In 1989, lawyer and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term Intersectionality in her paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.
“One of the very few Black women’s studies books is entitled All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis. …I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist politics.”
Though the term’s origins are academic, intersectionality is not a distant theory. It impacts everyday lives and should be a part of every writer’s thought process when creating characters.
Understanding Intersectionality
Watch this 2016 Keynote
- The Intersectionality Primer
- Why intersectionality can’t wait by Kimberlé Crenshaw (2015 op-ed)
- Disability is not a Binary – tweet thread by Elsa S. Henry