De-Whitening Intersectionality

Abstract

De-Whitening Intersectionality: Race, Intercultural Communication, and Politics re-evaluates how the logic of color-blindness as whiteness is at play in the current scope of intersectional research on race, intercultural communication, and politics. Calling for a re-centering of difference by exploring the emergence and inception of intersectionality concepts, the coeditors and contributors distinguish between the uses of intersectionality that seem inclusive versus those that actually enact inclusion by demonstrating how to re-conceptualize intersectionality in ways that explicate, elucidate, and elaborate culture-specific and text-specific nuances of knowledge for women of color, queer/trans-people of color, and non-western people of color who have been marked as the Others. As a feminist of color tradition, intersectionality has been appropriated through increasing popularity in the discipline of communication, undermining efforts to critique power when researchers reduce the concept to a checklist of identity markers. This book underscores that in order to play well with and illustrate a nuanced understanding of intersectionality; scholars must be attentive to its origins and implications.