Who Are the Masses? An Intersectional Critique on Mass Homogeneity

Abstract

This article proposes an intersectional reading of the phenomenon of the masses, drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’s formulation that situates intersectionality within the field of critical theory. From this perspective, intersectionality not only expands the analytical scope but also seeks theoretical mechanisms to denaturalize oppression by demonstrating how race, class, gender, among other markers, asymmetrically structure social relations. This framework shifts the tradition of Mass Psychology, which was centered on the search for supposedly universal psychic mechanisms and on generalizing explanations that treated the mass as an undifferentiated whole, toward an analysis that asks not only how masses function but, above all, who composes them. By revisiting late nineteenth-century authors such as Gustave Le Bon, Scipio Sighele, and Gabriel Tarde, we show that their theories sought to diagnose popular uprisings such as the Paris Commune, conceiving the mass as a pathological, homogeneous phenomenon governed by fixed psychological laws. Freud and Adorno later reworked this account of the multitudinal phenomenon, yet they still maintained assumptions that paid little attention to the structural differences among the subjects who constitute it. Through the multifocal lenses of intersectionality, it becomes possible to understand that masses are traversed by social markers. In other words, race, class, gender, and locality circumscribe and determine which subjects have their agency, demands, and leadership legitimized, and which are relegated primarily to obedience and control.