Constituting Intersectional Politics of Reinscription: Women Entrepreneurs’ Resistance Practices in China, Denmark, and the United States

Abstract

Guided by feminist politics of reinscription and intersectionality theory, this study theorized how women entrepreneurs from China, Denmark, and the United States depicted their situated struggles to resist simultaneous interlocking oppressions in everyday entrepreneuring based on 40 in-depth interviews. Participants described that they experienced inscription whereby multiple power asymmetries of gender, age, culture, race/ethnicity, and so on emerged and entangled to prescribe social scripts that constrained their entrepreneurial agencies. Simultaneously, participants engaged in reinscription to deconstruct intersectional controls and rework hegemonic scripts in situated entrepreneurial activities. They deployed three resistance strategies: recontextualizing their intersectionalities in different discursive contexts to legitimize and elevate their entrepreneur identities; reformulating their intersectionalities by invoking privileged positions to counterbalance marginalization; and re-envisioning by transcending their intersectional subordination to create opportunities for change. Instead of focusing on pre-existing and fixed power structures and identities in intersectional resistance-control processes, we demonstrate how intersectionalities are (re)constituted in situ through complex and fluid inscription-reinscription dynamics in women’s entrepreneurship.