Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a framework, and a term, coined by the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in a 1989 article examining how anti-discrimination law failed Black women specifically. Crenshaw argued that existing legal and social frameworks tended to treat categories such as race and gender as separate, independent axes of discrimination, so that a Black woman facing discrimination that was neither purely racial nor purely gendered, but specific to her position at the intersection of both, often had no available legal category to describe her experience and no clear path to redress. Intersectionality holds that overlapping social categories, including race, gender, class, sexuality and other dimensions of identity, do not simply add together but combine to produce distinct, compounded forms of disadvantage that cannot be fully understood by examining any single category in isolation. The concept grew directly out of Black feminist thought and critique of both mainstream feminist theory, which Crenshaw and others argued had often centered the experiences of white women, and civil rights-era anti-discrimination law, which had often centered the experiences of Black men. Since Crenshaw's original formulation, intersectionality has become a widely used analytical tool across sociology, feminist theory and conflict-oriented social science for examining how multiple systems of inequality interact in the lived experience of individuals and groups.