The Trouble with Intersectionality: Limits, Misuses, and Critical Reappraisals

Once a subversive intervention into legal theory and feminist thought, intersectionality now appears everywhere: in HR workshops, TikTok activism, and academic curricula. Yet with its success comes dilution. What happens when a concept designed to complicate power relations is smoothed into corporate policy or meme logic? This piece explores key critiques of intersectionality—not to dismiss it, but to rethink its uses, assumptions, and future relevance.

1. From Radical Critique to Managerial Buzzword

Critics argue that intersectionality has been co-opted by the very institutions it sought to challenge. Once a tool to highlight structural exclusion, it now risks becoming a checkbox in DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) protocols. Rather than interrogating how institutions reproduce power, intersectionality is sometimes reduced to a count-the-identities framework: the more boxes checked, the more "diverse" the space.

As Rinaldo Walcott and others have noted, this neutralization of intersectionality turns it into an instrument for institutional legitimacy, rather than structural change. The question becomes not just who is included, but whether inclusion itself is the right goal when the system remains intact.

2. The Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

Nancy Fraser's distinction between recognition and redistribution is useful here. Intersectionality tends to focus on recognition—how identities are acknowledged or marginalized. But critics argue this can obscure deeper economic or material inequalities. A workplace might celebrate trans Black visibility while continuing to underpay and overwork all employees.

This tension reveals a potential blind spot in intersectional praxis: the risk of symbolic politics overshadowing structural critique. When identity becomes the primary axis of analysis, questions of class, labor, and capital can recede into the background.

3. Category Fatigue and the Paradox of Specificity

Another critique comes from within theory itself: intersectionality, in its effort to be inclusive, may proliferate categories to the point of incoherence. As identities multiply, so do the intersections. This can create what philosopher Amia Srinivasan calls the "paradox of specificity": the more precise the identity, the harder it becomes to build coalitions or shared political goals.

Moreover, critics like Sirma Bilge warn that intersectionality can devolve into a "disciplinary feminism" that polices speech and identity claims, rather than fostering emancipatory politics. The very framework meant to open up analysis can become a gatekeeping mechanism.

4. Ontological Critiques: Do Identities Precede Structures?

Post-structural and post-colonial thinkers have also challenged the ontological assumptions behind intersectionality. Does it assume stable, nameable identities (e.g., woman, Black, queer) that exist prior to their social articulation? Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, and others question whether this reifies identity categories rather than destabilizing them.

Jasbir Puar's concept of assemblage offers one response: rather than seeing identities as intersecting lines, we might see them as emergent properties of more fluid, shifting networks. This challenges the foundational metaphors of intersectionality and invites new ontologies of the self.

Why These Critiques Matter

None of these critiques call for abandoning intersectionality. Rather, they ask what happens when a once-radical framework becomes hegemonic. Can it still do the work it was meant to do? Can it be re-politicized, re-complicated, or even partially undone?

The challenge ahead is to preserve the analytic power of intersectionality without allowing it to harden into dogma or dissolve into platitude. A living theory must invite friction, not just affirmation.

See also:

Three Theoretical Takes on Intersectionality

Intersectionality Explained: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Theory and Social Justice Movements

Precarious Life: Butler's Ethics of Vulnerability and Interdependence

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Judith Butler turned her attention from gender theory to questions of violence, grief, and political responsibility. The resulting work represents a significant evolution in her thinking, moving toward what we might call a philosophy of precariousness—an ethics grounded in our shared vulnerability and fundamental dependence on others.

Shared Vulnerability and Grievability

Butler begins with a simple but profound observation: we don't choose our dependencies. From birth, we rely on others for care, recognition, and survival. This reliance never entirely ends; throughout our lives, we remain vulnerable to loss, injury, and the withdrawal of support. Our lives are, in Butler's terms, precarious—exposed to forces beyond our control, dependent on networks of care and recognition we didn't choose and can't fully secure.

What makes this observation ethical rather than merely descriptive is Butler's argument that recognizing our shared precariousness should transform how we respond to others. If my own life depends on being recognized as grievable—as a life that would be mourned if lost—then I have a stake in ensuring that other lives are recognized as equally grievable. The question "whose lives count as lives?" becomes urgent and political.

Butler argues that dominant political frameworks distribute precariousness unevenly. Some lives are protected, valued, and publicly mourned when lost, while others are treated as disposable, their deaths barely registered. After 9/11, she observed how American grief was mobilized to justify violence against populations whose own losses would not be counted or mourned. The asymmetry in which lives are considered grievable underlies the ability to wage war with a clear conscience.

An Ethics of Interconnection

This analysis leads Butler to a critique of national frameworks that divide humanity into those who merit protection and those who don't. She challenges the notion that our ethical obligations stop at national borders or extend only to those we recognize as "like us." Instead, she proposes an ethics based on our shared vulnerability—what she calls our "precarious life" in common.

But Butler's ethics of precariousness isn't simply a call for universal recognition or inclusion. She's interested in how our dependencies make us relational subjects, fundamentally connected to others in ways we don't control. This means accepting that we're partially opaque to ourselves, formed by relationships and histories we didn't choose. It means acknowledging that the other person exceeds my capacity to know or understand them fully.

This emphasis on vulnerability and dependence might seem to counsel passivity, but Butler sees it differently. Recognizing our precariousness can motivate fierce political action—not to transcend vulnerability by securing absolute safety, but to challenge the unequal distribution of precariousness and to build more robust networks of care and support. The goal isn't invulnerability but a world where everyone's vulnerability is acknowledged and addressed.

Butler's ethics thus offers an alternative to both liberal individualism (which fantasizes about autonomous, self-sufficient subjects) and identity politics (which can reinforce boundaries between "us" and "them"). Instead, she proposes an ethics and politics grounded in our fundamental interconnection, our shared exposure to loss and harm, and our common need for recognition and care.

Culture as Ordinary: Raymond Williams and the Politics of Everyday Meaning

Culture, for much of modern history, has been a velvet rope. A gatekeeping term used by critics, institutions, and academics to separate the refined from the raw, the worthy from the wasted. But Raymond Williams, Welsh Marxist thinker and unwitting patron saint of Cultural Studies, asked a deceptively simple question: what if culture isn’t just the opera, but also the pub? Not just Shakespeare, but Coronation Street? What if culture is not only the best that has been thought and said, but also everything else we live and breathe?

In his landmark 1958 essay "Culture is Ordinary," Williams detonated the elitist bomb at the heart of cultural criticism. Against the rigid hierarchies of F.R. Leavis or Matthew Arnold—who believed culture should uplift the masses toward elite refinement—Williams argued that culture was already everywhere. It wasn't something possessed by the few, but practiced by the many. It was, in his now-famous phrase, "a whole way of life."

Against Cultural Snobbery: Making the Ordinary Visible

To say that culture is ordinary was not to flatten or sentimentalize it. Williams wasn’t a cheerleader for mediocrity. Rather, he sought to recognize that value doesn’t only live in high forms or canonical texts, but in the rituals, dialects, and emotional textures of daily life. The meals people cook, the songs they hum, the stories they tell at the bus stop—all of these, for Williams, were cultural forms as worthy of attention as any sonnet or symphony.

This approach is deeply political. When culture is defined from above, it becomes a weapon of distinction—a way to delegitimize the tastes and identities of working-class people. By asserting that culture is embedded in everyday practices, Williams turned culture into a terrain of struggle, one shaped by social forces but also by collective creativity. Culture, in this view, is not just reflective but productive; not a mirror, but a loom.

Culture as Living Practice, Not Museum Piece

Williams’s framework anticipates—and arguably seeds—the entire field of cultural studies, which would later examine everything from soap operas to street fashion with theoretical rigor. But it also remains startlingly relevant in an era where debates about taste, authenticity, and representation rage across digital platforms. TikTok dances, reality TV, meme formats, fan fiction—these aren’t just frivolous content. They are, as Williams would insist, cultural practices thick with meaning.

The core of Williams's insight is that culture isn’t just what we make, but how we mean. It’s the shared codes and contested stories through which people locate themselves in the world. To treat culture as ordinary, then, is not to demote it, but to democratize it. To say: your life counts. Your language matters. Your experiences are not ephemera to be archived by elites, but living forms to be understood on their own terms.

So yes, culture is ordinary. And that is exactly what makes it extraordinary.

Narrative Identity and Performativity: Ricoeur and Butler on the Self

Paul Ricoeur and Judith Butler are towering figures in contemporary thought, each offering a powerful account of how human beings understand themselves. Ricoeur develops the concept of narrative identity, where the self achieves coherence through storytelling. Butler, in contrast, advances the theory of performativity, where identity—especially gender—is not a stable essence but the repeated effect of discursive acts. Comparing their views exposes the tension between continuity and disruption, coherence and fluidity, in theories of selfhood.

Ricoeur: Narrative Identity as Continuity Through Time

For Ricoeur, articulated in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another, identity is configured through narrative. Human beings are temporal, and we make sense of our lives by emplotting events into stories. This produces:

• Sameness (idem) – the enduring traits and patterns of identity.

• Selfhood (ipse) – the capacity for change, promise, and responsibility.

Narrative identity mediates these poles, offering a sense of self that is both continuous and open. Crucially, this identity carries an ethical dimension: stories help us assume responsibility and orient ourselves toward “the good life, with and for others, in just institutions.”

Butler: Identity as Performativity

Butler, most famously in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), rejects the notion of identity as a coherent narrative. Instead, she argues that identity is performative: it is constituted by repeated acts, gestures, and discourses. Gender identity, for instance, is not a fixed essence but an iterative performance regulated by social norms.

Performativity destabilizes the idea of a unified self. What we call “identity” is always provisional, contingent, and vulnerable to disruption. Rather than aiming for continuity, Butler foregrounds instability and resistance, exposing how norms construct subjects while leaving space for subversion.

Convergence: Language, Power, and Selfhood

Despite their differences, Ricoeur and Butler intersect in important ways:

• Mediation through language: Both see the self as shaped by discourse—Ricoeur through narrative configuration, Butler through discursive performativity.

• Non-essentialism: Neither views identity as a natural or pre-given essence.

• Ethical and political stakes: Ricoeur links narrative to justice; Butler links performativity to critique and emancipation from oppressive norms.

Contrast: Coherence vs. Disruption

The differences are sharp:

• Continuity vs. Instability: Ricoeur emphasizes the coherence of narrative identity across time, while Butler highlights its fragility and constructed nature.

• Ethical Aim vs. Deconstructive Critique: Ricoeur seeks ethical orientation in narrative unity; Butler resists normative closure, exposing how identities are produced and policed.

• Narrative Horizon vs. Discursive Iteration: Ricoeur situates the self in the horizon of storytelling; Butler situates it in the iterative repetition of norms.

Why the Comparison Matters

This dialogue between Ricoeur and Butler captures a crucial tension in contemporary thought:

• Do we need narrative continuity to live responsibly and ethically, as Ricoeur suggests?

• Or must we resist the illusion of coherence, recognizing identity as a site of contestation and performance, as Butler argues?

In today’s debates about gender, politics, and digital selfhood, both perspectives remain indispensable. Ricoeur highlights the ethical need for self-constancy, while Butler reminds us of the dangers of treating identity as fixed.

Between Story and Performance

Ricoeur and Butler illuminate complementary truths: identity is both narrated and performed, both ethically oriented and socially constructed, both continuous and unstable. Taken together, their theories invite us to embrace the complexity of selfhood—where narrative and performance intersect in the ongoing work of becoming who we are.

Organizations as Fields: Bourdieu’s Lens on Work and Power

When we think about organizations—businesses, NGOs, universities—we often imagine them as machines, designed to achieve specific goals. But Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology invites us to see them differently: as fields of struggle, where individuals and groups compete for capital, influence, and legitimacy. This perspective reveals why organizations are not simply efficient structures but contested arenas where power is constantly negotiated.

Organizations as Fields

For Bourdieu, a field is a structured social space with its own rules of the game. Organizations are no exception. Inside a company, school, or nonprofit, people vie for positions, resources, and recognition. The “stakes” may be profits, promotions, or symbolic prestige. What matters most is that organizations are not neutral spaces—they are shaped by ongoing struggles between actors with different forms of capital.

Capital at Work

Within organizations, the classic forms of capital—economic, cultural, social, and symbolic—take on organizationally specific meanings.

• Economic capital may appear as budgets, salaries, or financial performance.

• Cultural capital might be credentials, expertise, or professional language.

• Social capital is the network of alliances, mentors, and team relationships.

• Symbolic capital manifests as authority, legitimacy, or reputation.

Success in organizations depends not only on skill but also on the ability to mobilize these forms of capital in line with the rules of the organizational field.

Struggles and Change

Bourdieu’s framework highlights that organizations are dynamic. Newcomers challenge established leaders, managers compete for authority, and external pressures—such as regulation or cultural change—reshape the rules of the game. Conflict is not a sign of dysfunction but a sign that the organizational field is alive.

Consider a university: professors struggle for prestige through publications and grants, administrators seek legitimacy through rankings and budgets, and students navigate the field by accumulating cultural and social capital. Or take a tech company: engineers, marketers, and executives all compete to define what counts as valuable—innovation, revenue, or brand image.

Why This Matters Today

Viewing organizations as fields sheds light on why change is so difficult. Policies or reforms succeed only if they align with the distribution of capital and the underlying logic of the field. At the same time, it shows why organizations can be engines of transformation: when new actors bring fresh resources, they can shift the balance of power and redefine the rules.

Rethinking Workplaces

Bourdieu’s theory encourages us to look past official charts and mission statements. The real life of organizations happens in the struggles for recognition, influence, and control over the stakes. By seeing organizations as fields, we gain a sharper lens on why they reproduce inequality—and how they can be reimagined as spaces of innovation, fairness, and change.

Learn More:

Bourdieu Explained

Habitus: Pierre Bourdieu’s Key to Understanding Social Life

The Social Game Board: Bourdieu’s Concept of Field

Beyond Money: Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital

Doxa, Orthodoxy, and Heterodoxy: Bourdieu’s Invisible Powers

When Habits Fall Behind: Bourdieu’s Concept of Hysteresis

Reflexivity in Bourdieu’s Sociology: A Method, Not Just a Mindset

Education as Reproduction—and Resistance: Bourdieu on Schools and Inequality

Distinction, Taste, and Class Today: Revisiting Bourdieu’s Classic Insight

Symbolic Power and Symbolic Violence: Bourdieu’s Subtle Weapons of Domination

Pierre Bourdieu - short summary of ideas

12 key concpets in Bourdieu's socological thought

“Culture Industry” in the Age of Cultural Capital

The Old Masses and the New Elites

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer offered a blunt vision of culture under capitalism: homogenized, mechanized, and hollow. Culture, they argued, had become an industry like any other—producing standardized goods to pacify the public and suppress critical thought. Consumers didn’t choose; they were chosen for.

But today, cultural consumption doesn’t feel quite so passive. We build Spotify playlists with surgical care, signal taste on Goodreads, debate aesthetics on Letterboxd, and curate our Netflix queues like digital mood boards. In this context, Adorno’s bleak vision seems… outdated. Haven’t we moved from being cultural dupes to cultural connoisseurs?

That’s where Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital sharpens the picture.

Theory Snapshot: From Mass Standardization to Taste as Distinction

If Adorno’s “culture industry” emphasized sameness, Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979) looked sideways—at how different social groups consume culture to signal class, education, and power. Cultural capital, in Bourdieu’s terms, is the non-economic currency of taste: knowing how to talk about cinema, choosing artisanal over mass-market, signaling refinement through what you don’t like.

Where Adorno saw culture flattening difference, Bourdieu saw it reinforcing social hierarchies. Highbrow vs. lowbrow wasn’t about quality—it was about class camouflage. Consuming "the right things" becomes a quiet performance of superiority.

Now, drop that into today’s world of influencers, aesthetic subcultures, and lifestyle branding—and things get interesting.

Case in Point: The Instagram Aesthetic and Taste as Content

Consider the visual economy of Instagram. Every brunch photo, reading list, travel snap, or shelfie is a small gesture of taste. These aren’t mass products; they’re signals—carefully composed, semi-public displays of cultural capital. A niche zine, a Margiela piece, a rare vinyl pressing—each says something about your position in the cultural field.

Platforms that seem democratic are often fields of quiet stratification. TikTok’s “core” subcultures (coquettecore, cottagecore, etc.) turn taste into aesthetic identity. Even anti-capitalist aesthetics—DIY zines, thrifted fits, lo-fi photography—become forms of capital when performed visibly.

This isn’t just consumption—it’s curation. And curation is power.

Why It Matters: The New Culture Industry

So, has the culture industry disappeared—or just adapted?

In some ways, Adorno and Bourdieu were diagnosing the same disease from different angles. Adorno warned of culture’s descent into pacifying sameness. Bourdieu warned of how difference itself can be commodified. Today, we live in a synthesis of both: a world where the appearance of uniqueness feeds a deeper logic of conformity and hierarchy.

Culture today is not mass-produced kitsch imposed from above—it’s a marketplace of taste distinctions, performed from below but shaped by invisible algorithms, platform norms, and brand aesthetics. The illusion is one of autonomy. You don’t have to watch Marvel; you can signal prestige by quoting Godard. But both exist in the same monetized attention economy.

To put it simply: we’re no longer just the audience. We’re the product and the promoters.

Roman Jakobson's Legacy and Influence

Roman Jakobson's influence on structuralism cannot be overstated. Along with Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, he provided the theoretical foundations for understanding culture as structured systems of signs. His demonstration that language operates through relations of opposition and equivalence inspired structuralist analyses across the human sciences. Lévi-Strauss adapted Jakobsonian phonology to analyze kinship systems and myths; Roland Barthes applied semiotic principles to fashion, photography, and popular culture; Jacques Lacan reread Freud through linguistic categories derived partly from Jakobson's work on metaphor and metonymy.

Even as post-structuralism emerged to challenge structuralist orthodoxies, it remained deeply indebted to Jakobson's insights. Derrida's deconstruction, while opposing the structuralist search for stable meanings, employed analytical techniques descended from Jakobsonian close reading. The "linguistic turn" across philosophy and social sciences—the recognition that language shapes rather than merely reflects reality—owed much to Jakobson's insistence on studying language as a constitutive system rather than a transparent medium.

Contemporary Resonance

Jakobson's legacy extends well beyond structuralism. In linguistics, his distinctive feature theory remains central to phonological analysis, his typological work influences comparative linguistics, and his attention to language universals anticipated Chomskyan concerns. In cognitive science, his insights about binary oppositions and feature-based categorization inform research on perception and concept formation. Literary studies continues to draw on his analytical methods, even when questioning his theoretical premises.

Perhaps most remarkably, Jakobson's interdisciplinary vision seems increasingly relevant. At a time when academic specialization often fragments knowledge, his example demonstrates the value of theoretical frameworks that bridge disciplines. His ability to move fluidly between linguistics, poetics, semiotics, anthropology, and neuroscience reflected a conviction that human symbolic behavior required multi-perspectival analysis. Contemporary fields like cognitive poetics, biolinguistics, and digital humanities embody this same integrative ambition. Jakobson's work reminds us that the boundaries between disciplines are often artificial, that the most significant insights emerge from theoretical synthesis, and that rigorous formal analysis need not exclude humanistic concerns. His intellectual legacy endures not merely in specific theories but in his demonstration that systematic, scientifically informed approaches can deepen rather than diminish our understanding of human meaning-making.

See also:

Roman Jakobson - Life and Intellectual Formation

Roman Jakobson's Contribution to Linguistics

The Six Functions of Language

Phonology and Distinctive Features

Poetics and the Structure of Literature

 Roman Jakobson – On Linguistic Aspects of Translation - summary