Intersectionality
Intersectionality is the analysis of how multiple systems of power, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, intersect and combine to shape experience, identity, and inequality.
Definition
An analytic framework holding that social categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality operate not as separate axes but as interlocking systems that jointly produce particular positions of advantage and disadvantage.
Scope
This area covers the concept named by Kimberlé Crenshaw and developed within Black feminist thought, which holds that forms of disadvantage cannot be understood in isolation because they overlap and modify one another. It treats the original legal arguments, Patricia Hill Collins's matrix of domination, the distinction between structural and political intersectionality, and intersectionality's use as a method, while noting debates over its scope and rigor. The treatment is descriptive.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- Why can the experience of, for example, Black women not be captured by adding 'race' and 'gender' analyses together?
- How do legal and political frameworks render people at intersections invisible?
- Is intersectionality a theory, a method, or a heuristic, and how can it be applied rigorously?
Key theories
- Intersectional invisibility
- Crenshaw's argument, drawn from antidiscrimination law, that frameworks treating race and sex as separate categories fail those positioned at their intersection, whose specific experiences fall through the conceptual and legal cracks.
- The matrix of domination
- Collins's account of oppression as organized through interlocking structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power, within which individuals occupy positions of both penalty and privilege.
History
Crenshaw introduced the term 'intersectionality' in legal scholarship in 1989 and elaborated it in 'Mapping the Margins' (1991), drawing on a longer Black feminist tradition that had insisted on the simultaneity of oppressions. The concept spread across the social sciences and humanities, was synthesized by Collins and Bilge (2016), and became both widely adopted and the subject of methodological debate.
Debates
- Breadth versus precision
- Whether intersectionality's wide adoption across disciplines has diluted its original focus on the specific predicament of women of color, and how the framework can be operationalized rigorously rather than invoked as a slogan.
Key figures
- Kimberlé Crenshaw
- Patricia Hill Collins
- Sirma Bilge
Related topics
Seminal works
- crenshaw1989
- crenshaw1991
- collins2000
Frequently asked questions
- Who coined the term intersectionality?
- The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced it in 1989, though it built on a longer Black feminist tradition emphasizing that race, gender, and class operate together.
- What problem does intersectionality address?
- It addresses how analyses that treat categories like race and gender separately can render invisible the people who experience them simultaneously, such as women of color in antidiscrimination law.