Social Policy. Fiona Williams

and siloed. And this too was reproduced in social policy studies. The effect of these two dynamics was that single categories of gender, race, etc., came to signify specific descriptors, stand-alone critiques or measures of diversity rather than as challenges to the theoretical underpinnings of what stands for universalism in welfare. Of course, it is also the case that these critiques have themselves needed to stand alone in order to pursue more deeply the specificities of their intellectual journeys, but this separation was influenced by other developments. It was not simply that the fragmentation of social movements was mirrored in the social sciences, or, as some have argued, that feminism’s critique of the state dovetailed with neoliberal policies to wither the state, or that feminism was lured into individualist empowerment strategies (Fraser 2009). It was that critical diversities became siloed because the demands of managerialized universities required more intensive academic specialization (defining and leading a new area of study, setting up a specific journal, etc.) for both research assessment purposes and individual career advancement. On the other hand, this separate but parallel existence has not been a one-way movement. Marginalization happens when barriers exist, intellectual or otherwise. It is this that the demands decolonizing the universities challenge (Bhambra et al. 2018; Andrews 2015).

      This marginalizing tendency is no worse in social policy than in other social, economic and political sciences. Indeed, as a disciplinary space it can be more propitious: its very eclecticism gives it greater openness to new ideas. Paradoxically, however, its general commitment to social justice can also render it complacent (Phillips and Williams 2021). Feminist scholarship in particular has a high profile in social policy. Yet, at the same time, its frames of analysis still stand at a conceptual distance from core theories. It should be said that, even here, it is the intersection of gender with class that dominates, with only sporadic forays into critical disability, race and queer theories.

      Having explained the continuing marginalization of these critical developments, I want to turn this argument around now to make the case for how they need to be central to social policy. One way of doing this is by providing a strategy to bring together their common analytical and transformative strengths in a manner that can also recognize their specific arguments but avoid the siloing effects mentioned here. I assess first the relevance of an intersectional approach in enabling this.

An intersectional approach for social policy

      Intersectionality provides an understanding of social inequalities and power as complex, interlinked, shifting and multifaceted, constituting both penalties and privileges. In other words, our experiences of power and inequality are constituted not simply by, say, our gender identity or our racialized and class positionings but also by the multiple places we occupy on the many salient and changing axes of power that exist at any given time. Importantly, it is an approach in which analysis and political practice are closely linked. The concept has a long history emerging from black feminist struggle and critical race studies.

      No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women. We are rarely recognized as a group separate and distinct from black men, or as a present part of the larger group ‘women’ in this culture. (hooks 1981: 7)

So wrote bell hooks in her introduction to Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. The phrase ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ was a quotation from a speech delivered in 1851 by the African American campaigner Sojourner Truth for both the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. hooks’s intervention was important in the history of second-wave feminism, as were other activist writings which spoke to an experience in which the race and gender of women of colour decentred them within both feminist and anti-racist/black movements (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995; Hull et al. 1982; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Lewis and Parmar 1983; Hill Collins 1990). The crucial analytical point to emerge was that race, gender and class could not be understood as single or even incremental axes of oppression but, rather, as interconnected modalities of power that reconstitute identity, experience and practice in specific ways. Intersectionality emerged as the analytic concept in the 1980s to encapsulate this political and institutional problem of invisibility, elaborated by the socio-legal black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1989). The term became more widespread after the turn of the twenty-first century in a different political and intellectual context, particularly with respect to continuing and widening inequalities, increasing migration and gender diversity. It was to develop critical methodological, empirical and political insights which could be applied to a range of interconnected and contingent social relations and exercises of power (McCall 2005; Lutz et al. 2011; Cho et al. 2013; May 2015; Wilson 2013; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Carastathis 2016; Hancock 2016; Bone 2017; Romero 2018; Irvine et al. 2019; Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery 2019; and, especially, Nash 2019).

      For social policy, the importance of an intersectional approach speaks to its potential to critically analyse the complexities of social power and inequalities as well as guiding transformative possibilities for social justice. It operates as theory, method and praxis. It concentrates on excavating the lived experience. It works not as a grand and totalizing theory but as an ‘orientation’ (May 2015: 3), a way of thinking about complexity, contingency and connectedness in social and political phenomena, and a refusal to reduce phenomena to single causes or solutions. These days, intersectionality denotes as much a political position as a conceptual approach, although, to be honest, the word is too long for a placard and too clumsy as a rallying cry. Nevertheless, what it marks is the importance of alliances across difference as a path to transformative change. This has clear relevance to social policy’s concerns with understanding social inequalities and social justice, how to research and make visible those that are hidden, and how to think about the solidarities that can reinscribe universalism with difference.

In recent years intersectionality has begun to be applied to social movements and practice, to politics, and to social and public policy intervention (Wilson 2013; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery 2019; Bassel and Emejulu 2018; WBG and Runnymede Trust 2017; Williams 2018; Irvine et al. 2019). The key characteristics of these applications of intersectionality are their attention to the complexity of social inequalities and power and their focus on change and fluidity, challenging fixed and essentialist approaches in which social positions or economic systems are seen as given, natural or overdetermining. Relationality, the contingencies of time and place, the contested, contradictory and unsettled nature of phenomena (including welfare states, their policies and practices) also characterize intersectional policy analysis, as do ideas that emerge from the margins and inform resistance. As Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery note, it thus enables an understanding of

      the differential impacts of policy on diverse populations … it draws attention to aspects of policy that are largely uninvestigated or ignored altogether: the complex ways in which multiple and interlocking inequities are organized and resisted in the process, content and outcomes of policy. In so doing, the exclusionary nature of traditional methods of policy, including the ways in which problems and populations are constituted, given shape and meaning, is revealed. (Hankivsky and Jordan-Zachery 2019: 2)

Intersectionality is not without its criticisms.³ It is important to note that, as a theoretical orientation, intersectionality has different versions and applications (McCall 2005). It has been criticized for becoming an abstract academic theory – a new (or not so new) ‘buzzword’ – which depoliticizes the very forces that brought it into being (Davis 2008). Another ‘depoliticizing’ criticism suggests that, while purporting to be about the multiple and intersecting relations of inequality, the focus on subjective identities and on local, lived experiences in intersectional analysis obfuscates the explanatory power that connects inequality and oppression to global capitalism. Avoiding these pitfalls requires, first, the recollection that the origins of intersectionality in black feminism lie firmly in the struggle against social, cultural, political and economic injustices. Thus, it is important to keep the concept and practice of such contestation central to any contemporary analysis. It is this that protects against reification and depoliticization; and it is this that differentiates it from a mapping of multicultural diversity disconnected from the challenges such diversity makes or is subjected to. Second, one of the promises of intersectional