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“I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me.” – bell hooks
From January to May 2024, I taught a class that could have been blocked at my previous institution in Florida—if it wasn’t potentially illegal. The class? Intersectional Anthropology.
I’ll start with a confession: I am not a cultural anthropologist. I call this a “confession” because “(bio)archaeologists” like me—scholars who identify with archaeology, biological anthropology, or both—are not necessarily known for centering social theories like Intersectionality in our subdisciplines. We’re also not known for centering intersectional thought.
The distinction between capital-I “Intersectionality Theory” and lowercase-I “intersectional perspectives” is important. “Intersectionality Theory” as a model has undergone transformation from its popularization in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Kimberlé Crenshaw stated that in its original formulation, Intersectionality worked to expose “how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice.” Sociologists Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge defined Intersectionality more recently as investigations into “how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies, as well as individual experiences in everyday life.” Intersectional perspectives, meanwhile, focus on the compounded oppression experienced by people with multiple marginalized identities, and are not always tied to a specific, named theoretical or methodological program. Intersectionality has undergone great change and has a reputation for being difficult to define—and when a theory gets used often enough, it’s in danger of meaning both everything and nothing simultaneously.
Similar to bell hooks’ encounter with theory, intersectional perspectives gave me the words to articulate the structures working to oppress marginalized communities. As I read the work of thinkers like Audre Lorde, Devon Carbado, Psyche Williams-Forson, Katherine McKittrick, Christen Smith, and Charisse Burden-Stelly (among many others!), I began to “grasp what was happening around and within me” and explain to myself what I knew but didn’t have the words for.
Here, I share about my class, “Intersectional Anthropology,” and reflect on some of the ways it has played into my career, while also acknowledging my privileges as a person who holds a Ph.D. and, in the context of international research, has United States citizenship.
The Personal Is Political—and Embodied
Bracketing the “bio” of “(bio)archaeologist” signals the dual nature of my professional identity. I study human skeletal remains of the past, how burial contexts were constructed, and what they revealed about communities. My work sits at the nexus of human biology and archaeology, two disciplines known for being deeply positivist and scientific, valuing numbers, models, and testable hypotheses as a gold standard. Bioarchaeology uses methods like paleopathological analyses (observing disease on bones), evaluating dental health, and isotopic analyses to understand lived experience. Studying human bodies provides a deep historical perspective on social dynamics whose echoes remain with us today.
(Bio)archaeology is no stranger to its colonial baggage. Both past and present, the subdiscipline has traditionally studied and produced data from Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies. This work entangles power structures with disciplinary histories that work to enforce and reinforce particular narratives about whose bodies are to be studied, whose bodies are to be cared for, and what care looks like for community members.
As a bioarchaeologist and woman of color, I am intimately aware of this disciplinary baggage. I am the kind of person whose body has been deemed worthy of study. I am also the kind of person not traditionally welcomed in the academy. Throughout my 12 years of training in human osteology and bioarchaeology, I often questioned my own disciplines and role(s) within higher education. As historical bioarchaeologist Dr. Rachel Watkins noted, “There is a longer history of a critical mass of people of color being involved in bioarchaeological research as subjects … than as knowledge producers.” Within this history, (bio)archaeologists’ methods, theories, and narratives shape the politics of knowledge production and structure who designs research agendas, produces “valid” knowledge, and is valued within the academy.
Scholars, activists, and practitioners have pointed out that there is great danger in only recognizing single axes of identity since forms of discrimination have a compounded effect when they occur together. Of course, marginalization in one time and place may not be perceived as marginalized in another context or might differ in its degree. However, in the matrices of domination in the United States, queer Black women are disproportionally targeted by compounded oppressive structures, and because identity is socially constructed and mutually constitutive, all identities—including dominant identities like whiteness and masculinity—must be deconstructed. As scholars working with intersectional perspectives argued for decades, the tenets of intersectional work are tied to activism, and critical inquiry must be paired with social justice.
Intersectionality Under the Sunshine State
Teaching Intersectional Anthropology was significant because, in my (bio)archaeological work, I engage with intersectional thinkers in my writing and was eager to share the vast body of thought with my students. It was also significant quite simply because I was able to do so in the first place.
When I say “able to,” I mean the opportunity to earn the qualifications to teach in a university classroom. I received my Ph.D. in 2023 from the University of Florida (UF) as part of the “COVID generation” of students. According to the NSF-SCSES Survey of Earned Doctorates, of the 1,030 doctorates in archaeology awarded to US citizens and permanent residents from 2012-2022, only 53 (5.1%) were awarded to US-born Latinxs compared to 899 awarded to white individuals (86.3%). This number is strikingly low, considering Latinxs with US citizenship comprise approximately 15% of the US population. Earning a Ph.D. as a Mexican-American woman of color was already a significant achievement. So was the privilege to teach as a professor.
But the significance was also political in the everyday sense of the word. As a graduate student at UF during the rise of Ron DeSantis’s administration, I heard the whispers about what was happening in Florida’s higher education landscape—changes that would eventually become HB7 (“Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (Stop WOKE)”), which became law on 1 July 2022. Many people in U.S. higher education were shocked, but for those of us in Florida, this law was just one in a series of cascading changes that were a long time coming.
Shortly after July 2022, UF’s Board, led by two trustees who are known DeSantis donors, hired Ben Sasse as the new University President, implemented a new post-tenure review that some worry could be used to intimidate faculty, and conducted a mass firing of DEI-related positions. UF’s Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement’s website has been down since May 2. Many students suspect this is connected to the passage of SB266 earlier this year, ruling it illegal to spend state funds on DEI initiatives and Critical Race Theory. As recently as late August 2024,