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The purpose of this paper is to debate intersectionality as a key methodological aspect for critical research. While intersectionality is a consensus for critical studies, it is important to highlight the challenges that a perspective that consider power relations across social categories put forward. For this, I examine how these relations are seen in research, and highlight the risks of hierarchical views on social categories, or the invisibilization of those same categories.

These reflections will be primarily based on previous research on immigration in São Paulo and on older transsexual women in Brazil, studies that required a multi-faceted analysis. The studies were based on critical feminist, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis to examine discourses and to unravel the social imaginaries on the immigrant and on transsexual women in Brazil. For this, I bring forth the notion of the other as a discursive space often placed on these groups, and how the discursive position also reflect views on gender, race, sexuality and class as structural discursive boundaries in Brazil.

Taking the border as a metaphor to read everyday encounters, the body becomes a mark of difference, where subjects are placed at specific discursive (and also geographical) positions – at the center or at the margins. Taking this into account, the paper highlights two main aspects: first, a debate on the importance of intersectionality for critical methodological frameworks, and second, how critical discourse analysis allow us to defy the taken-for-granted binary constructions of other-us, that are continuously re-evoked and reified in discourse.

This debate is important as there are innumerous ways of approaching intersectionality, hence a critical analysis into current debates and methodological standpoints become central.

Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.

The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.

Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?

A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.