Intersectional Feminism
Intersectional feminism – a feminist approach based on the recognition that different forms of discrimination intersect with sex- and gender-based discrimination and may intensify one another.
The term intersectionality was first introduced in 1989 by American legal scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Crenshaw drew attention to the fact that discrimination on the basis of sex and discrimination on the basis of race had often been treated as separate and unrelated issues. In her view, examining them in isolation from one another is insufficient, since women of color, for example, may experience multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination at the same time.
In her work, Crenshaw argued that analyses of sex discrimination often failed to take into account the experiences of women of color, because such analyses tended to be based on the experiences of more privileged, particularly white, members of the category “women.”
Thus, the concept of intersectionality, as formulated and developed by Crenshaw, created a new analytical framework that challenged the traditional tendency within social justice movements and critical social theory to treat race and sex as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis (Crenshaw, 1989; Cooper, 2016).
Today, intersectionality refers not only to the intersection of race and sex. The term is widely used to describe the interaction between different forms of discrimination and inequality, including those based on sex, gender, race, age, class, socioeconomic status, physical or mental ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, and other social categories (IWDA, 2018).
References:
Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Cooper, B. (2016). Intersectionality. In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.20
International Women’s Development Agency. (2018, May 11). What does intersectional feminism actually mean? Retrieved from https://iwda.org.au/what-does-intersectional-feminism-actually-mean/
Leave a Reply