Avoiding Paradigm Voyeurism and Embracing Intersectionality Stewardship: Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm “From Below”

While “intersectionality” as an approach to understanding and analyzing power has a history that spans nearly 200 years, its time in political science, sociology, and other social sciences is more commonly measured in decades, not centuries.  While power – particularly structural power – has been a primary unit of analysis across the various disciplines and fields of study, analytical approaches to understanding power have, for most of their respective intellectual histories, evolved separately.  While many feminist scholars have focused on the influential roles played by the politics of citation and the politics invested in keeping the two histories separate, in this chapter I focus on sketching the ontological, epistemological and methodological points of convergence between traditional social scientific and intersectional approaches to analyzing power.