Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019, henceforth IACST) investigates how knowledge has been essential for resisting political domination. Whether visible or not, resistance to unjust power relations of race, class, and gender always exists, whether through faint memory or televised social protest. But what role does knowledge play in such resistance? Throughout my intellectual work, I return to this core question by examining how individuals and groups who are oppressed within systems of power create and pass on knowledge that fosters their survival, resilience, and resistance. Ó 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journalsMy intellectual journey to intersectionality informs this current book. In Black Feminist Thought, I analyzed how African-American women resisted the dehumanization of chattel slavery by producing a self-defined oppositional knowledge. Black women could see, feel, and experience how the treatment of their bodies as simultaneously raced and gendered shaped the contours of their subordination. This initial insight that both race and gender intersected reflected a methodology of bottom-up theorizing to address social problems. The terms race and gender signify the intersection of racism and sexism, with other terms added over time to flesh out contemporary understandings of intersectionality.My focus on Black women's knowledge is one case among many. The complexities of the multiple resistant knowledge projects that inform intersectionality lie in the parallel and intertwining narratives of Indigenous peoples, refugee and immigrant groups, women, LGBTQ teenagers, religious and ethnic minorities, and poor people. These and other similarly subordinated groups also find themselves facing social problems that can neither be understood, nor solved in isolation. In Race, Class, and Gender, Margaret Andersen and I drew upon these narratives to map the emergence of intersectionality as a field of inquiry. For over two decades, we selected articles that examined how race, class, and gender increasingly informed one another, thereby collecting empirical evidence for intersectionality (Andersen and Collins, 2020). We saw the field grow from its initial emphasis on race, class, and gender to encompass sexuality, nation, ethnicity, ability, age, religion, and similar categories of analysis. We also witnessed the increasing globalization of intersectionality as a field of critical inquiry and praxis. This painstaking work laid a foundation for the synthetic narrative of intersectionality's ideas, scope, and practices that Sirma Bilge and I present in Intersectionality (Collins and Bilge, 2016, 2nd edn 2020).My intellectual journey in many ways parallels the emergence of the field. I came to intersectionality knowing that, while disciplinary specializations offer useful analyses of power relations, their conceptual blind spots can limit their theoretical insight. Privileged groups with...

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Democratizing participation through feminism.The role of feminist subaltern counterpublics in the expansion of the Basque public sphere AbstractThis article aims to understand the limits on the expansion of the public space that is occurring through democratic innovations, and to investigate strategies for overcoming these limits.With an approach rooted in standpoint epistemology, this article studies the participation experiences of sixteen women belonging to a feminist subaltern counterpublic in fifteen apparatuses in the Autonomous Region of the Basque Country. The study considers that this expansion of the public space has taken place with three limits, related to the de-legitimisation of the private, the undervaluation of relational aspects and the naturalization of a universal idea of participation. Opposing this, the article states that the practice of counterpublics facilitates greater inclusion in the designs of democratic innovations due to those parallel publics' subaltern position in the public space.Keywords: democratic innovations, feminist theory, standpoint epistemology, Nancy Fraser. ResumenEste artículo tiene como objetivo comprender los límites con los que se está produciendo la ampliación del espacio público a través de mecanismos de innovación democrática, así como indagar sobre las estrategias para afrontarlos. Con un enfoque basado en la «epistemología del punto de vista», se estudian las experiencias de participación de dieciséis mujeres que forman parte de un contrapúblico subalterno feminista en quince mecanismos de la Comunidad Autónoma del País Vasco. La investigación plantea que esta ampliación del espacio público se está llevando a cabo con tres límites relacionados con la deslegitimación de lo privado, la minusvaloración de lo relacional y la naturalización de una idea universal de participación. Frente a esto, el artículo afirma que la práctica de los contrapúblicos facilita una mayor inclusividad en los diseños de innovación democrática por su posición subalterna en el espacio público.Palabras clave: dispositivos de innovación democrática, teoría feminista, epistemología del punto de vista, Nancy Fraser.

Abstract. This essay explores how developing more complex analyses of power and politics sheds light on important themes for both intersectionality and participatory democracy. First of all, drawn from intersectional inquiry, the article outlines three focal points of a power analytic: how analyses of intersecting, structural oppressions underpin systems of domination; how a domains-of-power framework provides a set of conceptual tools for analyzing and responding to intersecting power relations; and how a more robust analysis of the collective illuminates the political action of subordinated groups. From this power analytic, the essay examines power and politics from the standpoint of the resistance traditions of historically subordinated groups, especially African American women´s political action. Finally, the article discusses implications of intersectionality's power analytic for projects for intersectionality and participatory democracy. Related to this, intersectionality conceptualization from Black feminism in flexible, pragmatic terms constitutes an important site for seeing the deepening commitment to participatory democracy as an alternative to technical agendas of the state. Keywords: Black feminism; Intersectionality; Participatory democracy; Power; Resistance.[es] La diferencia que crea el poder: interseccionalidad y profundización democrática Resumen. Este ensayo explora cómo desarrollar de manera más compleja un análisis de poder y políticas que arroje luz tanto sobre las cuestiones relativas a la interseccionalidad como a la profundización democrática. En primer lugar, y desde la investigación interseccional, el articulo esboza tres puntos centrales de un análisis de poder: cómo el análisis de la intersección de las opresiones estructurales sustenta los sistemas de dominación; cómo el framework de los dominios de poder aporta herramientas conceptuales para examinar y responder a relaciones de poder entrecruzadas, y cómo un análisis más robusto de lo colectivo ilumina la acción política de los grupos subordinados. Desde este análisis, el ensayo examina el poder y las políticas desde el punto de vista de las tradiciones de resistencia de los grupos subordinados históricamente, especialmente la acción política de las mujeres Afroamericanas. Por último, el artículo discute las implicaciones de un análisis de poder interseccional para proyectos de interseccionalidad y participación democrática. A este respecto, la conceptualización interseccional del feminismo Negro en términos flexibles y pragmáticos constituye un importante punto de partida para un compromiso más profundo con la democracia participativa como una alternativa a las agendas técnicas del estado.

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