Intersectionality

Intersectionality is an analytical framework holding that social categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality or disability do not operate separately. Instead, they intersect and produce specific forms of oppression and privilege that cannot be understood by simply adding their effects together.

The term was coined by the African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, within legal studies, to show how Black women were left in a disadvantaged position that neither anti-racist law nor anti-sexist law could capture, because both took a single group as their reference. The idea has earlier roots. Black women from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Sojourner Truth, Anna J. Cooper and Ida B. Wells, already protested that the feminist movement spoke of "woman" as if it were a homogeneous category, when the experiences of middle-class white women did not describe those of Black women or of poor and working women. The 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective developed the notion of simultaneous oppression experienced by one and the same person.

Authors who have worked with the concept agree that its strength lies in rejecting the isolated analysis of each axis of oppression. Patricia Hill Collins describes a matrix of domination formed by vectors of oppression and privilege that interact with one another. bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Djamila Ribeiro stress that race, gender and class combine and reinforce one another, and that the experience of someone who occupies several of these positions at once is not the sum of its parts.

A simple example helps to see this: the workplace discrimination suffered by a racialized woman from a poor background cannot be explained only as sexism or only as racism, because its effects arise at the intersection of both and of her economic position.

The concept has been widely applied in feminism, gender studies, sociology, law and public policy. Its supporters present it as a tool for thinking about social justice with greater nuance. Its critics note that it can become so broad that it is hard to apply in empirical research, that it tends to reduce people to demographic labels, and that its ideological use has generated debate. Its reach in postcolonial and transnational contexts, where forms of oppression take other shapes, is also discussed.