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…
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.…
Within the parameters of this essay, I will explore the extent of the patriarchal society’s ability to apply hegemony in advertisements, shaping women’s subjectivities in order to reassert male dominance and female subordination. Radical feminist theory defines patriarchy as “a system of structures, institutions and ideology created by men in order to sustain and recreate male power and female subordination, ” located within a system of knowledge and language which constructs both masculinity and femininity in support of the establish power imbalance (Rowland & Klein, 1996, p.15-16). Through the application of the radical feminist theory, I argue that the hyper sexualized, unattainable and sexist beauty standards imposed on women by the patriarchy…
In her essay “Disability as a New Frontier for Feminist Intersectionality Research,” Nancy Hirschmann argues that feminism’s approaches (for the purpose of what we might assume to be understanding forms of systematic oppression (Hankivsky, 2011)) have been limited, mainly due to the conceptualizations of intersections and actual application of intersectionality in feminist work (Hirschmann, 2012). Disability studies, she asserts, can enrich feminist analyses because understanding the intersectionality between disability, gender and sexuality demands the development of more complicated conceptions of intersectionality. Intersectionality in disability studies recognizes both the differences and the connections within and between groups, therefore…
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.…
We as Americans reminisce on history to see and understand the advancements we have accomplished and the same can be said of not only the advancement of women but also the image of how women are portrayed. Although in today’s day and age, their figures and beauty are scrutinized but also exploited. For instance in both Tennessee Williams motion picture, “A Street Car Named Desire” and Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun you are able to see the evolution of the not only the portal of women but also the advancements they accomplish.…
Throughout the essay, “Becoming Disabled” by Rosemarie Garland-Thomas, her main claim that she argues is that she wants the disabled community to be politicized in the eyes of society. First, Garland-Thomas talks about politicizing disabilities into a movement. She compares and contrasts movements for race and sexual orientations to the movements about disability (2). Disability movements have not gained as much attention as race or sexual orientation movements because so many Americans do not realize how prominent disability separation is in America. She wants people to start recognizing that disability is just as important as race and other movements. Next, Garland-Thomas speaks about different types of disabilities and how they aren’t always…
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).…
Feminism was a topic that kept recurring throughout the story. Feminism was usually showcased to be important to Beneatha, she was a young black woman going to college “Listen, i’m going to be a doctor. I’m not worried about who i’m going to marry yet if i ever get married”. Beneatha didn’t care what people wanted for her, she wanted to do what she wanted like become a doctor, even if her older brother didn’t believe in her. Also she wasn’t worried about getting married, she wants to finish a career first. “You see! You never understood that there’s more than one kind of feeling which can exist between a man and a woman-or, at least there should be” (Beneatha). Beneatha believes that men and women can be just friends without having any to be anything more. That just because a man support a woman or talks to them that means automatically like a man.…
The dominant feminist description for men’s violence towards women is that it is “essential to a system of gender subordination” (MacKinnon, 1989). Feminists argue that sexual violence is a man’s way of preserving male dominance and female subordination, which are fundamental to the patriarchal social order (Stanko 1985). It is argued that a range of sexual violence outlines the everyday lives of women (Kelly, 1988), and similarly Stanko (1985) establishes that the appreciation of physical and sexual security by women is so firmly merged with their concern for sexual integrity as to “render the concept of safety problematic for women” (Stanko, 1985). It is argued that the safety which women do actually have is not used to their advantage and…
It is important to reflect upon how gender roles and expectations have changed in accordance to other issues such as age, social background/class, race and disability, this is called intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw (1989), an American professor and noted that feminist theory focused on white, middle-class females and it disregarded different groups of women who have different ‘layers’ of life to contend with. A modern example how this issue has changed and progressed in the last 30 years is Dame Tanni Grey- Thompson. She is an 11 gold Paralympian who, through her determination in the face of her disability, Spina Bifida has made her an international sporting hero and increased awareness of Paralympic…
Research about the reasons why domestic violence occurs within partnerships and families is still ongoing and continues to make strides for the prevention of such abuse. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s the concept and theories of Intersectionality began to emerge and come into the spotlight. Intersectionality is used to describe the connection between different social constructs, individual and relational ideologies, and structural aspects that contribute to oppression (Ramsay, 2014, p. 1771). Intersectionality is used to assess the relationship or intersection between various characteristics of a person such as race, class, and gender (Josephson, 2002, p. 86). Researchers use Intersectionality theory widely, in conjunction with the…
This perspective is also known as intersectionality theory and multicultural feminism. Multiracial feminism is preferred because it explains how race is a power system that interacts with other inequalities to shape the genders. But, the main focus is on engaging the multiple inequalities. Multiracial feminism has some key concepts that make it stand out from other feminist perspectives. First, multiracial feminism shows that men and women are characterized not only by gender but their race, class, sexuality, age, physical ability, and etc. Next, the matrix of domination puts everyone into a broad perspective, but everyone has different experiences. Then, there’s a concept called relationality, which means women’s differences are connected in systematic…
At the age of eleven I experienced two fundamental shifts within my knowledge of myself and the world around me; though, of course, at the time I was quite unaware of the long lasting implications of these shifts. The first shift would lead to a drastic reworking of my inner psyche, this inner reworking founded itself when I experienced my first panic attack, an early sign of the anxiety disorder that would fester in my mind until the present. The second shift had a greater immediate impact upon my understanding of the my known world, when I suddenly came into the knowledge of my father's, worsening and still worsening, alcoholism. These two events which I viewed as independent from the other, would come to lay the foundation for my own understandings of feminism. Over the next several years, these two flourishing fragments of myself and my world would no longer be able to exist independent in my own conscious. Instead, I would…