Condemning Intersectionality: Online Conservative News Media and Intersectional Panic

Research has increasingly drawn attention to the role of online conservative news media in propagating disinformation and reinforcing social inequalities. Scholarship, however, has yet to explore how these media represent intersectionality. Using a grounded theory approach, I examined how 427 online conservative news reports, from nine widely searched websites in the U.S., portrayed intersectionality. The authors of the reports employed a complex set of discourses to condemn intersectionality, constructing it as limited, hierarchical, and divisive, while also conveying panic over its ability to bring individuals on the Left into coalitions. I thus develop the concept intersectional panic to account for how these media responded to intersectionality with a considerable amount of fear or anxiety. Findings reveal that intersectional panic overlaps with, yet also operates differently from, other forms of panic, such as racist, sexist, or anti-LGBTQ fears, because the former involves anxiety over multiply-marginalized individuals advancing in U.S. society. I further reveal that these conservative news media sometimes used intersectional discourses to condemn intersectionality. Building on Patricia Hill Collins’s (2019) understanding of intersectionality as a critical tool for social justice, I argue that emphasizing intersectionality’s expansive and beneficial capacities would help challenge such panic.