Intersectional Saturation: Toward a Theory of Feminist Organizations' Intersectionality

Abstract:A growing interdisciplinary body of scholarship analyzes feminist organizational efforts toward practicing intersectionality, generating a variety of theoretically distinct ways to understand organizations' struggles and successes. These diverse frameworks render it difficult either to compare efforts across organizations or to capture the nuances of organizational intersectionality more broadly. This article develops a multi-faceted analytic tool for assessing and improving "intersectional saturation": the extent to which intersectionality permeates an organization's work and discourse. Intersectional saturation comprises three independent aspects: (1) rhetorically claiming intersectionality as part of the organization's work, (2) demonstrating a deep and thorough conceptual understanding of intersectionality, and (3) consistently applying that understanding to counter or dismantle particular structures of power through the organization's discourse and actions. I illustrate the intersectional saturation framework through case studies of the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority Foundation websites. Based on analysis of a complete set of mission documents from each organization for each year between 1996 and 2019, as well as the organizations' online coverage of Black Lives Matter between 2011 and 2019, I argue that neither organization should be understood to be intersectionally saturated.