The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and levels of precision. Because of the explanatory potential of this term in intersectional theory, we recommend on the basis of our analysis that social scientists reconsider the convention of asserting that entities such as race, class and gender are mutually constituted and borrow the methodological tools from feminist historians, literary critics and other humanists that would allow for a genuine determination and demonstration of when entities are mutually constituted.

“相互宪法”一词在交叉性研究中经常出现，但这意味着什么呢？我们不能以通常的方式（通过阅读有关该问题的书和文章）轻松地回答这个问题，因为该术语尚未直接，广泛或持续地参与女权主义理论。这使我们分析了广泛的女权主义奖学金-妇女研究期刊中的全部379篇文章都考虑了相互影响和共同构成-确定了使用这一重要理论术语的方式是否存在模式和共性。我们的分析表明，尽管人们普遍同意，共同构成不允许使用加法或二元方法，但这是对该术语达成共识的唯一要点。实际上，学者们对于共同体构成是否与交叉性相同是不同的看法，在实践中，各学科组使用的术语具有不同的规范和精确度。由于该术语在交集理论中具有解释性的潜力，因此我们建议在分析的基础上，重新考虑社会科学家的断言：种族，阶级和性别等实体是相互构成的，并借鉴女性主义历史学家，文学家的方法论工具。评论家和其他人文主义者，他们将真正确定和证明实体何时相互构成。