Untangling Power: Intersectionality & Global History Flashcards

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Intersectionality

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An analytic framework that examines how multiple axes of power—such as gender, race, class, and nationality—intersect and co-constitute experiences and institutions. It emphasizes relational, context-sensitive analysis rather than additive or separate explanations.

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Material Feminism

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A strand of feminist theory that insists on the material conditions of bodies, labor, and environments as crucial for analysis. It argues against purely cultural or discursive explanations and calls attention to embodied and economic realities.

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Social Return

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A proposed shift in feminist scholarship toward renewed engagement with social theory and structural accounts of inequality. It seeks to complement cultural studies with analyses of institutions, political economy, and historical formations.

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Post-structuralism

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An intellectual current that emphasizes language, discourse, and power relations in the production of knowledge and subjectivity. It has been critiqued by some feminists for under-emphasizing material and structural determinants.

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Dual Systems

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Theoretical models that treat patriarchy and capitalism as two interacting but distinct systems of domination. Critics argue these models can oversimplify by treating social spheres as separable or static.

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Matrix of Domination

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Patricia Hill Collins’ concept describing a networked field of power in which race, class, gender, and other axes are interlocked. It shifts attention from separate systems to a generalized social relation of domination.

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Eurocentrism

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A historical and analytic bias that treats European social and political development as the normative model for world history. Postcolonial critiques challenge its universality and call for decentering Europe in theorizing modernity.

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Postcolonial Critique

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An intellectual intervention that exposes how colonial histories and power relations shape knowledge, identities, and institutions. It interrogates imperial legacies and the assumptions underlying Western social sciences.

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Global History

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An approach to history that studies interregional connections, entanglements, and mutual influences across the globe, rather than isolating national narratives. It foregrounds circulation, empire, trade, and comparative institutions.

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Entangled Histories

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A method emphasizing mutual shaping of metropole and colony, and the co-constitution of institutions and identities across regions. It rejects simple center–periphery models and highlights complex interdependencies.

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Colonialism

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A political and economic system of domination involving territorial rule, resource extraction, and cultural hierarchy. Colonial practices produced legal pluralism, racial classification systems, and new governance technologies that reverberated in metropoles.

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Racism

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A system of classification and hierarchy that links biological or cultural attributes to social status and rights. In modern history, racism was shaped by colonial encounters, slavery, and administrative practices that implemented differential legal regimes.

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Dispositif desexualité

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A Foucauldian notion adapted in colonial studies to describe how sexual norms and regimes of reproductive governance become instruments of state and imperial power. It highlights how sexuality, race, and governance co-produce social order.

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Sati Regulation

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The 1829 Bengal law outlawing the burning of widows, often discussed as a case of colonial intervention, moral reform, and contested sovereignty. It exemplifies how imperial reform, missionary activism, and local politics intersected around the status of women.

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Labour Reproduction

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The material processes and practices that sustain labor power across generations, including subsistence production, domestic labor, and health care. Feminist theory highlights its centrality for understanding economic and gendered inequalities.

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Generative Reproduction

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The biological and social processes of bearing and raising children that reproduce the population and social relations. It is a key analytical category in debates on family, state regulation, and moral governance.

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Symbolic Reproduction

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The cultural and ideological processes—education, norms, media—that produce and legitimize social roles and hierarchies. Scholars treat it alongside material and generative reproduction to capture fuller dynamics of domination.

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Feminist Historiography

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An approach to writing history that centers gender as both structuring and structured by social relations, and that seeks to recover marginalized voices. It advocates rethinking conventional periodizations and categories through intersectional lenses.

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Technologies of Rule

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Administrative, legal, and disciplinary techniques—such as schooling, classification, biometric systems—used to govern populations. Many such technologies were developed or tested in colonial settings and later influenced metropolitan governance.

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Civilizing Mission

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The ideological justification for empire that framed colonial rule as a benevolent project to modernize and uplift 'backward' peoples. It often intertwined with gendered and racialized rhetoric that legitimated intervention and hierarchies.