than 6,000 participants from all over the world, the Eighteenth International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology convened in Yokohama, Japan. In his presidential address, Michael Burawoy (2005), a distinguished Marxist scholar, argued that inequality was the most pressing issue of our time. Burawoy suggested that growing global inequality had spurred new thinking not only in sociology, but also in economics and related social sciences. Burawoy had long been a proponent of public sociology, the perspective holding that sociological tools should be brought to bear on important social issues. Interestingly, he stressed the significance of the 2013 election of Pope Francis. As the first pope from the Global South, Pope Francis expressed a strong commitment to tackling the questions of social inequality, poverty, and environmental justice, even qualifying economic inequality as “the root of social evil.” It is not every day that a Marxist scholar quotes the Pope before an international gathering of social scientists.

That same year, more than 220 business leaders and investors from 27 countries assembled in London at the May 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism. As Nafeez Ahmed reported in a May 28, 2014 Guardian article, the attendees gathered to discuss “the need for a more socially responsible form of capitalism that benefits everyone, not just a wealthy minority.” Representing the most powerful financial and business elites, who controlled approximately US$30 trillion worth of liquid assets, or one-third of the global total, this group was concerned about, as the CEO of Unilever put it, “the capitalist threat to capitalism.” The stellar guest list for the conference included Prince Charles, Bill Clinton, the governor of the Bank of England, and several heads of global corporations. Interestingly, in her keynote speech, Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), invoked the same reference to Pope Francis’s depiction of increasing inequality as “the root of social evil.” Referencing Marx’s insight that capitalism “carried the seeds of its own destruction,” Lagarde argued, something needs to be done. Here again, it is not every day that the head of the IMF quotes both the Pope and Marx before the global financial elite.

Since the 1990s, economic inequality in income and wealth has grown exponentially, both within individual nation-states and across an overwhelming majority of countries, affecting 70 percent of the world’s population. And this economic inequality contributes to social inequality more broadly. Nearly half of the world’s wealth, some US$110 trillion, is owned by only 1 percent of the world’s population; between them, this tiny group owns more than the other 99 percent put together (Oxfam 2015).3 These trends suggest that by 2014 the state of global inequality was serious enough that people who were typically on opposite sides of many issues took notice. Lagarde and Burawoy were both concerned about the impact of a changing global economy. Under Lagarde’s leadership, the IMF offered a mainstream view of the causes and solutions to the social inequality brought on by a changing global economy. Like Burawoy, many sociologists have long offered a critical assessment of this mainstream view, pointing instead to structural power relations. By 2014, growing global social inequality was so significant that both mainstream and critical groups identified global social inequality generally, and economic social inequality in particular, as a global social problem.

Examining the specific histories of nation-states fosters different angles of vision on global economic inequalities. For instance, if we look at what happens between countries, we see that global income inequality has been in decline since the mid-1970s, which is related to the economic growth in fast-developing countries such as India and China. However, if we look at what happens within