CESA Conference

Daiva Stasiulis

Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University

Canadian Intersectionality: navigating methodological nationalism and transnationalism

This paper addresses the ways in which an intersectionality sensibility has informed Canadian migration and ethnic studies.  It is attentive to the fraught relationship between methodological nationalism and transnational perspectives in intersectional theory. Intersectionality frameworks within Canadian critical race and migration scholarship seek to understand the distinctive character of Canadian society, state, culture, inequality, and forms of belonging. They both interact with and diverge from the origins story of the “race, gender, class” conception of intersectionality in foundational work by U.S. Black feminist scholars.   The talk is organized to address two lines of inquiry.  The first is historical and addresses the specificity of Canadian intersectional thought.  Notable here are its roots in feminist movement adoptions of anti-racist politics of the 1980s in global cities attracting highly diverse immigration, Canada’s formation as a dual white settler colony (with the pre-eminence of the ‘national question’ in Quebec), and regional histories of migration, racialization, Indigeneity, settlement and diasporas.  These factors have shaped intersectional thinking of Canadian scholars to focus on oppression of (im)migrant and racialized women, and on social forces of nationalism, ethnicity, language, religion and cultural differences, class relations, settler colonialism and Indigeneity.  The second part of the talk addresses more contemporary trends, suggesting the deployment of intersectional thinking in directions that unsettle the imaginary of Canada as a tolerant, multicultural and exceptionally humanitarian country of settler immigration.  An intersectional lens in Canadian migration studies is key to understanding the growing patterns of temporariness, conditionality and hierarchy of non-citizenship statuses of a growing number of migrants and refugees.  The talk concludes with a discussion of the utility of an intersectional lens in illuminating systemic and heightened forms of privilege, oppression, and group trauma, and polarized politics during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.