A CRITICAL ANTI-CAPITALIST INTERSECTIONAL FRAMEWORK: A THEORETICAL, METHODOLOGICAL, AND ANALYTICAL INTERVENTION IN BLACK FEMINIST SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Abstract

I developed the critical anti-capitalist intersectional (CAI) framework, which emphasizes an analysis of capitalism that has been overlooked in intersectional sociological research. Deriving from my simultaneous positions as a Black Queer feminist abolitionist community organizer and professional academic, the CAI framework nudges researchers who study Black feminist intersectionality to return to intersectionality’s historically anti-capitalist Black feminist roots in radical movement spaces. Furthermore, the CAI framework emphasizes the context of racial capitalism. I urge Black feminist intersectionality researchers to divest from racial capitalism’s restrictive logics. I introduce the CAI framework using autoethnographic reflections on my time as an abolitionist community organizer with the DC Chapter of Black Youth Project 100. Tying theory to the importance of methodology as a social scientist, I conduct an extensive review of intersectional methodologies, honing in on qualitative and quantitative intersectional methodologies in health — an important issue in intersectionality, given how racism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, transphobia and more enact health inequities for multiply oppressed social groups such as Black women and girls. Complementing the CAI framework as a theoretical intervention in Black feminist social scientific research, I discuss how the framework can help us more deeply engage with intersectionality by considering its core ideas on relationality, complexity, and social context. There is a growing body of intersectionality literature that centers how Black girls and women experience misogynoir, or anti-black sexism, through school discipline and punishment. Putting the CAI framework into empirical praxis, I conduct qualitative in-depth interviews to examine Black women’s memories of coping with stress in US public middle school. I investigate how Black women make meaning of their coping processes, their coping with multiple, intersecting forms of oppression, and their coping with discipline and punishment as young girls in U.S. public middle school. I employ a critical eye on the context of racial capitalism by deconstructing standard approaches to studying social stress and education. Using an abductive, process-centered, and flexible coding analytical approach, my findings explore unconventional coping and non-normative coping processes as they occur in U.S. public education, yet also as they exist outside of the restrictive, racial capitalist logic of productivity.