Intersectionality has become a central concept in feminist theories and movements worldwide. Coined initially to understand how Black American women were rendered invisible in U.S. American anti-discrimination law around 1990, it has since traveled to both political activism and social scientific research worldwide. In this paper, we argue that there are challenges in transferring the concept from its origins in a late-20th-century liberal democratic and capitalist society to a different historical and socio-political context. We employ the epistemological operation of “strangification” to reflect on the potential and limitations of applying intersectionality to understand mechanisms of overlapping oppressions in the authoritarian socialist one-party regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; 1949–1990). We ask what needs to be considered when “estranging” intersectionality from its context of origin and applying it in a context-sensitive manner to the GDR. Drawing on an empirical analysis of biographical interviews with individuals from different social backgrounds, including lesbian, migrant, and Jewish communities, and on a theoretical examination of the preconditions of the concept, we theorize that “politically conformist behavior” with the Socialist Unity Party was the central principle determining relations of inequality and oppression in the GDR. We present this article as a call for a context-sensitive use of intersectionality, highlighting the need to examine its original assumptions and to consider whether the categories and overarching principles of social organization suggested by theorists of intersectionality require adaptation; without such reflection, uncritical application risks overlooking key dimensions of oppression or obscuring the complexity of intersecting power structures.
Sippel et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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