The politics of ‘including everyone’: Popular intersectionality as new feminist sensibility in digital feminism

This paper offers an intervention in current scholarly debates about the visibility of feminism, activism and intersectionality on digital platforms and in popular culture by introducing ‘popular intersectionality’. Popular intersectionality is a feminist sensibility and discourse, which promotes an affective desire for and an understanding of intersectionality as an imperative of inclusion, while simultaneously reinforcing norms of whiteness and reproducing white saviourism. Popular intersectionality further constitutes a neoliberal technology of self which entices digital feminists to perform ‘intersectional allyship’ with marginalised Others through performing caring and pleasing notions of white normative femininities. Grounded in empirical research with digital feminists, my theorisation sketches out six defining elements of popular intersectionality: an affective desire for intersectionality; an understanding of intersectionality as an imperative of inclusion; a discursive and visual focus on individual identities, narratives and experiences; discursive hierarchies of oppression and privilege; the articulation of allyship as neoliberal self-governmentality; and the high-stakes and felt anxiety of participating in popular intersectionality discourses. I suggest that popular intersectionality produces anxious feminist subjectivities heavily invested in white normative femininity and hierarchical thinking about marginalised groups, which ultimately impedes long-lasting structural change.