Intersectionality seeks to navigate, identify, and make intelligible the “intersecting patterns” of different paradigms (Crenshaw, 1991, p.1243). The intention of this perspective was to address a gap in academia characterised by “ignoring difference within groups [which] contributes to tension among groups” (Crenshaw, 1991, p.1242). Crenshaw noted that “Although racism and sexism regularly intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices.” (Crenshaw, 1991, p.1242). Crenshaw links intersectionality with identity and the complexity of navigating their connections within group politics. There are some criticisms to the concept of intersectionality including it’s scalability to different levels of society, it’s application to an inexhaustibly complex social world, the mutual exclusion of each category applied to the subject, and the concepts ability to perpetuate the identified issues it seeks to highlight (Carastathis, 2016). The latter, also known as the “reinscription critique”, as well as the “mutual exclusion critique” are particularly useful when examining the example of the intersectionality of Sex Workers (Carastathis, 2016). 

An intersectional approach through the feminist perspective often speaks through the paradigm of common oppression. While writing about the historical view of sex work in the USA Ann Lucas (1995) presents the idea that sex work was both necessary and evil saying it “…protected virtuous women by providing an alternative outlet for men’s fierce sexual drives, but ‘evil’ in that it involved commercial, non-marital, and sinful sex.” (p.51-52). Lucas goes on to look at the challenges sex workers posed to the patriarchal order by gaining financial independence in a time when the nuclear family was built upon a man’s ability to be the primary breadwinner and how this influenced legislation to bring a tolerated necessary evil back in line with conventional gender norms. The perception of sex work as deviant and by extension those who engage in that employment as deviant can benefit from an intersectional approach. It allows us to examine the socially constructed categories or groupings that layer to result in the perception of sex work by society as deviant. For example Schurs’ examination of the desire to place women into two distinct categories helps shed light on the secondary layer of deviance attached to sex workers by showing the, “dichotomization of women into two classes- the ‘bad women’ with whom men can enjoy this greater freedom, and the ‘good women’ whose reputability is maintained.” Utilising intersectionality to examine concepts of gender and ‘race’ expose further layers to sex workers that can be analysed to shed light on both trans sex workers experiences and sex workers of different ethnicities. 

An intersectional approach to sex work requires each category to be mutually exclusive if it is to intersect.  When discussing the critique of mutual exclusion Carastathis suggests that in order to achieve a redistribution of power the, “deconstruction and reconstitution of identity categories in ways that reveal groups’ internal dissonances as well as their interconnections with groups deemed separate from them” (Carastathis, 2016, p.138) is needed. However, simply rebuilding identity categories posits a further issue, that of an assurance that each category is a stable fact. The infallibility of the essentialism inherent in many conflict theories such as feminism has a heavy influence on intersectionality due to its ideological framing leading to the aforementioned critique of “reinscription” (Carastathis, 2016). Kevin Duong elaborates on this critique from a queer theory perspective saying “essentialist identity categories continue to resist critique and transformation both ideologically and materially.” (Duong, 2012, p.373).  The dangers of examining society from an inherently essentialist perspective can also lead to the “policing of identity” (Duong, 2012, p.376). Butler discusses the phenomenological approach of feminism by touching on the importance of disentangling the desire to source, create, and curate a history of “female specificity” from the need to, “consider the status of the category itself.” (Butler, 1988, p.523). Duong goes on to argue that historically the desire to make visible those practices and people that are seen to be deviant from societal norms, “often functioned as a pretence for sustaining the operative system of discipline that classified such deviance as deviance in the first place.”(Duong, 2012, p.375). 

References:

Butler, J. (1988) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40(4), pp. 519-531. [Accessed April 20, 2020].  Available at: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893

Duong, K. (2012) ‘What Does Queer Theory Teach us about intersectionality’, Politics & Gender, 8(3), pp.370-386. [Accessed April 20, 2020].  Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/what-does-queer-theory-teach-us-about-intersectionality/499D562EF8BE19D2641D9C108D17C626 

Carastathis, A. (2016) Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. [Online] University of Nebraska Press. [Accessed April 20, 2020].  Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1fzhfz8.9 

Crenshaw, K. (1991) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.  Stanford Law Review [online]. 43(6), pp. 1241-1299. [Accessed April 20, 2020]. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039?

Duong, K. (2012) ‘What Does Queer Theory Teach us about intersectionality’, Politics & Gender, 8(3), pp.370-386. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/what-does-queer-theory-teach-us-about-intersectionality/499D562EF8BE19D2641D9C108D17C626 

Lucas, A.M. (1995) Race, Class, Gender and Deviancy: The Criminalization of Prostitution. Berkley Women’s Law Journal [online]. 10, pp. 47-60. [Accessed April 20, 2020]. Available from: https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/berkwolj10&id=55&men_tab=srchresults

Schur, E.M. (1984) Labeling Women Deviant: Gender, Stigma and Social Control. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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