In principle, there is broad agreement among materialist and intersectional scholars that different relations of social domination such as class domination, racism and sexism co-exist in present-day societies, that they tend to reinforce one another, and that they need to be pushed back. At the same time, there are heated and polarised debates about what social domination is, and what kind of political strategies should be adopted to fight it. Whereas intersectional scholars often charge materialists with ‘class reductionism’, ‘economism’ and a wilful ignorance of the complexities of social identity, the latter respond by criticising the former for a disinterest in social structures, most importantly the capitalist mode of production, plus a latent liberalism that is more concerned with promoting narrow ‘diversity’ agendas than with challenging the existing social-economic order.
In my view, many of these debates are fruitless. The criticised positions are often caricatures. They refer to contributions that can be dismissed easily from one’s own standpoint; more nuanced work is ignored. In this class, I want to avoid these easy routes. I want foster conversations by engaging in close readings of key contributions to materialist and intersectional social theory. That way, it will hopefully be possible to identify the specific
strengths, but also the blind spots of the two traditions. Following Ashley Bohrer, the overall aim is to find out whether there is space for a “theoretical coalition” between materialist and intersectional thought.