From Triple Jeopardy to Intersectionality: The Feminist Perplex

This essay focuses on the contradictory state of feminism today, showing how the transformations feminism has undergone since the inception of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s have manifested accommodations to changes in the broader political arena. To illustrate this, Aguilar’s article traces the evolution of “intersectionality,” a central concept in feminism, from the “triple jeopardy” slogan of the second wave. It makes evident that while intersectionality recounts and mimics the triple jeopardy motif propounded by US third world women it has, in fact, successfully been emptied of its revolutionary content. This essay argues that such evisceration characterizes contemporary US feminism. To resolve this quandary, Aguilar proposes that sharper analytical tools be deployed to comprehend a larger social totality than what prevailing discourse offers and that creative energies be channeled into the building of a revolutionary social movement.