Intersectionality
Overview
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The concept of intersectionality is an analytical tool for describing how members of marginalized groups, particularly women of color, experience oppressive forces in multiple ways. Most often, intersectionality identifies and makes visible the ways women of color are caught between feminist and racial politics. More broadly, the concept considers how forms of social stratification (race, gender, sexuality, class, age, disability, religion, etc.) do not exist separately from each other but are interlocking and experienced multiply by an individual situated at the crossroads of these identities.
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Leslie McCall that states that intersectionality is, “the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies, in the conjunction with related fields, has made so far.”
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Key Voices
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Although not the first to conceptualize the multiple jeopardies experienced by people who contend with multiple layers of oppression and exclusion, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in a 1989 paper written for the University of Chicago Legal Forum, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." She has been one of the most prominent theorists articulating this concept and aiding in its proliferation in the public discourse. In a later and more expansive essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Crenshaw develops her ideas by tracing three categories in which women of color experience multiple oppressions and exclusions:
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Structural,
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Political, and
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Representational
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Crenshaw charts issues related to battered women of color, rape, and media representation to show how women of color are caught between identity groups and the severe implications of this marginalization. Different from antiessentialist perspectives, which often dismiss the validity of race to the detriment of acknowledging the lived impact of racism, Crenshaw’s intersectionality desires to “unveil the processes of subordination and the various ways those processes are experienced by people who are subordinated and people who are privileged by them” (1297).
Conversely, Jennifer Nash, writing in 2008 in Feminist Review, takes up the term and how it has been theorized by Crenshaw and the various paradoxes that underlie the theory. Nash is more concerned with interrogating assumptions underpinning intersectionality by looking at four tensions within scholarship on intersectionality: the lack of a defined methodology, the use of black women as quintessential intersectional subjects, the vague definition of “intersectionality,” and the empirical validity of intersectionality. Nash sees intersectionality as an analytic starting point, but argues that it must sort out its paradoxes in order to strengthen its explanatory power.
Contemporary Relevance
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Intersectionality applies to American society as a way to view our culture which is nominally colorblind in policy, yet superbly racist and discriminatory in practice. Many who live in the US refuse to confront the things that make us different because they fear turmoil or taking away of privilege. Intersectionality is a lens for looking at policies and cultural practices that consider themselves colorblind but actually hurt marginalized groups. Equity cannot be achieved passively, the greater norm must be challenged first.