Post-structuralist Perspectives on Intersectionality: The Contributions of Staunes and Prins

Intersectionality, as a concept, has long served as a vital tool for understanding how social categories like gender, race, class, and sexuality overlap to shape people’s lived experiences. But not all approaches to intersectionality work the same way. Post-structuralist thinkers have pushed the concept beyond its structural roots, arguing that social categories are not fixed containers but fluid, contested, and continuously produced through language, power, and social interaction. Among the most significant contributors to this post-structuralist turn are Danish scholar Dorthe Staunæs and Dutch philosopher Baukje Prins, whose work offers a more nuanced and dynamic framework for how we study and apply intersectionality today.

What post-structuralism brings to intersectionality
Dorthe Staunæs: intersectionality as a meaning-making process
Categories as conditions, not just constraints
Baukje Prins: systematic vs. constructionist approaches
The systematic approach
The constructionist approach
Dominant and subordinate poles: seeing the full spectrum
Why both approaches matter together

What post-structuralism brings to intersectionality

To appreciate what Staunæs and Prins contribute, it helps to understand the broader theoretical shift they draw from. Post-structural feminism emphasizes the contingent and discursive nature of all identities, treating social categories not as stable facts about the world but as constructions that vary across contexts, histories, and power relations. Rather than viewing gender, race, or class as fixed attributes a person carries, post-structuralists ask how these categories come to be defined, who defines them, and what effects those definitions produce.

When applied to intersectionality, this shift is significant. Scholars in feminist health research have noted that while intersectionality and post-structuralism are sometimes described as incompatible, they in fact share core commitments: both treat knowledge as socially situated, both challenge dominant discourses, and both resist essentialist accounts of identity. The real value of combining them, as Staunæs demonstrated in her work, lies in the ability to move between macro-level structural analysis and micro-level lived experience without collapsing one into the other.

Both intersectionality theory and poststructuralism embrace a social-constructionist view of knowledge, highlighting the relationship between knowledge and power, and how people construct meaning from different social positions. This shared epistemological ground makes their integration not only possible but productive – particularly for research that aims to capture the full complexity of marginalized experience.

Dorthe Staunæs: intersectionality as a meaning-making process

Staunæs’s most foundational contribution comes from her 2003 article Where Have All the Subjects Gone? Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification, published in the Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. In it, she argued that the concept of intersectionality – while useful for tracing how people are positioned across categories like gender, ethnicity, race, age, sexuality, and class – needed to be retooled for research focused on subjectification and the variability of social life.

Her core argument is that standard uses of intersectionality treat social categories as relatively stable background features that combine in predictable ways. Staunæs challenged this by insisting that we do not actually know how categories like gender and ethnicity work in the lived experiences of specific subjects. She introduced the idea of intersectionality as a meaning-making process – not a static structural condition, but something actively produced through daily social interactions, discursive practices, and processes of subjectification.

In her empirical work at a multiethnic school in Denmark, Staunæs examined how students’ experiences of gender and ethnicity were shaped not just by systemic inequalities but by the minute, everyday social processes through which certain identities were rendered “troublesome” or marginal. As researchers combining intersectionality with poststructural subjectification theory have noted, this kind of integrated framework allows analysis to shift fluidly between macro- and micro-level processes – from institutional structures down to individual encounters in a classroom corridor.

Categories as conditions, not just constraints

One of Staunæs’s more striking moves is to reframe how we understand social categories themselves. Rather than treating categories like “woman” or “ethnic minority” purely as markers of oppression or special minority status, she argued they are also conditions for the more privileged and powerful. As scholars drawing on her work have noted, Staunæs defines intersectionality at the subject level of “doing”, seeing categories not just as axes of disadvantage but as active forces shaping the subjectivities of everyone – including those in dominant positions.

This is a meaningful reorientation. It means that studying intersectionality requires examining not only how marginalized people are constructed as “different” or “troublesome,” but also how dominant identities – whiteness, masculinity, able-bodiedness – are actively maintained through the same social processes. The focus shifts from simply cataloguing oppression to understanding the dynamic, relational production of all social positions.

Staunæs and her collaborator Dorte Marie Søndergaard later extended this into what they called a theoretical adjustment of intersectionality, emphasizing that categories such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, age, and disability cannot be understood in isolation from one another – and that their combined effects are produced, not given.

Baukje Prins: systematic vs. constructionist approaches

Where Staunæs focuses on subjectification and lived experience, Baukje Prins makes her key contribution by drawing a clear and theoretically productive distinction between two different ways of understanding intersectionality: systematic and constructionist approaches. Her work, particularly her 2006 article Narrative Accounts of Origins: A Blind Spot in the Intersectional Approach?, published in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, lays out this distinction with careful attention to what each approach can and cannot explain.

The systematic approach

The systematic approach to intersectionality treats it as a structural phenomenon. It focuses on the material and institutional dimensions of how power and oppression are organized – examining how systems like patriarchy, racism, and class hierarchy operate together to produce inequality. This perspective has real analytical value: it can reveal patterns of wage disparity, differential access to healthcare, or overrepresentation in the criminal justice system that result from the simultaneous operation of multiple axes of disadvantage.

However, Prins argues that the systematic approach has a significant limitation. By focusing primarily on structural positions, it tends to treat identities as relatively fixed and predictable – you are a “Black woman” or a “working-class immigrant,” and your experience is largely determined by that structural location. As scholars examining the distinction between these approaches have observed, systemic models can oversimplify power dynamics by assuming that structural positions translate directly and uniformly into lived experience.

The constructionist approach

The constructionist approach, which Prins advocates for and applies in her own research, treats identity as something actively produced through narrative, language, and social interaction. Rather than “naming” someone’s position in a structural hierarchy, this approach asks how people construct, perform, and narrate their identities – and how those constructions are shaped by their social and historical contexts.

In her study of Dutch and Moluccan classmates, Prins used life-story narratives to demonstrate that identity formation cannot be reduced to structural position. She found that questions of origins – roots, belonging, ancestry – continued to matter deeply to individuals in ways that were not captured by simply assigning them an ethnic identity marker. Her argument is that the constructionist approach, with its account of identity as a narrative construction rather than a practice of naming, offers better tools for answering questions about intersectional identity formation.

This has broader methodological implications. It means that researchers cannot simply assume what identity categories mean to individuals, or that belonging is straightforwardly subsumed under a single axis like ethnicity. Theories of intersectionality are not justified in subsuming the issue of belonging under the identity marker of ethnicity, Prins argues, when all identities are produced through narrative enactments that include the precarious achievement of belonging.

Dominant and subordinate poles: seeing the full spectrum

One of Prins’s most important contributions is her insistence on examining both the subordinate and dominant poles of societal categories. Much intersectional analysis has historically focused on those who are marginalized – examining what it means to be a woman of color, a disabled person, a queer migrant. This is necessary work. But Prins argues that an analysis which only looks at the subordinate end of categories misses half of how power operates.

To understand the category “woman,” for instance, you also need to examine how “man” is constructed and maintained as the dominant pole. To understand “ethnic minority,” you need to examine how dominant ethnic identity – often unmarked and naturalized – is produced and reproduced through the same social processes. This relational view of categories, in which dominant and subordinate positions are mutually constitutive, opens up a fuller picture of how inequality is sustained and where it might be challenged.

As researchers drawing on post-structuralist intersectionality have noted, understanding the context and meaning behind processes that shape identity experiences is important for revealing strategies that can dismantle power structures – including making visible the subjugated knowledges that dominant systems routinely overlook.

Why both approaches matter together

A key insight of both Staunæs and Prins is that systematic and constructionist approaches are not opposed – they are complementary. Systematic approaches reveal structural patterns of inequality that are real, persistent, and materially consequential. Constructionist approaches reveal the agency, variability, and narrative complexity with which people experience and navigate those structures. Neither alone is sufficient.

The intersectional turn in feminist theory has increasingly called for frameworks that can hold both levels simultaneously – moving between structure and individual life, between macro-patterns and micro-practices, without reducing one to the other. This is precisely what Staunæs’s framework of intersectionality as a meaning-making process, and Prins’s careful distinction between systematic and constructionist perspectives, are designed to support.

For researchers, this means designing studies that attend to both institutional structures and the lived, narrated experiences of individuals. For policymakers, it means recognizing that addressing inequality requires both structural intervention and sensitivity to the specific, contextual ways that inequality is experienced by real people – who do not experience themselves as the sum of their structural positions. And for anyone seeking to understand how social categories operate, it is a reminder that those categories are never neutral, never fixed, and never operate in isolation: they are produced, contested, and lived in relation to one another, continuously.

What do you think? If social categories like gender, race, and class are actively constructed through everyday interactions rather than fixed structural facts, how should that change the way researchers and policymakers approach inequality? And when studying marginalized identities, is it possible to fully understand subordination without simultaneously examining the dominant categories it depends on?

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Table of Contents

What post-structuralism brings to intersectionality 🔗

Dorthe Staunæs: intersectionality as a meaning-making process 🔗

Categories as conditions, not just constraints 🔗

Baukje Prins: systematic vs. constructionist approaches 🔗

The systematic approach 🔗

The constructionist approach 🔗

Dominant and subordinate poles: seeing the full spectrum 🔗

Why both approaches matter together 🔗