Avoiding Paradigm Voyeurism and Embracing Intersectionality Stewardship: Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm “From Below”

The political concept of power predates the emergence of political science as a discipline. While the concept of “intersectionality” as an approach to understanding and analyzing power has a history spanning nearly two hundred years, its presence in political science, sociology, and other social sciences is more commonly measured in decades, not centuries. This chapter explores how political science has operationalized intersectionality theory through an analysis of methods sections within 132 articles published across nine different political science journals. Following this analysis, the chapter sketches a path forward for the empirical operationalization of intersectionality that comprehensively captures the many dimensions of the theory. From this approach to understanding intersectionality, we can glean more of its compelling approach to analyzing power.