In the article titled “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait“ Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, “intersectionality has been the banner under which many demands for inclusion have been made, but a term can do no more than those who use it have the power to demand” (Washington Post). In this statement Crenshaw says that intersectionality is a term that has given people who experience overlapping systems of discrimination a platform but it does not eliminate social injustices. Intersectionality is a term Crenshaw coined to describe the multiple injustices people face but she says it does nothing to portect them. In the Ted talk titled “The urgency of intersectionality, Crenshaw explains how the courts ruled that combining the overlapping of injustices of Emma…
Intersectionality is an analytic framework which identifies how interlocking systems of power impact those who are most marginalized in society. Intersectionality considers various forms of social stratification and identity, such as class, race, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender, do not exist separately from each other but are complexly interwoven. Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw coins the term “intersectionality” through this story from the courts. In DeGraffenreid v General Motors, a group of Black women sued the company alleging discrimination against Black women in the company’s seniority system. The court found against the women.…
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black scholar, who coined the term “intersectionality” in her essay from 1989, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, in which she attests that black women are the most oppressed people in American society. A black woman might be discriminated in ways that neither fit into legal categories of “sexism” nor “racism”. She explains that sadly the legislation has generally defined sexism constructed on an assumed position to the injustices confronted by all females (including white), while defining racism to advocate to those confronted by all Blacks (including men). This failure within the legislation captures Black…
Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in this very essay. Her usage of the term was in conjunction with Black women in the United States and how they are being oppressed because of their race and gender. Crenshaw focuses on gender and race in this very paper, she argues that race and gender should be looked at as cohesive terms, rather than different frameworks in cases that involve Black women that encounter a combination of sex and racial discrimination. This is looking more beyond than racism and sexism, it is building solidarity between the lines of structural differences. Crenshaw uses the metaphor of traffic intersection and crossroads to better illustrate the meaning of intersectionality.…
I will attempt to relate my experiences to this article and figure out whether it supports or opposes the literature discussed so far. The key argument in the text revolves around intersectionality. Collins (2000) describes intersectionality as a combination…
6- Intersectionality: A concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia..) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. Third wave feminism thrived on the concept of intersectionality in order to redefine feminism as inclusive.…
In feminist theory, intersectionality is a theory which describes how women can face multiple intersecting and overlapping systems of oppression such as sex, race and class. These systems deem to focus on the minority and or discriminate against. Each system of oppression is unable to be examined separately because of it’s intersecting and interconnectedness. More over, intersectionality describes the higherarchical nature of power and how belonging to multiple minority or discriminative systems may indicate one’s personal identity will be disregarded in society. That being the case, even though intersectionality is traditionally applied to women, women are not the only one’s oppressed from intersectionality, men are also being affected by such happening of intersecting and interconnectedness. The concept of intersectionality first came into use by the scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate.…
She did not make it seem like everyone else is this she made a point of saying we are ALL this way. Hankivsky uses evidence collected from a wide range of sources to make her points about how intersectionality is important and needs to be considered more. She includes pictures, charts, graphs, and a variety of statistics to back up her claims. Her points were logical and credible and did the job that she set out to do, which was to educate the reader about the usefulness and principle of intersectionality. Barsky’s chapter, Theory, Values, and Ethics, made the point that social workers use theories that are drawn from other fields, such as psychology, medicine, law, and many others.…
In the novel Bodega Dreams intersectionality functions in the way the characters envision themselves achieving their definition of success and how they will achieve it. Intersectionality is the “interlocking inequalities of race, gender, ethnicity, and class that create a matrix of domination within which privileges and disadvantages are unequally distributed among people” (Intersections of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class, 02/14). Even though two of the book’s characters Julio (most commonly known as Chino) and Edwin Nazario use their masculinity to obtain what they desire, each individual is gifted with dissimilar traits of masculinity that aid in achievement of what they yearn for. All while consuming the hardships of growing up in the Puerto Rican community of East Spanish Harlem.…
Before intersectionality, individuals were forced to assign themselves to only one identity at a time (Phoenix, 2006). As such, a black, Muslim, female with a low socioeconomic status previous to intersectionality would have had to choose one of her identities to associate with- whereas now she would be able to assign herself to each of these identities and present herself as a product of the way they mesh together. Feminist literature describes that whilst most women understood and accepted the dominance approach that describes males’ social power over women, the ‘hegemony of feminisms that is constructed primarily around the lives of white–middle class women’ was rarely discussed before intersectionality (Baca Zinn & Thornton Dill, 1996).…
These are all bound together and inseparable elements. These foundations are largely materialist, describing disadvantaged identities as historically constituted, rather than innate. Focusing exclusively on one dynamic while ignoring the intersections of other structures of disadvantage often produce biased and inaccurate generalizations. Intersectionality recognizes that multiple oppressions are not each suffered separately but rather as a single, synthesized experience. Rather than having any unified canon, this concept draws primarily from direct experiences of the…
As identified by Bowleg, the challenges of intersectionality researches include: a lack of clear methodology to study intersectionality, the difficulty in determining whether all intersectional identities have equal values, whether to focus on intersectional identities, processes, policies of positions, the virtual impossibility of asking inherently non-additive intersectionality questions in quantitative research3,9 or problems of determining the most appropriate statistical method to use.15 Pragmatic inter-categorical approaches to intersectionality of implicit bias can be adequately used to explore the complexities and health effects of multiple identities of sex, race, income, social class, gender, education, sexual orientation, age, immigration, to social positionalities (McCall, 2005). In public health research, the challenges of intersectionality researches present ample opportunities to ensure identification and possible solution to, and quality research in health disparity and implicit bias.…
For example, a black woman has to fend off and survive a life where she is discriminated for being both black and a women, both enduring racism and sexism. The mixture of damages from both intersectional failure and patriarchal society are the causes for the blanket of oppression surrounding…
Intersectionality is a feminist framework that strives to illuminate the relevance of social location in relation with practices of discrimination and inequality. Basu states the roots of intersectionality originate from the issues of non-inclusive feminism—the beginning of women’s rights in the Western world only included white, middle class women while continuing to oppress these marginalized groups (Basu, 1995). Through systems of discrimination such as racism and colonialism, certain people face different sets of prejudices. To counter these social injustices, the Intersectional Feminist Frameworks stresses the importance of women’s varying histories create multiple identities that allow them to achieve different, unequal hierarchal power.…
This is when privilege determines who is the “Us,” and who is the “Them.” In “A Question of Class,” Dorothy Allison shares her struggles as a lesbian coming from a low-income background. She expresses that being poor label her as the “other.” However, her white privilege makes her have more opportunities compared to her black peers. Allison argues that “The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives, there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal” (Allison 35). Based on her experience, she observes that people, in order to keep or protect their privilege, have to oppress the…