British Journal of Social Work (2015) 45, 313–330
doi:10.1093/bjsw/bct131
Advance Access publication August 21, 2013
Intersecting Deviance: Social Work,
Difference and the Legacy of Eugenics
Margaret F. Gibson*
*Correspondence to Margaret F. Gibson, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, 246 Bloor
Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1V4, Canada. E-mail: margaret.gibson@utoronto.ca
Abstract
How do we understand human difference, and what should we do with it? These are
central questions of social work knowledge, practice and pedagogy. In recent years, ‘intersectionality’ has emerged as a useful construct in theorising how difference operates in
social hierarchies. Too often, however, ‘intersectional’ discussions have led to increasingly
fine divisions that isolate individuals and reify categories of difference. This article argues
that an active engagement with history can promote a more nuanced and helpful approach to intersectionality, as a greater understanding of the past shakes up static perceptions of identity categories. The legacy of eugenics visible in present-day notions of
‘desirable reproduction’ is explored using the example of ‘queer parents of disabled children’. Two ways of looking at such a grouping illustrate different possible applications of
intersectionality theory. A temporal, relational intersectionality is proposed—one that can
be both historically responsive and situated in everyday narratives. The article concludes
by addressing the social work implications of a historically aware, relational approach to
difference.
Keywords: Disability, history, identity, parents, sexuality, theory
Accepted: May 2013
Introduction: intersectionality and its discontents
How do we understand human difference, and what should we do with it?
These are central questions of social work knowledge, practice and pedagogy.
Whether categories of difference appear between clients and workers, group
members, participants and researchers, community groups, managers and
staff workers, or teachers and students, social workers routinely face the challenge of explaining and working with difference. In this paper, I consider what
# The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of
The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.
314 Margaret F. Gibson
it means when we identify, talk about and act upon social difference between
people, and how questioning our understanding of social difference might
usefully further social work goals. In so doing, I focus on the concept of
intersectionality.
In recent years, intersectionality has emerged as a central construct in theorising how difference operates in social relations and hierarchies (Collins,
2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Hulko, 2009; McCall, 2005; Mehrotra, 2010). Coined
by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality follows from traditions of
(mostly American) women-of-colour feminism and black feminist thought,
in which theory was developed from a previously subjugated standpoint
(Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Intersectionality’s fundamental assertion is that
the social categories many people and institutions often treat as separate
axes of difference—such as gender, class or race—cannot be effectively
pulled apart, but instead operate in coordinated and mutually definitive
ways. Black women, then, in Crenshaw’s work, could not separate out their
‘black’ identity from their ‘female’ identity in any meaningful way, and
neither could they be fully extricated from class in making sense of their
experiences. Intersectionality drew heavily on Patricia Hill Collins’s (2000
[1990]) argument that ‘interlocking oppressions’ (e.g. sexism, racism and
classism) could not be pulled apart in understanding or responding to black
women’s perspectives. Building upon work by other women-of-colour feminists, intersectionality challenged those feminist thinkers who conceptualised
gender as if it operated in isolation, with a single category of ‘women’, just as it
challenged critical race theorists who conceptualised race in the same discrete, homogenising way (Combahee River Collective, 1983 [1977]; Davis,
1981; Hong, 2006; Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983).
For social work, the necessity to conceptualise and work with complexities
of social difference and identity is particularly acute since the individuals and
communities that social workers engage with are usually experiencing more
than one form of marginalisation. Mehrotra (2010) and Hulko (2009) have
both effectively argued that intersectionality is an important and useful construct for social work. They have joined with scholars in other fields in arguing
that intersectionality continues to present a fundamental, necessary critique
of any political or scholarly analysis that attempts to generalise on the basis of
one category of difference. Intersectionality now represents one of the most
widely recognised scholarly contributions of feminist theory in general, and
black feminist thought in particular.
With this widespread uptake, the meaning and impact of intersectionality
have become diffuse and, at times, disquieting. Since its inception, intersectionality has, as Kathy Davis has written, become a ‘buzzword’ (Davis,
2008). For example, a number of writers have noted that, too often, intersectional language is combined with practices that bolster social inequities. In
their argument for increasing the attention scholars and activists pay to intersectional practice rather than intersectional rhetoric, Jane Ward and Rachel
E. Luft (Luft and Ward, 2009) have written: ‘When not joined to
Intersecting Deviance 315
intersectional practice, intersectional intonations function as a kind of credentialing, an appropriation used to mask an anti-intersectional orientation’
(p. 17). In her critique of ‘diversity culture’ within increasingly corporate
models of organisational practice, Ward has argued that intersectionality
has been effectively ‘mainstreamed’. In this ‘mainstream’ version of intersectionality, the ‘diverse groups’ created by combining multiple identities are
treated as target markets for programming or fundraising, while larger
power structures remain intact (Ward, 2008, pp. 27– 49). In social work pedagogy and practice, Wendy Hulko has similarly claimed that the language of
intersectionality is sometimes deployed as a means for white feminists to
avoid the acknowledgement of their own privileges (Hulko, 2009).
In recent considerations of intersectional scholarship, Jennifer Nash (2008),
Lisa Bowleg (2008), Leslie McCall (2005) and Gita Mehrotra (2010) have all
called for greater attentiveness to the approaches termed ‘intersectional’, suggesting that researchers and theorists clarify their political, theoretical and
methodological intent. For social work scholarship, in particular, Mehrotra’s
excellent review has argued for a ‘continuum’ of intersectional approaches in
which scholars select and place their theory and methods with greater thoughtfulness and clarity (Mehrotra, 2010). Such a revitalised investigation of intersectionality is much needed in contemporary social work; however, for those
who wish to co-opt intersectional rhetoric to preserve (their) existing privileges, a conceptual continuum may be all too convenient.
Within contemporary social work practice, ‘intersectionality’ is often
treated simplistically and additively, as a listing of taken-for-granted identities for social workers, clients and communities, perhaps leading to an
accounting of relative privilege and oppression. Intersectionality thus
becomes seen as a formula which uses multiple, distinct axes of otherwise
stable difference as they come together in individual bodies. I could, therefore, describe myself as a female, late-thirties, middle-class, white, lesbian/
queer, partnered, generally able-bodied social worker with an invisible
chronic health condition who is of varied Northern European heritage. No
doubt, I have left out some important adjectives. But what next?
While I do not mean to imply that an awareness of the social categories that
operate in one’s own life is without value, any individualised understanding of
difference has limited potential in the promotion of interpersonal connection, political affiliation or even productive discussion—all ideals of most
social work practice. In such framings of human difference, constructs such
as ‘identity’ and ‘experience’ can become fetishised sources of authority,
while overarching structural factors recede, unnoticed. When this occurs,
each person is not only encouraged to think and speak from and for his or
her own social location, but anything labelled ‘personal experience’ is
treated as if it cannot be questioned any further, as if it exists apart from
larger discourses and their histories (Scott, 1991). Often, such approaches
rely on defining individuals and groups solely in terms of shared oppressions,
and neglect privileges and context (Hulko, 2009). A search for authenticity
316 Margaret F. Gibson
(as in, who is really working-class?) replaces an investigation of how certain
types of identities or experiences come to be seen as ‘more authentic’ than
others, and who benefits from such distinctions in the first place. Discussion
and debate can end in increasingly fine divisions which ultimately reify categories of difference as inevitable and immovable. When this occurs and
each member of a class, group, family or community has been cordoned off
to his or her own, sparsely populated, intersectional island, there can be a
strong temptation to move on, as in ‘Now we see that we are all different,
we can get some real work done’. Differences that may be very salient to
the workings of a particular group are then shunted aside.
This way of interpreting intersectionality entrenches difference. Categories, and even hierarchies, are thus taken for granted, rather than seen as historically produced through people’s actions and interactions over time and
space, dependent on available meanings. Some people can be seen as inevitably and only speaking from a position of entitlement and others as inevitably
and only speaking from a position of marginalisation. Even if most people are
aware that the terms used to define socially salient categories of difference
can shift over time, such as a move from ‘handicapped children’ to ‘children
with special needs’, the boundaries that are drawn between and around categories are too easily accepted as self-evident, as in the assumption that
‘we all know who we are calling “handicapped” or “special needs”. That
won’t change’. Terminology, rather than impact, receives our focus, as we
struggle to find the words that will not get us into trouble, rather than thinking
about whom these designations affect, and how.
In this article, I argue that an active engagement with history can assist social
work in moving beyond social difference as an introductory caveat or a methodological challenge, and instead promote a more nuanced intersectionality which
engages with temporality, relationality and the legacies of power. Drawing on
the example of queer or LGBTQ (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer)
parents of disabled children in English-speaking North America, I explore
how an understanding of the past can shake up static, individuated perceptions of present identity categories, including beliefs about the identity of
social work itself. In my analysis, I highlight the limitations of viewing
social differences as traits that individuals ‘have’, and instead propose that
we look at how difference is defined and determined relationally, such that
it appears between and across, rather than within, people.
This article thus blurs traditional boundaries of social work scholarship, as
it draws upon historical records, critical theory and examples from personal
reflection, all with methodological implications for empirical research. It is
particularly appropriate that the process of reconceptualising intersectionality should connect ways of thinking that have been kept in different domains
of scholarly practice. Intersectionality’s inter-disciplinarity and widespread
implications follow its primary theoretical assertion that, in sorting people
and ideas into rigid and singular groupings, we inevitably fail to understand
and respond to the complexities of human experience.
Intersecting Deviance 317
Generating degeneracy: sexuality, deviance and eugenics
By even creating the phrase ‘queer parents of disabled children’, I am invoking
the type of list-making I have described as one common application of intersectionality. I could add to it even further by listing lesbian/gay/bisexual/
two-spirit/transgender/transsexual/intersex/queer/questioning parents and
their children with physical/developmental/intellectual/sensory/multiple
disabilities. I have not even started to tease apart ‘parents’ and what relationships might be implied under this word, or where to draw the line around
‘children’—are children designated by age or solely via the relationship to
their parents (as in ‘my child’)? Regardless of the terminology, to dominant
ways of framing human difference and social work practice, this grouping
appears as an exceedingly narrow focus with limited relevance to anybody
who is not on that intersectional island of identity. Why, then, would this
matter to the general theory and practice of social work, except as an esoteric
example of stigma?
A different approach to understanding such categories is suggested by
attending to how related categories have been designated in other historical
contexts. Consider work by German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
He first published Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study in 1906, but my English translation is a revised edition of the twelfth (!) German edition, published in 1924
in New York. In it, most case studies begin with a number (e.g. Case 156), a
diagnosis (e.g. ‘psychical hermaphroditism’, ‘viraginity’, ‘gynandry’, ‘homosexuality’ and even ‘homo-sexuality in transition to viraginity’ all appear
under the chapter heading ‘Congenital sexual inversion in woman’) and
then proceed with a listing of diagnoses and descriptions of the individual’s
parents, siblings and other relatives. Then, he lists, in impressive detail, the
patient’s own physical and psychological description/diagnosis, and that of
any children they might have. For example, in the case of ‘Mrs M.’, diagnosed
with ‘psychical hermaphroditism’ due to her history of sexual attraction to
women as well as men, Krafft-Ebing recounts:
She had eleven brothers and sisters, but only six survived. Two brothers died
at the age of sixteen and twenty of tuberculosis. One brother was suffering
from laryngeal phthisis. Four living sisters the same as Mrs. M. were physically
like unto the father, very nervous and shy. Two younger sisters were married
and in good health, and both had healthy children. Another one, a maiden,
was suffering from nervous affection (Krafft-Ebing, 1924, p. 402).
Mrs M. was the mother of four children, mostly delicate and neuropathic:
There was nothing of importance in the history of the patient’s childhood. She
learned easily, had gifts for poetry and aesthetics, was somewhat affected,
loved to read novels and sentimental literature, was of neuropathic constitution and very sensitive to changes of temperature, the slightest draught would
make her flesh creep. It is noteworthy, however, that one day when ten years
318 Margaret F. Gibson
of age she fancied her mother did not love her. Thereupon she put a lot of
sulphur matches in her coffee and drank it to make herself ill, in order to
draw her mother’s love to herself (Krafft-Ebing, 1924, p. 402).
In this brief excerpt of a much longer case study, categories are certainly in full
evidence, however much is combined through and across these typologies.
Physical, mental and sexual forms of ‘deviance’ intertwine such that Mrs
M.’s sexual inclinations and relations with both men and women are inextricably connected to her ‘neuropathic constitution’ and her sensitivity to temperature. In spite of the assertion that ‘There was nothing of importance in
the patient’s childhood’, physiological and psychological explanations are
similarly co-constructive, such that Mrs M.’s response to a perceived loss of
her mother’s love and her interest in novels and poetry all appear in the
same paragraph as a description of her inability to tolerate draughts. Even
more pronounced, the detailed account of her relatives’ conditions and constitutions (of which this paragraph is but a brief selection), and the health of
her own children, are at the forefront of our understanding of Mrs M., second
only to her diagnosis and initial reason for contact with the examining physician. Why?
Krafft-Ebing himself explains:
The first important point based upon ripe experience is the fact that antipathic
sexual instinct as an anomaly of sexual life is only found in individuals who are
tainted, as a rule, hereditarily. In foro particular stress should be laid upon this
point (Krafft-Ebing, 1906, pp. 444 – 5).
Thus, any ‘sexual’ deviance was seen to be indicative of and inseparable from
other heritable, embodied deviance.
A discourse of ‘degeneration’, or a feared individual and societal regression on the human evolutionary ladder, dominated the work of almost all
European and North American medical writers of the late nineteenth
century as they began to meticulously categorise sexual attractions and activities (Gibson, 1997, 1998; Gilman, 1985; Terry, 1999). Such writers assumed
that there was an evolutionary ranking of humanity that societies ignored
at their peril. Proponents of emerging fields such as criminology, anthropology, psychiatry and public health advocated the role they might play in documenting signs of human advancement or, more often, decline (Gilman,
1985). Siobhan Somerville (2000) has argued that the attention such
new experts began paying to the categorisation of homosexuality was
always, primarily, motivated by fears of racial mixing and the decline of
white supremacy.
In such a discourse, then, the checkboxes found in contemporary social
work practice were notably blurred, as mutually constitutive categories of
race, sexuality, gender, religion, disability and class commingled to slot individuals and groups onto the evolutionary ladder. In addition, these evolutionary placements could change. For example, descriptions of ‘inverts’ (a
common descriptor of people who engaged in non-heterosexual behaviours
Intersecting Deviance 319
or relationships) highlighted gender behaviour as much as sexual behaviour
(Terry, 1999). Medical writers used case studies and biomedical imagery to
argue that white people who engaged in such behaviours were racially
suspect, and might pose a threat to future generations (Gibson, 1997, 1998;
Gilman, 1985; Terry, 1999). It is within such a framework that Krafft-Ebing
was writing copiously about the hereditary ‘taint’ of his patients.
This dominant turn-of-the-century discourse of degeneration flowed
through the first decades of the twentieth century into a similarly mainstream
consideration of how the reproduction of people could and should be scientifically improved: the domain of eugenics. Eugenic advocates supported the
deliberate promotion of reproduction by those deemed ‘fit’ members of
society, and the deliberate suppression of reproduction by those deemed
‘unfit’. Eugenics was founded by English scientist and prominent statistician
Francis Galton (1822 – 1911). Galton argued that intelligence and other measures of human ‘fitness’ were almost entirely hereditary and that societies
should selectively promote and suppress breeding of different members in
order to maximise overall social ‘fitness’. Although Galton died in 1911, his
ideas were taken up by so many others that they became accepted doctrine
throughout North America from the early twentieth century on, peaking in
the 1920s and 1930s. Most dominant in public health and immigration policies, eugenic influences could be found across many domains of both Canadian and American culture and were integrated into emerging welfare states
(McLaren, 1991; Ordover, 2003; Snyder and Mitchell, 2006; Valverde, 2008).
What can a consideration of Krafft-Ebing’s categories, degeneration and
eugenics offer to discussions of intersectionality and queer parents of disabled children? To begin with, the category of ‘queer parents’ is suddenly
altered, such that the meaning and significance of ‘queerness’ have everything to do with intergenerational impact. Parenting as genetic heredity
mixes with parenting as psychological relation. Mrs M.’s diagnostic queerness
is evident and salient in both how she was parented and by whom, as much as
in whom she parents, and how. In sum, ‘disability’ and ‘sexuality’ cannot be
neatly separated out as strands of identity or oppression in Krafft-Ebing’s
writing, or, indeed, in most of the sexological writing from the first part of
the twentieth century. Embodied differences were instead viewed as a socially undesirable ‘taint’, which sexual behaviours both predicted and revealed.
Thus, instead of being portrayed as individuals who engaged in socially censured acts, people who participated in non-normative sexual practices
became seen as ‘being’ different, and as representing a threat to the future
of the society and, possibly, the species (see Foucault, 1990 [1978]; Somerville, 2000; Terry, 1999).
Who should and should not reproduce were questions at the heart of
eugenic belief and practice. All categories of ‘degenerative deviance’ were
thus simultaneously defined through designations of race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, class, disability, national origin, etc. Instead of distinctive categories that ‘intersected’ in particular bodies, then, the understanding
320 Margaret F. Gibson
of any category was dependent upon a widespread understanding of both
‘deviance’ and ‘fitness’, always in relation to every other socially meaningful
category of difference. In other words, in spite of many examples of categorisation in this discourse (e.g. ‘mental defective’, ‘invert’, ‘hysteric’), the
effects of such groupings only made sense in the framework of common
‘regressive’ threat which all were perceived to pose to the creation of a
desired ‘progressive’ future society.
The histories of professionally designated ‘sexual deviance’ (queerness)
and ‘embodied deviance’ (disability) in English-speaking North America
thus have shared, but not identical, connections to early twentieth-century
discourses on degeneration and eugenics (Gilman, 1985; Hegarty, 2007;
Ordover, 2003; Snyder and Mitchell, 2006). Nancy Ordover (2003) has documented extensive theoretical and substantive connections between discourses on queer sexualities and those on eugenic movements, such as
immigration, the diagnosis of ‘defectives’ and the ‘feeble-minded’, institutionalisation and forced sterilisation of all those deemed ‘unfit’, including
large numbers of women of colour. Work by Ordover (2003) on the USA
and Angus McLaren (1990) on Canada documents how mainstream such explicitly eugenic thinking and practice was in North America, even though it
has since been portrayed as a distant Nazi aberration.
North American social work emerged as a profession in this same time
period as degeneration and eugenic theories, in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Indeed, much of the impetus for the development
of social work’s professional role had roots in the same discourses of degeneracy and social reform (Chen, 2005; Little, 1998; Moffatt, 2001; Morton,
1993). Eugenic ideology was primarily promulgated by medical professionals, but, as Angus McLaren reminds us, the lure of eugenics’ scientific,
cutting-edge status had a broad appeal: ‘Many psychologists, social
workers, and teachers would also be drawn to eugenics, in part because by
embracing what they took to be a scientific approach to social problems
they could enhance their professional standing’ (McLaren, 1990, pp. 49– 50).
One example of a prominent social worker who embraced eugenic discourses and objectives was Charlotte Whitton, long-time head of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare. In the 1930s, while American radical social
workers had greatly increased influence on public policy during the Roosevelt Administration (Reisch and Andrews, 2002), the Canadian Prime Minister, R. B. Bennett, had conservative social worker Charlotte Whitton as a
primary policy advisor (Jennissen and Lundy, 2011; Moffatt, 2001). Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Whitton not only advocated for decreased financial
supports for families, she also expressed explicitly eugenic ideas regarding
immigration policy and family policy. Eugenic impulses were evident in her
organisation’s study, ‘Canada’s Child Immigrants’, which was conceived
and executed with the goal of identifying extensive degeneration
(McLaren, 1990). Whitton herself published an article entitled ‘Mental deficiency as a child welfare problem’ in which she asserted:
Intersecting Deviance 321
Statistics abound to show the alarming degree to which an immigration policy
that sought not quality but quantity has contributed to the social problems of
this young country. Fortunately the war has stemmed the human tide temporarily at least, and allowed us to take stock of the population that has flowed
into this country . . . . Our strength and resources are bent to the task of
keeping this country strong, virile, healthy, and moral, and we insist that
the blood that enters its veins must be equally pure and free from taint
(cited in McLaren, 1990, pp. 63 – 4).
It is important not to presume that the terms ‘social work’ and ‘social workers’
themselves represent stable and homogenous categories or a unified intent.
There is ample evidence that radical social workers during the 1920s and
1930s, at the peak of eugenicist fervour, continued to struggle for social
justice in both Canada and the USA. In so doing, many took considerable
personal risks and suffered the consequences (Moffatt, 2001; Reisch and
Andrews, 2002). However, the push in both countries for social work’s recognition as a profession during this time period involved a closer affiliation with
‘scientific’ approaches and official government policy, including eugenic
assumptions and strategies (Jennissen and Lundy, 2011; Reisch and
Andrews, 2002). Furthermore, regardless of personal convictions, as employees in state-run or -funded organisations, social workers often implemented
policies which had, at their root, eugenic rationales, such as the identification,
regulation, rehabilitation, deportation or institutionalisation of those
deemed ‘feeble-minded’ or otherwise ‘unfit’ (McLaren, 1990; Ordover,
2003).
Even as categories have changed over time and ‘eugenics’ has fallen out of
fashion as a term, the mutually constitutive definition of who is ‘fit’ and who is
‘unfit’ continue to resonate in contemporary operations of difference. The
legacy of eugenics persists in dominant North American discourses about
queerness, disability and social desirability; these designations are always
intertwined with social meanings of ‘fitness’, always in alongside groupings
by race, class, gender and nation (Mamo, 2007; Ordover, 2003; Snyder and
Mitchell, 2006; Titchkosky, 2007). There is ample evidence of continued connections between disability, queerness and fears about social/national/racial
reproduction (McRuer, 2006; Titchkosky, 2007). Consider some of the following: laws preventing travel or immigration based on HIV status;
debates about the legality and morality of technological interventions in supporting, monitoring and terminating pregnancies, combined with the implications of various prenatal tests; regulations surrounding who can donate
sperm or ova, who can receive such donations, who can be or hire gestational
surrogates, who can be adoptive parents, who can have children removed
from their care and which children are adoptable; moral panics about some
women reproducing ‘too late’ or ‘not enough’ and others ‘too early’ or ‘too
much’, and the impact of both on children’s disability rates. Indeed, even
social science arguments that aim to support LGBTQ parents often do so
by highlighting how ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ their children are (and, not
322 Margaret F. Gibson
coincidentally, how ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ these parents are, too) (Hicks,
2005; Malone and Cleary, 2002; Stacey and Biblarz, 2001). Simultaneously,
those who argue against the expansion of LGBTQ rights frequently highlight
the presumed ‘cost’ to children and society (Butler, 2004; Gibson, in press;
Hosking and Ripper, 2012). ‘Fit’ children are still assumed to come from
(and validate) ‘fit’ parents.
However, this article will not offer a comprehensive summary of eugenics
and its ongoing influence and meaning for social work (although this would
be an important project to pursue). Instead, the example of eugenics illustrates a broader claim that a historical lens can usefully inform present-day
intersectional praxis. Thus, I suggest a move from seeing intersectionality
as the overlap of categories to intersectionality as a consideration of how categories have been produced through time, and an examination of what legacies such productions leave in both our current lists of identifiers and our
everyday interactions.
Categorical distinctions: shifting views of intersectionality
The meaning of multiple categories of hierarchical difference has been complicated by this historical interlude. In this section, I move back to the present
historical moment in order to explore what implications this travel through
time might have for how we view a grouping such as ‘LGBTQ parents of disabled children’. Here, I explore how we might illustrate the proposed shift
from a list-making intersectionality to an intersectionality that is more temporally, contextually and relationally responsive. I start with a picture.
The list-making approach to intersectionality commonly suggests an
easy-to-draw Venn diagram, where the two groupings (or three, or four, or
twenty) overlap to produce an ‘intersectional’ zone of identity and experience. The Venn-diagram approach to ‘LGBTQ parents of disabled children’
is represented in Figure 1. In such a diagram, the unique shading of the overlapping slice might also be examined and understood on its own terms, or it
might be seen in additive terms (figuring out the relative influence of each category on those contained within). Numbers and frequencies are implied by
the relative size of the circular groups (although here they are the same)
and by the size of the overlapping slice. However, the intersectional slice is
always perceived as a domain that is only relevant to the minority within, cordoned off from the rest of each circle. And, of course, the more circles are
added, the smaller the intersectional slices.
The Venn-diagram approach can be useful, of course, in asserting that one
aspect of people’s lives has previously been entirely neglected, and that the
‘circle’ of a given group has been mistakenly shaded over in a single, homogenous colour. The existence of people in previously unacknowledged
social positions can thus be represented and validated. At the same time,
this illustration reifies the lines which are drawn around the circles, and
Intersecting Deviance 323
Figure 1. One common approach to intersectionality.
highlights the oddity, and numerical scarcity, of those who fall under multiple
categories of consideration. They become ‘exceptional’.
Further, a Venn-diagram approach to intersectionality presumes a universally satisfactory (or at least defensible) definition that can be found/made
for each label: we can designate ‘parents’, we can designate ‘disabled children’ (or ‘children with disabilities’), we can designate ‘LGBTQ people’. Furthermore, such a model is temporally static: once you have found your place
in the circles, you stay there. Contextually dependent, temporally variable
fluctuations are not allowed, even though nobody in contemporary North
American culture would likely be placed in either category at birth.
Readers encountering the diagram are also presumed to have a single location, as individuals, even if the categories presented are inherently dependent
on others.
In contrast, the model of intersectionality I am proposing here does not
lend itself to portrayal in a diagram. Rather than a time-frozen picture
where permanent categories are contained within individual bodies and identities, what would happen if we instead attended to intersectionality as produced through embodied, institutionally situated, relational narratives? In
such an approach, categories would become contingent upon the context in
which they are applied, even as their material ramifications are undeniable
and central to analysis. A turn to narrative offers one means to illustrate
such a model. For example, when I move with my family across national
borders, my relationships with my partner and my two children are redefined
to accord with local laws and even, at times, with the disposition of the
324 Margaret F. Gibson
particular border guard on duty, and the contingencies of our interaction with
him or her. Sometimes I have two children, and sometimes one. Sometimes I
am married, and sometimes not. Sometimes a border official asks where our
children’s father is, and whether we have his permission to travel with the children without him. We then have to explain that the children have no father to
give such permission (or do they? this depends on what each of us means by
‘father’), and we offer texts that support our claims (passports, birth certificates, marriage certificate, adoption certificate). Simultaneously, I am carrying privileges associated with white skin, a Canadian passport and the
trappings of being a middle-class, educated person with a Northern European
ethnicity represented in my name.
In another example, after over two years of meetings with a range of professionals sprinkled across our city, many hours filling out questionnaires and
completing interviews, and a sizeable cheque reimbursed through an employment policy, my partner, daughter and I obtain a piece of paper with a diagnosis and an appropriate signature that we photocopy and present to our
child’s school staff. We learn that she can now have another trained adult
to work with her throughout the day in her classroom. However, things are
not remotely settled. Additional meetings and telephone conversations are
required of me and many others to evaluate and document her ongoing
‘need’ for increasingly scarce resources. We bump up against institutional frameworks that allocate less and less funding to ‘exceptional’ children and
those who work with them, especially within ‘mainstream’ settings (i.e.
designed primarily for children not deemed ‘exceptional’). Three years
later, my daughter’s diagnosis is suddenly deemed outdated after a revision
in medical criteria. We still have adequate documentation of her ‘exceptionality’ to enrol her in programmes, advocate for changes in her school services
and so forth. This, too, can change.
Furthermore, none of these institutionally intertwined labelling activities
occurs in isolation, and the possible combinations of such narratives are increasingly complex and uncertain. If my child behaves at a border crossing
in a way that is not expected or condoned by border officials, how might presenting a diagnostic label can influence the institutional response? If I meet
with medical professionals who are insulting to me and/or my family, or
others who seem confused, how can I locate the labels and associations of
‘LGBTQ parent’ or ‘parent of a disabled child’ in their actions, and in my
responses? More fundamentally, is ‘my’ queerness separable from my children’s identities, or ‘my child’s’ disability separable from my identity (or
from the identities of my other child and my partner)? Across each of these
interactions, have my relationships changed? Has my child changed? Has
my family changed? Has my parenting changed? Have the border guard,
the medical professional, the teacher changed? What are the material, embodied and relational consequences of these categorical shifts?
At the core of the approach to intersectionality here described is a need to
attend to how lines are drawn around social groupings, and to the
Intersecting Deviance 325
consequences that follow. Specific labels are applied as a part of this larger
process and have meaning only in context. I am certainly not on my own
when I question the premises and effects of categories; entire disciplines
and traditions have done so before me, notable among them queer, postcolonial, feminist, critical race and disability studies (e.g. Butler, 1993;
Foucault, 1990 [1978]; McRuer, 2006; Puar, 2007; Shakespeare, 2006;
Thobani, 2007; Titchkosky, 2007; Warner, 1993; Wendell, 1996). In joining
with others in what Leslie McCall (2005) designates as the ‘anti-categorical’
tradition of intersectionality theory, I am motivated not by an opposition to
categories as real and meaningful in people’s lives, but by a conviction that
categories are so very real, so very meaningful in people’s lives through
their effects across time, space and relationship. This anti-categorical approach to intersectionality has not been commonly applied in social work
theory and practice (Hulko, 2009; Mehrotra, 2010). A critical engagement
with history in such a process is even rarer in our field, although a number
of historians have shown that both Foucauldian ‘history of the present’ and
materialist approaches can usefully illustrate the contingencies and connections of social policy and social work practice (e.g. Chen, 2005; Donzelot,
1979; Little, 1998; Moffatt, 2001; Reisch and Andrews, 2002; Valverde, 2008).
Building upon ideas from Dorothy E. Smith (1999), I also urge social
workers to challenge the ways that dominant forms of intersectionality scholarship have perpetuated the individuation of subjects. In other words, if we
shift intersectionality to focus on how difference operates through relations,
such as those between parents and children, we can usefully undermine the
assumption that intersectionality is always and only about ‘a subject’, conveniently located in a single body and a unitary identity. Judith Butler,
herself accused by Smith of such individuated theorising in the past, has
more recently written eloquently about the urgency of seeing how people
are ‘undone’ by each other, asserting that the idea of an individual who is separable from others in identity or experience is a dangerous fallacy (Butler,
2004). Further, Butler’s earlier writing about ‘gender performativity’ offers
a useful example of rethinking categories that have previously been seen as
stable and inevitable (Butler, 1999 [1990], 1993). As work by Powell and
Gilbert (2007), McRuer (2006) and Featherstone and Green (2009) has
shown, we need not limit our reading of Butler to analyses of gender and sexuality, but can usefully apply the concept of performativity to any consideration of how identity and power are temporally and relationally produced,
with dire consequences for some.
The diagram in Figure 1 obscures the necessary role such relationality
plays, even as presumed relations permeate the labels ‘LGBTQ’, ‘parents’
and ‘disabled children’. There are even more hidden operations of race,
gender, class and nation in each such category, plus the un(re)marked overlaps such as parents or LGBTQ people who are themselves disabled, or their
children themselves queer. The categories are instead used as if the labels
identify obvious traits possessed by the individual bodies—bodies that we
326 Margaret F. Gibson
can sort for once and for all into the appropriate region of the diagram.
However, it is at this very relational juncture, in between spaces of ‘public
interest’ and ‘personal connection’, that social work so often operates.
Thus, what may be perceived as ‘my’ difference is not exclusively mine at
all. I may be put on an island by myself in a list-making exercise, but my lived
experience is of difference always and only in relation. For example, nondisabled mothers of disabled children are by no means a homogenous or
united group, but, as they reject, alter or engage with discourses surrounding
the disabled identities or differences of their children, and what it says about
their them as parents, ‘their own’ identities are integrated into this process
(Landsman, 2009). Instead of intersectional wedges, or islands, then, come
situated moments of unity and divergence as we examine the lines that are
drawn between and around people, the points at which ‘personal experiences’
come together and split apart. The material, relational and embodied consequences of these shifts through time can take centre stage, and affiliations
become more than an empathetic gesture.
Integrating narratives allows us to ask about how histories move in and
through people’s experiences of difference. There are opportunities for interrogating how such legacies are ‘experienced’ by different bodies, at different
moments and spaces, and in different sets of relations, some long-lasting
(parent and child) and some fleeting (border agent and traveller). Throughout, no voice is always oppressed or always oppressive (Hulko, 2009). The
queer, the parent, the disabled are all contingent and contextual. Difference
is thus up for discussion, but always as a question and not a statement.
Conclusion: the future of intersectionality
Some theorists have argued that we need to move away from the language of
‘intersectionality’ altogether. Jasbir Puar is a particularly well-known proponent of this approach, and her work has built upon postcolonial and
queer theorising to suggest a more restricted use of intersectionality within
a framework of ‘assemblage’ (Puar, 2007). The concept of assemblage highlights the temporal, contextual and relational aspects of oppression and
identity in human interactions, thus maintaining a constant awareness of
how histories shape the interpersonal encounters where attributes and
power are assembled. Puar’s transnational, feminist, postcolonial investigation of ‘homonationalism’ offers a critique of the USA-centrism and
de-politicisation of much contemporary intersectionality theory, and is
promising for future scholarship. I differ from Puar, however, on the need
to supplant the term ‘intersectionality’, since it has a useful activist and
scholarly history.
What are the social work implications of the version of intersectionality I
advocate in this article? For one, the proposed approach promotes a methodological shift away from social work research that idealises generalised
Intersecting Deviance 327
and quantifiable styles of knowledge. In social work’s recent focus on particular types of evidence, an ahistorical scientism can prevail. I would argue that
the assumptions implicit in dominant approaches to social work research are
too often unexplored. Here, I build upon the work of many narrative, ethnographic, historical and feminist researchers in arguing for the value of
nuanced and contextual research, proceeding from ‘the everyday’ (Smith,
1987). Additionally, discourse analysis, on its own or in combination with
other research methodologies, can be particularly helpful in attending to
the historical, linguistic and relational setting in which people live their
lives and (re)produce their identities (Gee, 1999; Van Dijk, 1993). Such research methods can incorporate an anti-categorical approach to intersectionality as they empirically document and analyse how social differences are
produced, rejected and responded to by people in particular times, places
and relations. Through such research, we can not only refine our understandings of intersectionality in social work, we can also promote alliances and
agitate for institutional change—goals that fulfil the original intents of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; Luft and Ward, 2009).
More generally, this article argues that revisiting eugenic discourses of the
past can encourage us to consider how large swathes of humanity continue to
be designated as ‘undesirable’, and how reproduction continues to be a
central domain in which (un)desirability is labelled and enforced. Through
a historical interrogation of ‘desirable reproduction’, social workers across
all domains of policy and practice are called upon to examine the connections
between their own institutionalised power and the processes that create and
maintain difference. In such everyday applications of intersectional theory,
new possibilities for social work education, practice and scholarship can
emerge.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Izumi Sakamoto, Sheila Neysmith, Tanya Titchkosky, Adrienne Chambon and the late Roxana Ng for their suggestions and support. I
am also grateful to the reviewers and editors for their contributions. This
project has been supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada
Graduate Scholarship through the Social Sciences and Humanities Council
of Canada.
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