intersectionality

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for examining how an individual’s various identities interact to create discrimination or privilege. Originally conceived to examine how race and gender interact, intersectionality can take into account any number of factors, including ethnicity, class, sexuality, country of origin, religion, disability, age, and weight. For example, the discrimination that a black woman experiences is not simply due to misogyny and racism operating independently, but the two factors interact to create a distinct form of discrimination. According to the theory, any analytical framework that examines discrimination along a single axis will be deficient.

The term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, writing in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989:

This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.

After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the marginalization of Black women in feminist theory and in antiracist politics. I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women's experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.

The metaphor underlying the term is that of traffic at a road intersection. Crenshaw specifically evokes that metaphor in her article:

The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

In a later, 1991 article, Crenshaw gives a specific example of how intersectionality operates:

I observed the dynamics of structural intersectionality during a brief field study of battered women's shelters located in minority communities in Los Angeles. In most cases, the physical assault that leads women to these shelters is merely the most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience. Many women who seek protection are unemployed or underemployed, and a good number of them are poor. Shelters serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often converge in these women's lives, hindering their ability to create alternatives to the abusive relationships that brought them to shelters in the first place. Many women of color, for example, are burdened by poverty, child care responsibilities, and the lack of job skills. These burdens, largely the consequence of gender and class oppression, are then compounded by the racially discriminatory employment and housing practices women of color often face, as well as by the disproportionately high unemployment among people of color that makes battered women of color less able to depend on the support of friends and relatives for temporary shelter.

Intersectionality resists simplistic, one-axis explanations of discrimination and privilege, and it takes into account the specific situation and context. For instance, a battered, upper-middle-class Black woman might be better able to seek help compared to a poor, white woman. That does not mean that racism has ceased to operate, but rather that in this particular situation class is the dominant factor.

Sources:

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–68 at 140, 149. HeinOnline.

———. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43.6, July 1991, 1241–99 at 1245–46. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2015, s.v. intersectionality, n.

Image credits: Edward Kimmel, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Google Ngram Viewer, accessed 12 July 2024.