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Quotes (Academic Theory)
Intersectionality

AUTHOR

Catharine A. Mackinnon

SOURCE

Intersectionality As Method: A (...)

as, for example, Marxist theory has class as its subject and employs dialectical materialism as its method, intersectionality both notices and contends with the realities of multiple inequalities as it thinks about “the interaction of ” those inequalities in a way that captures the distinctive dynamics at their multidimensional interface. Resisting dissociation - the trance state of much academic theorizing - intersectionality begins in the concrete experience of race and sex together in the lives of real people, “with Black women as the starting point”
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Aspect: 01. Genesis

AUTHOR

Mary Bernstein

SOURCE

Identity Politics

Although often ignored in the social movement literature, the feminist literature on standpoint theory, intersectionality, and materialist feminism draws on Marxist historical materialism (Naples 2003) to conceptualize identity politics as a way to produce knowledge that derives from the material conditions, lived experience, and social location of participants. Activists thus formulate political strategies (Hartsock 1983; Collins 1990, 1998; Mohanty 1992a, 1992b; Haraway 1988) that depend on how power or “the relations of ruling” (Smith 1987) are expressed in everyday life. Although standpoint theory is sometimes portrayed as essentialist (e.g., Benhabib 1999), Naples (2003) argues that people do not translate personal (...)
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Aspect: 01. Genesis

AUTHOR

Elizabeth R. Cole

SOURCE

Intersectionality And Research In (...)

The Combahee River Collective (1977/1995), a group of Black feminists, wrote a manifesto that has been cited as one of the earliest expressions of intersectionality (see also Beale, 1970). They argued “We... find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously” (Combahee River Collective, 1977/1995, p. 234).
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Aspect: 01. Genesis

AUTHOR

Jennifer C. Nash

SOURCE

Re-Thinking Intersectionality

The term intersectionality, coined by legal scholar Kimberlé ́ Crenshaw, underscores the ‘multidimensionality’ of marginalized subjects’ lived experiences (Crenshaw, 1989: 139). Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s from critical race studies, a scholarly movement born in the legal academy committed to problematizing law’s purported colour-blindness, neutrality, and objectivity
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Aspect: 01. Genesis
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Ibram X. Kendi

SOURCE

How To Be An (...)

In 1991, UCLA critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw further explored this notion of “intersectionality“. That year, she published “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color “in the Stanford Law Review, based on her address at the Third National Conference on Women of Color and the Law in 1990. “Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains“, Crenshaw theorized. “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of (...)
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Aspect: 01. Genesis

AUTHOR

Jennifer C. Nash

SOURCE

Re-Thinking Intersectionality

Leslie McCall stresses intersectionality’s importance, calling it ‘the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far’ (McCall, 2005: 1771). This ‘important theoretical contribution’ has become the ‘gold standard’ multidisciplinary approach for analysing subjects’ experiences of both identity and oppression.
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Aspect: 01. Genesis
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberle Crenshaw

SOURCE

Mapping The Margins: Intersectionality, (...)

I consider intersectionality a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory. In mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable. While the primary intersections that I explore here are between race and gender, the concept can and should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color.
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Aspect: 02. Definition

AUTHOR

Mike C. Parent, Cirleen (...)

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Approaches To Research On (...)

Intersectionality theories, or the recognition of multiple interlocking identities, defined by relative sociocultural power and privilege, constitute a vital step forward in research across multiple domains of inquiry.
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberle Crenshaw

SOURCE

Mapping The Margins: Intersectionality, (...)

We all can recognize the distinction between the claims “I am Black“ and the claim “I am a person who happens to be Black“. “I am Black“ takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity. “I am Black“ becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification, intimately linked to celebratory statements like the Black nationalist “Black is beautiful“. “I am a person who happens to be Black“, on the other hand, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, “I am first a person“) and for a (...)
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Sumi (...)

SOURCE

Toward A Field of (...)

Implicit in this broadened field of vision is our view that intersectionality is best framed as an analytic sensibility. If intersectionality is an analytic disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses, then what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term “intersectionality,” nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional - whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline - is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of same-ness and difference and (...)
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Sumi (...)

SOURCE

Toward A Field of (...)

As deployed by many intersectional academics and activists, intersectionality helps reveal how power works in diffuse and differentiated ways through the creation and deployment of overlapping identity categories. As Jennifer Jihye Chun, George Lipsitz, and Young Shin pithily observe, “Intersectionality primarily concerns the way things work rather than who people are”. Indeed, as contributors herein suggest, the opposition between identity and power is itself a rigid and nondynamic way of understanding social hierarchy. Catharine A. MacKinnon notes that identities are, of course, “authentic instruments of inequality. And they are static and hard to move”.
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Sumi (...)

SOURCE

Toward A Field of (...)

The concept of “political intersectionality” reflects a dual concern for resisting the systemic forces that significantly shape the differential life chances of intersectionality’s subjects and for reshaping modes of resistance beyond allegedly universal, single-axis approaches. Political intersectionality provides an applied dimension to the insights of structural intersectionality by offering a framework for contesting power and thereby linking theory to existent and emergent social and political struggles. This praxis orientation demands that the realm of practice always already inform the work of theorists. Possibilities for fusing the development of theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge come from several of the articles in (...)
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Aspect: 02. Definition

AUTHOR

Elizabeth R. Cole

SOURCE

Intersectionality And Research In (...)

Feminist and critical race theories offer the concept of intersectionality to describe analytic approaches that simultaneously consider the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage.
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Sumi (...)

SOURCE

Toward A Field of (...)

“Intersectional politics” does not, for Spade, mean dismantling identities or categories themselves but, rather, dismantling structures that selectively impose vulnerability upon certain bodies.
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Aspect: 02. Definition

AUTHOR

Jennifer C. Nash

SOURCE

Re-Thinking Intersectionality

Intersectionality, the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality, has emerged as the primary theoretical tool designed to combat feminist hierarchy, hegemony, and exclusivity.
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Aspect: 02. Definition

AUTHOR

Catharine A. Mackinnon

SOURCE

Intersectionality As Method: A (...)

Its firm grip on the way hierarchy works as a process in motion explains why this theory is not abstract, unlike the conventional equality theory of which it is critical. It is inherently substantive - hence, crucially, it does not flip. “Intersectional subordination” is a one-way ratchet, even as the analysis of it informs understanding of the status locations at both the top and the bottom of the hierarchies involved. But top and bottom are not fungible, as the classifications of race and sex are constructed to be, which explains why intersectional method could reveal the white male intersectional reality (...)
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Robin DiAngelo

SOURCE

Is Everyone Really Equal? (...)

One is not simply a man, but a cisgender man, a White man, or a man of Color; or a working-class White man, perhaps a working-class gay White man, or a heterosexual Christian able-bodied man of Color - and each of these identity positions intersect in important ways.
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Aspect: 02. Definition

AUTHOR

Sirma Bilge

SOURCE

Intersectionality Undone. Saving Intersectionality (...)

These questions are of particular relevance in the case of intersectionality, as it is a theory and praxis, an analytical and political tool elaborated by less powerful social actors facing multiple minoritizations, in order to confront and combat the interlocking systems of power shaping their lives, through theoretical and empirical knowledge production, as well as activism, advocacy, and pedagogy
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Aspect: 02. Definition

AUTHOR

Elizabeth R. Cole

SOURCE

Intersectionality And Research In (...)

Categories such as race, gender, social class, and sexuality do not simply describe groups that may be different or similar; they encapsulate historical and continuing relations of political, material, and social inequality and stigma. Mahalingam (2007) characterized intersectionality in terms of the “interplay between person and social location, with particular emphasis on power relations among various social locations”. Asking what role inequality plays draws attention to the ways that multiple category memberships position individuals and groups in asymmetrical relation to one another, affecting their perceptions, experiences, and outcomes. This question helps psychologists to view constructs such as race and gender (...)
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Ibram X. Kendi

SOURCE

How To Be An (...)

Intersectional Black identities are subjected to what Crenshaw described as the intersection of racism and other forms of bigotry, such as ethnocentrism, colorism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. My journey to being an antiracist first recognized the intersectionality of my ethnic racism, and then my bodily racism, and then my cultural racism, and then my color racism, and then my class racism, and, when I entered graduate school, my gender racism and queer racism.
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Robin DiAngelo

SOURCE

Is Everyone Really Equal? (...)

Intersectionality is the term scholars use to acknowledge the reality that we simultaneously occupy both oppressed and privileged positions and that these positions intersect in complex ways
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Aspect: 02. Definition
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Robin DiAngelo

SOURCE

Is Everyone Really Equal? (...)

We must also remember that we are never solely one group; we occupy multiple and intersecting group identities. The disadvantages of one membership do not cancel out the advantages of another.
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Aspect: 03. Positionality

AUTHOR

Sirma Bilge

SOURCE

Intersectionality Undone. Saving Intersectionality (...)

Thinking intersectionally about how intersectionality is and should be deployed requires considering structural locations and power differentials. Those who use intersectionality as a universal device to be applied as an invariant rule may undermine the strategic planning of those who use intersectionality to contest specific concrete oppressions. Thinking intersectionally includes the possibility that stepping back from intersectionality may in some cases work as a strategy of empowerment for subordinated groups (...) As Rachel Luft argues, stepping back from intersectionality and the strategic use of race-only approaches might be necessary in our “postracial” times in the early stages of intervention and (...)
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Aspect: 03. Positionality

AUTHOR

Jennifer C. Nash

SOURCE

Re-Thinking Intersectionality

Intersectionality’s reliance on black women as the basis for its claims to complex subjectivity renders black women prototypical intersectional subjects whose experiences of marginality are imagined to provide a theoretical value-added.
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Aspect: 04. Practise
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Sumi (...)

SOURCE

Toward A Field of (...)

Coming full circle to our earlier discussion of the politics of knowledge production, we can restate now that not only do intersectional prisms excavate and expose multilayered structures of power and domination by adopting a grounded praxis approach; they also engage the conditions that shape and influence the interpretive lenses through which knowledge is produced and disseminated.
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Aspect: 04. Practise

AUTHOR

Jennifer C. Nash

SOURCE

Re-Thinking Intersectionality

Intersectionality serves a few theoretical and political purposes for both feminist and anti-racist scholarship. First, it subverts race/gender binaries in the service of theorizing identity in a more complex fashion. The destabilization of race/gender binaries is particularly important to enable robust analyses of cultural sites (or spectacles) that implicate both race and gender, like the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial, or the Kobe Bryant rape case. Because intersectionality is attuned to subjects who ‘exist y within the overlapping margins of race and gender discourse and in the empty spaces between’, it is a tool particularly adept at (...)
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Aspect: 04. Practise
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Richard Delgado

SOURCE

Critical Race Theory An (...)

Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists. While women's studies professors teach about intersectionality (…) Ethic studies courses often include a unit on critical race theory, and American studies departments teach material on critical whatness studies developed by CRT writers. Sociologists, theologians, and health care specialists use critical theory and its ideas. Philosophers incorporate critical theory ideas in analysing issues such as viewpoint discrimination and whether Western philosophy is inherently white in its orientation, values, and method of reasoning.
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Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Robin DiAngelo

SOURCE

Is Everyone Really Equal? (...)

Intersectionality is more than a theoretical standpoint. It is intended to build coalitions among diverse groups so that their actions are more equitable and effective.
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Aspect: 04. Practise

AUTHOR

Jennifer C. Nash

SOURCE

Re-Thinking Intersectionality

Currently, much of intersectionality theory conforms to what Loic Wacquant terms the ‘logic of the trial’, a scholarly tradition of locating practices that injure multiply marginalized subjects (Wacquant, 1997: 222). While the ‘logic of the trial’ enables scholars to locate the racist and sexist practices that undergird seemingly neutral and objective sites (like law), it also tends to ignore the mechanisms through which domination operates, proliferates, and entrenches itself (Wacquant, 1997).
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Aspect: 04. Practise

AUTHOR

Elizabeth R. Cole

SOURCE

Intersectionality And Research In (...)

To translate the theoretical insights of intersectionality into psychological research does not require the adoption of a new set of methods; rather, it requires a reconceptualization of the meaning and consequences of social categories.
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Aspect: 04. Practise