How should we understand the concept of intersectionality given its ascendancy in women’s, gender and sexuality studies as ‘the’way to theorize the synthesis, coconstitution or interactivity of ‘race’and ‘gender’? As it has travelled from margin to centre,‘intersectionality’appears to have become a cliché, a commonplace or ‘buzzword’which garners widespread agreement that axes of oppression are not separable in our everyday experiences and therefore must be theorized together. 2 In a progressivist narrative, intersectionality is celebrated as a methodological triumph over ‘previous’ essentialist and exclusionary approaches to theorizing identity and power relations; viewed as a research paradigm, 3 it has even been characterized as the ‘most important contribution that women’s studies has made so far’. 4 It is hailed as the inclusionary political orientation par excellence for the millennial generation. 5 In the quarter-century that has elapsed since the term ‘intersectionality’was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw–the most widely cited ‘originator’of intersectionality, whose work inherits a much longer history of black feminist thought traced to the nineteenth century6–it seems feminist theory has very much ‘settled down’with intersectionality. But what conception of intersectionality is this, which (white-dominated) feminist theory has made very much its own? And how does it connect to Crenshaw’s aims when she originally articulated the metaphor (1989) and developed the concept (1991)? Even as it is frequently characterized as ‘difficult work’, 7 intersectionality seems to have been ‘easily’appropriated by the white-dominated mainstream of feminist thought. This raises the question, what is the relationship between intersectionality’s ‘mainstreaming’8 and the broader concerns of black feminism, in which intersectionality is but one of a constellation of concepts, yet from which it seems to have become detached as the sole contribution this intellectual