Intersectionality Meets Infrastructure: Recruitment Matrices and Identity Overflow in Just Research

This paper traces intersectionality’s theoretical-methodological “twists and turns” to reconsider its explanatory power in elucidating relations between selves and socialites and its application in research. Questions of how researchers take up the heuristic have become charged given intersectionality’s uptake by democratic institutions as a marker of excellence alongside critiques of its appropriation by systems advancing it. Adopting a processual-relational framing, we argue that difference represents a site of possibility—affirming life’s heterogeneity—and danger, exposing the unboundedness of monolithic identities upon which intersectional theorizing relies through misfitting/fracturing. This reveals intersectionality’s potential as infrastructure. Using an “infrastructural inversion” that makes the hidden work of intersectionality-as-infrastructure perceptible, we demonstrate how an infrastructural critique uncovers the socio-material implications of classification systems underpinning intersectionality. We approach research matrices as “wild containers” illuminating nondominant differences, suggesting this enables a decolonized understanding of intersectionality as inter-/intra-sectional becomings moving beyond hierarchical categorizations imposed by white supremacist thought.