Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist known for her development of Black feminist thought and her contributions to intersectionality theory. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) she argued that Black women occupy a distinctive standpoint shaped by the intersection of race, gender, and class, and she developed the concept of a matrix of domination to describe how these and other systems of oppression interlock and operate together rather than as separate, additive forces. Her work has been central to establishing intersectionality as a core analytical framework across sociology and related fields.