Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

This seminar will examine the development, articulation and application of "Intersectionality" as both a theoretical frame and a discursive practice in law, human rights and social justice advocacy. Emerging as a theory to articulate the multiple axis of discrimination encountered by women of color in employment, the family, and elsewhere, Intersectionality has found broader application in efforts to move beyond single-issue and identity-based approaches to societal marginalization. Taking note of more than two decades of the intersectional framework, the seminar will feature feminist and critical race scholars, social justice practitioners, and others who will engage, critique and expand the intersectional prism through exploring its relationship to their own work. Key questions that will be explored include the legal erasure of intersectional discrimination; the role of intersectional subordination in generating intra-communal conflict and hierarchy, the circulation of intersectionality in human rights and international discourses; the contested interface between intersectional and anti-essentialist critiques of identity politics; the utility of intersectionality as a prism for understanding coalition failures (i.e. Proposition 8; immigration reform; affirmative action) and the role of intersectionality as a conceptual building block for cross-movement building strategies. Guests (TBA) will include leading thinkers in the academy (law, sociology, feminist studies, post-colonial studies); human rights and social justice practice, journalism and the arts.