Sex, race, class and ethnography of social movements. Metodologics implements for an intersectional perspective

Abstract

By emphasizing the French approach of co-substantiality of rapports sociaux, this article proposes to link the theoretical issues of intersectionality to the empirical work of social mapping. How can we observe and categorize in the field when class, race and sex/gender intertwine as dynamics of social differentiation? Through the prism of materialist and constructivist feminism, the article argues that the intersectional approach is very much heuristic to measure the diversity within a social movement, as illustrated by a “undocumented persons support collective”. Then it shows that the ethnographic perspective is exposed to some essentialist bias when dealing with sex or race and makes a few proposals to limit this bias.