Gender, Intersectionality, and Global Social History

One of the most fruitful concepts of recent social analysis has been that of intersectionality, the idea that the nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and that no one identity – race, class, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities, but is always materialized in terms of and by means of them. Although it was developed out of the US experience, intersectional epistemology has been dynamic and mobile, as scholars have not simply used social groupings drawn from the Western past and present but have elaborated social categories taken from local understandings as well. This article analyses some recent examples of gendered world history that also take other social hierarchies into account, and assesses how these help us better understand global processes that transformed societies. It begins with a place and time where global entanglements led quite clearly to the emergence of new social groups, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and then more briefly examines this process in other parts of the early modern colonial world.