Living and researching embodied intersectionality

In this chapter, Heidi Safia Mirza offers a wide-ranging discussion of connections between her multi-faceted personal history, Black feminist activism, and scholarly research on intersecting identities and inequalities. The chapter foregrounds and expands upon Mirza’s own concept of embodied intersectionality (Mirza 2009), emphasizing the centrality of the body in analyses of how the structural systems we live in reinforce our identities and social locations and make them real. The social world exists in relation to us as Raced, minoritized, classed, gendered, and religious bodies, argues Mirza. In people’s everyday life, ‘difference’ is constantly constructed and interpreted in ways that reflect systemic sedimentations of Race, class, and gender etc. and which further (re-)produce social inequalities. The chapter, which is based on an interview Line Nyhagen had with Mirza in London, UK, in December 2022, is structured along five sections: quilting a feminist life; Black feminist activism in a post-colonial racist order; Intersectionality: from buzzword to embodied intersectionality; Muslim women’s agency and resistance through the lens of embodied intersectionality; and Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and Methods and the Importance of History.