In recent years we have seen advances in theorizing women’s political representation while accounting for intersectionality, which is the intersection and political and social consequences of multiple different axes of identity within any individual person. Even the most promising of this work, however, still struggles with repeating the problem of ignoring additional axes of identity that may also matter. Scholars, for example, may examine the intersection of race and gender, but in doing so they may miss other influential factors.
This paper attempts a different approach to examining the dynamics of intersectionality by choosing to replace a focus on selected axes of identity with a focus on the dynamics of a specific issue area: legislative processes about citizenship in the German Bundestag. In other words, this paper process-traces the German citizenship discourse, examining intersectional impacts at three important stages: the integration of East and West Germany (1990); the introduction of the gender mainstreaming policy (1996); and legislation introducing the possibility of ius soli citizenship (1999). This approach is intended to capture the highly contextualized nature of intersectionality, illuminating German citizenship discourse in new ways. The study is qualitative, but it concludes with suggestions for how this approach might be translated into a statistical study.
