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Intersectionality refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power (Davis 2008, p. 68). As a framework and concept within the social sciences, intersectionality has its roots in a seminal paper written by UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics” (1989).
Text from: "Intersectionality," from the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods.
Intersectionality intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people's lives. While "intersectionality" circulates as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices to urge a more careful reading. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality can disorient habits of essentialism, categorial purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements.
Intersectionality is one of the most popular theoretical paradigms in gender studies and feminist theory today. Initially developed to explore how gender and race interact in the experiences of US women of colour, it has since been taken up in different disciplines and national contexts, where it is used to investigate a wide range of intersecting social identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination. This volume explores intersectionality studies as a burgeoning international field with a growing body of research, which is increasingly drawn upon in policy, political interventions, and social activism.
