Methodologies for Categories in Motion

The concept of intersectionality has profoundly shaped sociological research on bodies and embodiment. While single-axis analyses of race or gender were common in sociology before the late 1980s, they appear inadequate now. Nonetheless, the concept of intersectionality has been critiqued for its weddedness to identitarian projects, and applications of intersectionality have been critiqued for failing to move beyond additive approaches. This chapter highlights examples of research on bodies and embodiment that employ methodologies that realize intersectionality’s promise. Examples of ethnographic, autoethnographic, archival, textual, interview, and mixed methods are presented as methodologies that investigate the simultaneous force of multiple social structures. These methods involve identity categories but treat them as always in motion. Keeping categories in motion within sociology of the body entails accounting for individual bodily change, contextual and historical change in the available identity categories, and change in the meanings that are socially attached to forms of embodiment.