Developing an Intersectional Framework: Engaging the Decenter in Language Studies

Abstract

The author explores how current scholarship has investigated diversified identities and identification practices using a variable-by-variable approach. This kind of approach focuses on developing in-depth understandings of particular variables of identity, such as race and gender. However, this kind of approach has also limited language studies engagement with diversified identities and identification practices. The author argues for a variable-with-variable or intersectional approach to develop more complex, nuanced ways of understanding these identities and identification practices within the nexus of language studies. The approach attempts to retheorize K. W. Crenshaw’s (1993) intersectionality for the language classroom by proposing the concept of the decenter, or the potentially productive spaces in which forgotten and unintelligible experiences can be perceived. The author discusses how this concept encourages us to investigate identity and identification practices in innovative ways through a careful, multilayered analysis of classroom and focus group interactions from her 200-level composition course for multilingual learners.