Limits of Intersectionality as a Theoretical Framework

Abstract

The radical politics and its grand narratives based on emancipatory theories of Marxism and Feminisms have failed to adopt an inclusive and diverse approach to understand, analyse and explain different complexities and layers of capitalist exploitation within the structural and post-structural forms of capitalist systems. ‘Intersectionality’ has emerged as struggles of praxis. It emerged as a theoretical framework to fill the gap within theoretical narratives of radical politics. ‘Intersectionality’ has helped to understand different layers of social, political, economic, cultural and religious exploitation within capitalism. It engages with different levels of hierarchy within the individual experience moving beyond narrow silo of identity in search of alternative politics and theory. However, this chapter outlines the limits of intersectionality as it has failed to identify the structure and fluidity of power relations within capitalism. It has failed to document different sites of struggles against majoritarian and dominant identity-based violence, exploitation, supremacy and discrimination within and outside communities. The ‘intersectionality’ as an approach is ahistorical, as it does not look at the roots of the different forms of exploitation with capitalism. Therefore, deradicalisation is an inadvertent outcome of intersectionality as a political and theoretical approach to emancipatory struggles.