How should we understand the concept of intersectionality given its ascendancy in women's, gender and sexuality studies as ‘the’ way to theorize the synthesis, co-constitution or interactivity of ‘race’ and ‘gender’? As it has travelled from margin to centre, ‘intersectionality’ appears to have become a cliché, a commonplace or ‘buzzword’ which garners widespread agreement that axes of oppression are not separable in our everyday experiences and therefore must be theorized together. In a progressivist narrative, intersectionality is celebrated as a methodological triumph over ‘previous’ essentialist and exclusionary approaches to theorizing identity and power relations; viewed as a research paradigm, it has even been characterized as the ‘most important contribution that women's studies has made so far’. It is hailed as the inclusionary political orientation par excellence for the millennial generation. In the quarter-century that has elapsed since the term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw – the most widely cited ‘originator’ of intersectionality, whose work inherits a much longer history of black feminist thought traced to the nineteenth century – it seems feminist theory has very much ‘settled down’ with intersectionality.