Intersectionality Analysis

Intersectionality analysis is a critical qualitative framework that examines how multiple social categories — such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability — intersect and operate together to shape lived experience, advantage, and disadvantage. Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and 1991, it rejects single-axis analysis that treats categories one at a time, insisting instead that overlapping systems of power produce qualitatively distinct positions that cannot be understood by adding the categories separately.