Pluriversal intersectionality, critique and utopia

Abstract

Since intersectionality theory constitutes a critical assessment of the way the social world operates and strives for social justice, it entails an image of how the world is and how things could become. In this article a version of intersectionality with particularly strong counter-cultural tendencies is considered. Drawing on Ruth Levitas’s approach to utopia as ‘method’, it makes explicit pluriversal intersectionality’s utopian content. It is shown that the defining features of this intersectionality theory share an elective affinity with the principle of self-management lying at the core of the libertarian strand of socialist thought. But the utopia whose contours are drawn here is not expected to act as a blueprint. Instead, the article aspires to serve as an invitation to dialogue about the kind of future that could lie beyond intersectional oppression and, consequently, help consolidate pluriversal intersectionality’s transformative potential.