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editorial2016
CHD001–410.1177/0907568216631055ChildhoodEditorial

Editorial

Childhood

‘Intersectionality’ and other

2016, Vol. 23(2) 157­–161
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0907568216631055
childhood chd.sagepub.com

The new stage in research on children and childhood (since the 1980s) has broadly coin-
cided with what has been called the “postmodern turn” in the social sciences—in fact,
this “turn” was well underway when the movement for a differently conceptualized study
of childhood was started. It may be even the case that many of the ideas that have ani-
mated researchers to move into social studies of childhood, and which they have put into
work in their research, may have originated in the discussions and controversies on and
around modernity/postmodernity and what the (contested) postmodern condition was
claimed to imply for understanding society and social life, and for social science research.
For the development of the social sciences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has
been substantially shaped by key assumptions underlying theoretical approaches that
defend both the epistemic validity and the historical significance of the “postmodern
turn” (Susen, 2015: 1). In his comprehensive and systematic analysis of (and critical
reflections on) the “postmodern turn” and its significance for today’s social science,
Susen illustrates the far-reaching importance of this paradigmatic transformation that has
been reflected in as many as five influential dimensions or “turns”: in (1) epistemology,
(2) research methodology, (3) sociology, (4) historiography, and (5) politics. It is not dif-
ficult to recognize that particularly the first three of these five “turns” have been particu-
larly influential to the re-formation of childhood research: the turn to relativism in the
epistemology of social science, the turn to hermeneutics-inspired interpretivism in its
methodology, and the turn to cultural studies in sociology.
The engagement with postmodern thought peaked in the mid-1990s; the tide then
started to change. Now postmodernism is thought to be “superseded” and has become
“somewhat of an outmoded catchword” (Susen, 2015: 33). But even if its greatest influ-
ence is over, the presence of postmodernist modes of thinking continue in recent and
current academic discourses—which provide exciting and inspiring ideas for childhood
research to take on. This condition is important to keep in mind and to critically take
account of. For postmodernism was never uncontroversial and continuities exist between
modern and postmodern ways of theorizing. This being the case, the frameworks,
approaches, concepts, and research questions that current academic—modern and post-
modern—discourses suggest come with no guarantees. Theoretical challenges impose on
us, and instead of relying on any given form of orthodoxy, we would do well to clarify
what are the tacit assumptions and implications inherent in the conceptual tools and
frameworks that we enthusiastically use in our research. Such a self-critical position of
course applies to any serious researcher whatever his or her disciplinary field or research
158 Childhood 23(2)

area. However, a call for particular analytical rigor and conceptual clarity might be
needed in fields whose research community is comparatively young and small, and
which needs to rely on “borrowed” tools for its development of theory, as is the case for
the social study of childhood.
One such tool, open for adoption, is intersectionality. Since its invention by legal
theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality has been widely adopted and
applied as well as extensively discussed and debated, particularly in feminist/gender
studies where the term originated.
In recent years, intersectionality has been one of the fastest traveling concepts which
has cut across geographical and academic borders, and has become transplanted in other
intellectual environments. Currently it is claimed to provide a central paradigm in femi-
nist theory (Geerts and Van der Tuin, 2013) and one of the most important contributions
made to social theory by women’s studies (McCall, 2005). In any case, it has become a
“buzzword” (Davis, 2011) and “intersectional studies” appears to be a burgeoning inter-
disciplinary research field in its own right (Cho et al., 2013). Moreover, its connection to
postmodern imagination is obvious; “intersectionalization” is regarded as one of post-
modernity’s constitutive dimensions (Susen, 2015: 220): in a postmodern world, social
reality is taken to be intersectionally structured.
By now “intersectionality” has also pushed its way to research areas outside its femi-
nist cradle, including areas that connect with the study of children, such as disability
studies (e.g. Goodley, 2013), race studies (e.g. Bhopal and Preston, 2011), and human
rights studies (e.g. Taefi, 2009). In social studies of childhood, it seems, the notion has
not yet taken root. The term has not been indexed in sociological books on children and
childhood and it rarely appears in papers published in relevant journals. In the pages of
Childhood, so far only a handful of fairly cautious mentions of intersectionality have
appeared, but no papers with a clear theoretical or methodological take on the concept,
framework, or theory. Barrie Thorne (2004), however, in her editorial in Childhood
introduced intersectional analysis as a way to theorize age (and other differences, as was
given in her title).
The question to ask is as follows: how new or useful “intersectionality” is as a con-
cept, perspective (“lens”), method, or even theory for the theoretical-conceptual advance-
ment of childhood research? To start with, what is intersectionality? In the article which
introduced the term to feminism, Crenshaw (1989) criticized the limits of single axis
notions of identity as practiced in legal doctrine and also in feminist and antiracist poli-
tics. Gender seen through an intersectional “lens” is to emphasize that women are not
only women but also Black, White, rich, poor, and so on. Through socially constructed
categories (e.g. gender, “race,” and ethnicity), women are situated within several frame-
works of interacting forms of subordination and privilege. Therefore also such aspects of
women’s identity cannot be thought of as operating independently of each other; being
woven together, they produce people’s lived experience and their (fragmented) identity.
It is this idea of entanglement of the structured “sections” of subordination and inequal-
ity that “intersectionality” is meant to express, in contrast to a purely “additive” approach
(e.g. gender + class + “race”).1
A non-additive intersectional analysis would start from observations of the differences
that exist between individuals (e.g. women). The multiple, separate and intersecting
Editorial 159

“sources” of subordination would then be concurrently brought in and analyzed as to the

way they produce the observed individual-level differences. It is here that intersectional
analysis becomes troubling to execute, for in many cases, these material and symbolic
sources of oppression, subordination, and/or disadvantage are not directly observable and
must therefore be theorized. The unobservable power structure(s) that in feminism has
considered the “source” of women’s disadvantaged position has been variously named
(e.g. “patriarchy”). Naming in itself does not make for a convincing analysis. To do so, an
empirically based intersectional analysis requires that one or more social “mechanisms”
of power can be assumed to be at work in producing positions of subordination (as well as
counterpositions of privilege), and their working then needs to be empirically “tested.”
What makes a truly intersectional analysis even more difficult is that also the other unob-
servable “sources” of subordination and disadvantage (e.g. class, ethnicity, “race”) need
to get a similar analytical treatment, opening the possibility to analyze the combined
working of their “mechanisms.”2
Intersectionality was a parsimonious term for expressing this problematic, but it has
proved quite complicated to move from the idea to successful empirical analysis. Not
only does this empirical-cum-theoretical exercise require an elaborated research design;
at stake are also basic assumptions on the nature of social reality. And here, postmodern-
ism has brought in much diversity and complexity, instead of clarity.
Intersectionality, as the postmodernist literature tells us, is a current social reality, and
by implication also children’s lives are intersectionally structured. We need not be post-
modernists to believe this. Also common sense and everyday experience tell us that also
children are not only children; they are girls/boys (i.e. gendered) and they are also in many
cases “raced,” dis/abled, classed, and ascribed ethnicity. Whether inspired by such every-
day observations, or “the new paradigm” for the social study of childhood, or also post-
modernist sociologies more broadly, much if not most of the (“new”) research on
childhood has taken as its main task to empirically study and analytically describe this
diversity of children’s everyday worlds. The challenge that intersectional thinking appears
to be a similar thought experiment in the case of children as it is in the case of women.
Jens Qvortrup, the Danish sociologist of childhood and former editor of this journal,
points to the same observation and formulates it as a dedication to “diversity of child-
hood.” Such dedication has long been popular in childhood studies, manifesting itself in
the recurrent idiom of childhoods (in the plural). In a conference speech (Qvortrup,
2008), he is concerned about “diversity’s temptation and its hazards” and argues for the
necessity of using “childhood” in the singular form, as a (social) category that is by no
means dissolved by the existence of a plurality of (empirical) childhoods. Childhood
moreover is not a stand-alone category: it can be an intelligible category (as has been
shown in childhood studies) only in its necessary interrelationship to a counter-category,
which in modern societies tends to be adulthood, but may also be some differently con-
structed generational category. Thus, generation—or (inter)generationality3—should be
for the social study of childhood, the equivalent of gender in feminist studies and class in
class studies. This surely is a significant insight with which to productively confront the
challenge of intersectionality.
Bringing childhood researchers to face this challenge will, first, help us to clarify the
limitations of the long-held “diversity perspective” (Qvortrup) in childhood research and
160 Childhood 23(2)

open vistas for not only describing the multitude of children’s childhoods—their life-
worlds, identities, and experiences—but also for analyzing the causal social mechanisms
at work. On these grounds, I also hold with Qvortrup that the insight in the structural
position of childhood to be gained in such an approach to childhood will also aid us in
understanding what would be a political intervention on behalf of childhood (in the
singular).

Notes
1. It is worth remembering that the idea of several entangled axes or dimensions of subordi-
nation, oppression, and marginalization that together produced women’s social condition
was not brought up the first time in the intellectual history of feminism (see, for example,
Taylor, 2009). What was new was its renaming as “intersectionality” and its productive use in
expanding the feminist problematic in feminist theory.
2. Correspondingly in studies on childhood, positions of subordination have been identified for
children and “sources” of their disadvantaged position named (e.g. “patriarchy,” “paternal-
ism”; see, for example, Hood-Williams, 1990).
3. Some ground for this has been done under the topic of generational analysis (see, for example,
chapters in Qvortrup et al., 2009).

References
Bhopal K and Preston J (eds) (2011) Intersectionality and “Race” in Education. New York and
London: Routledge.
Cho S, Crenshaw KW and McCall L (2013) Toward a field of intersectionality studies:
Theory, application and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(4):
785–810.
Crenshaw KW (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique
of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago
Legal Forum 1989: 139–157.
Davis K (2011) Intersectionality as a buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what
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Editorial 161

Taefi N (2009) The synthesis of age and gender: Intersectionality, international human rights law
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Leena Alanen, Co-editor

University of Jyväskylä, Finland
January, 2016