Reflections on Intersectionality: Gender, Class, Race and Nation

This article argues for several shifts in perspective in order to advance a comparative, transnational account of how gender, race, ethnicity, class and nation align in practice to overcome insularity and particularism inherent to many extant intersectional theories. An extensive review of feminist theories finds that much US scholarship decontextualizes intersectionality, takingfor-granted the national and the transnational. Complexity of relationships between social inequalities cannot be studied as if contained within national borders. A theoretical shift takes the analysis of complexity beyond the nation-state, and argues for social practice theory to examine how complex social relations are reproduced as well as resisted in a globalizing economy. Then introducing the concept of geographies of power shifts the analysis to the transnational to historicize and contextualize categories of analysis. Historicizing Japan’s past and present international entanglements can lift the veil shrouding the national narrative of class and racial homogeneity and deconstruct the boundaries of the racial category of Asian. A substantive shift to study transnational migration, particularly women migrants involved in reproductive labor, complicates categories and frameworks for analyzing the intersection of class, gender, race and nation.