Intersectionality
Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these intersecting and overlapping factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and age. These factors can lead to both empowerment and oppression.
Intersectionality arose in reaction to both white feminism and the then male-dominated Black liberation movement, citing the "interlocking oppressions" of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. It broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, cisgender, and middle-class, to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups, and aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women's differing experiences and identities.
The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. She describes how interlocking systems of power affect those who are most marginalized in society. Activists and academics use the framework to promote social and political egalitarianism. Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation. In this framework, for instance, discrimination against black women cannot be explained as a simple combination of misogyny and racism, but as something more complicated. While many readers understand intersectionality as the overlapping of multiple social identities, the original intent was to provide an internal framework for analyzing systems of oppression and privilege that interlock. For example, structural racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and to support putting theory into practice for social justice rather than simply cataloguing individual identities.
Intersectionality has heavily influenced modern feminism and gender studies. Its proponents suggest that it promotes a more nuanced and complex approach to addressing power and oppression, rather than offering simplistic answers. Its critics suggest that the concept is too broad or complex, tends to reduce individuals to specific demographic factors, is used as an ideological tool, and is difficult to apply in research contexts.
Key concepts
Interlocking matrix of oppression
, author of Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, refers to the various intersections of social inequality as "vectors of oppression and privilege" that together form a matrix of domination. These concepts describe how people's experiences of privilege and marginalization are shaped not just by individual differences in isolation, but also by the effect of overlaps and interactions between these differences. The impact of a particular factor, such as race, can vary based on the presence or absence of other factors, such as gender or class.Multiple discrimination
In the European Union and UK, "multiple discrimination" refers to discrimination which encompasses more than one social classification. These categories, which were previously considered in isolation as defining in their own right, are now increasingly approached as different facets of a person's identity that are considered as a multidimensional whole.Standpoint theory
has been described by Patricia Collins and Dorothy E. Smith. A standpoint is an individual's world perspective. Standpoint theory suggests that societal knowledge is subjective, being situated within an individual's specific geographic location and the social conditions under which it was produced.History
scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of intersectionality in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991, within the subject of legal studies. Intersectionality originated in critical race studies and considers the way different forms of oppression can combine and interact to produce multifaceted systems of oppression and privilege that shape the experiences of individuals. Crenshaw used intersectionality to demonstrate how these intersecting systems of oppression disadvantaged minorities in the workplace and society.Although Crenshaw introduced the term Intersectionality in 1989, recent scholars emphasize that intersectionality is not a static framework but one that has continued to evolve both before and after the origin of its namesake. In a 2023 review of the concept’s development, it is argued that intersectionality has undergone significant reinterpretation over time as researchers apply it across new geopolitical, legal, and social contexts. The article notes that while Crenshaw’s original formulation emerged from Black feminist legal theory to illustrate how racism and sexism operate simultaneously, contemporary scholars increasingly stress the need to maintain a focus on structures of power as opposed to reducing the concept to simply overlapping identities. This ongoing academic debate highlights both the durability of Crenshaw’s foundational insights and the expanding range of issues to which intersectionality is now applied.
Precursors to intersectionality
The historical exclusion of Black women from the feminist movement in the United States resulted in many Black 19th- and 20th-century feminists—including Sojourner Truth, Anna J. Cooper, Maria W. Stewart, Ida B. Wells and others—challenging their historical exclusion from earlier feminist movements, which were primarily led by white middle-class women who suggested that women were a homogeneous category who shared the same life experiences.In her 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, Sojourner Truth spoke from her racialized position as a formerly enslaved woman to critique essentialist notions of femininity. She highlighted the differences between the treatment of white and Black women in society, saying that white women were often regarded as emotional and delicate, while Black women were stereotyped as brutish and subjected to both gendered and racialized abuse. These observations were largely dismissed by many white feminists of the time, who prioritized the suffrage movement over addressing the intersecting oppressions faced by Black women.
Early writers and intellectuals such as Cooper, Stewart, Wells, Stuart Hall and Nira Yuval-Davis also emphasized the interconnected nature of racial and gender oppressions, prefiguring intersectionality. In her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office", Cooper identified Black women as crucial agents of social change, emphasizing their unique understanding of multiple forms of oppression. In Cooper's publication of "A Voice from the South", she emphasized the importance of considering the "whole race" by focusing on the lived experiences of Black women. Cooper said that their oppression was just not racial or gender-based but a complex combination of the two.
W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain specific aspects of the Black political economy. Patricia Hill Collins writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power." Du Bois nevertheless omitted gender from his theory and considered it more of a personal identity category. In 1947, Pauli Murray used the phrase "Jane Crow" to describe the compounded challenges faced by black women in the Jim Crow south.
Second wave feminism
describes the many proponents of Black, Asian American, Latina, Indigenous, and Chicana feminism active in North America between the 1960s and 1980s as instrumental in the development of intersectionality. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of non-Western feminists of color also articulated ideas similar to intersectionality, such as Awa Thiam, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chela Sandoval, and others.In 1974, a group of Black feminists organized the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts, in response to what they felt was an alienation from both white feminism and the male-dominated Black liberation movement, citing the "interlocking oppressions" of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. The collective developed the concept of "simultaneity": the simultaneous influences of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which informed the members' lives and their resistance to oppression. The Combahee River Collective advanced an understanding of African-American experiences that challenged analyses emerging from Black and male-centered social movements, as well as those from mainstream cisgender, white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists.
In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Emma DeGraffenreid and four other Black female auto workers alleged compound employment discrimination as Black women resulting from General Motors' seniority-based system of layoffs. The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination separately, finding that the employment of African-American men in the factory disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white women in the offices disproved gender discrimination. The court declined to consider compound discrimination, and dismissed the case. Crenshaw said that in cases such as this, the courts have tended to ignore Black women's unique experiences by treating them as women or Black.
In 1978, Senegalese writer Awa Thiam wrote of the "threefold oppression" of racism, sexism and class oppression which impacted African women:
By the 1980s, as second-wave feminism began to recede, scholars of color including Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Angela Davis brought their lived experiences into academic discussion, shaping what would become known as "intersectionality" within race, class, and gender studies in U.S. academia. Scholar bell hooks, in her groundbreaking work Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, described the exclusion of Black women's experiences from mainstream feminist narratives and underscored the importance of addressing race, gender, and class as intersecting systems of oppression. For hooks, the emergence of intersectionality "challenged the notion that 'gender' was the primary factor determining a woman's fate". Inspired by Lorde, Afro-German women also began to explore issues of overlapping oppression in Germany.
Also in 1981, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology centering the experiences of women of color, which challenges white feminists who made claims to solidarity based on sisterhood, calling for greater recognition of their multiple identities. Among other things, works in the anthology call for greater attention to race-related subjectivities in feminism, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism.
In 1988, Deborah K. King published the article "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology". In it, King addresses what soon became the foundation for intersectionality, saying, "Black women have long recognized the special circumstances of our lives in the United States: the commonalities that we share with all women, as well as the bonds that connect us to the men of our race".