Intersectionality refers to how a person´s various social and political identities combine (intersect) to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. It involves many factors of advantage and disadvantage, such as gender, sex, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and physical appearance.
The term intersectionality was first introduced by civil rights advocate and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in a paper called ¨Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex¨. In that paper she drew on a series of legal cases and argued that people who were discriminated against on the basis of more than one characteristic often fell through the cracks of the legal system. She focused on how intersections along axes of identity reinforced marginalization and illustrated how laws and policies designed without accounting for intersectionality may produce undesirable outcomes.
Patricia Collins is the sociologist who introduced the term matrix of domination. She uses this term to explain that issues of oppression that deal with different social classifications are all interconnected. There are many different ways in which someone might experience domination and they may face many different challenges in which one obstacle (e.g. race) may overlap with other sociological features. Oppression is shaped through the interaction of intersectional micro processes and interlocking macro processes.
How can you distinguish between intersectionality and the matrix of domination?
Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions (e.g. intersections of race and gender). These oppressions work together in producing injustice. The matrix of domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions are organized. Regardless of the intersections, there are structural, hegemonic, interpersonal and disciplinary domains of power that reappear across different forms of oppression.
A first group of scholars opted out of using intersectionality altogether, stating that privileged patriarchy and racism over heterosexism and other forms of inequality. A second group argued that intersectionality should be defined as a normative and empirical research paradigm that could make better research designs and collect better data through its attentiveness to causal complexity.
To analyze intersectionality it can be organized in two conceptualizations:
- An academic tool (a theory and/or research paradigm). The difficulty with this is that it creates an additional layer of complexity to traditional modes of research within disciplines. Another issue is related to Collins' definitional dilemma and Alexander-Floyd´s paradox of invisibility.
- An approach for remedying complex social inequalities.
What did Collins mean with intersectionality´s definitional dilemma?
Collins' intersectionality definitional dilemma refers to defining the field neither so narrowly that it reflects the interests of any one factor, nor so broadly that its very broadness causes it to lose meaning. Intersectionality´s growing popularity and its difficulty to ¨box it in¨ leads to some dimensions of it to flourish, but others to fade out. It refers to the questions if the travel of intersectionality across different research disciplines and extension of intersectionality to many categories of identity render it conceptually ambiguous.
What does Alexander-Floyd mean with the paradox of invisibility?
Scholar Nikol Alexander-Floyd coined the term paradox of invisibility to refer to the fact that Black women in many ways are hypervisible, for example in terms of dominant cultural symbols. Yet, their needs are invisible and often unaddressed in social policy and scientific research. She used this phenomenon as an example of a potentially exclusionary outcome that is associated with broadening the conceptualization of intersectionality.
What does Hancock mean with paradigm intersectionality?
What scholar Ange-Marie Hancock means with paradigm intersectionality is that intersectionality as a theory or academic tool provides a justice oriented analytic framework for examining socio-political problems that emerge from race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other factors as process-driven and interlocking categories of difference.
With the term intersectional-type approaches Dhamoon refers to research that does not only describe and explain complex dynamics of power in specific contexts and at different levels of social life, but also critiques or deconstructs (and therefore disrupts) the forces of power and even offers alternative worldviews. According to her, four aspects of socio-political life have been studied in intersectional-type work:
- Processes of differentiation (e.g. processes of racialization).
- Categories of difference (e.g. transsexuals in the LGBTQ movement).
- Identities of marked individuals (e.g. strategic intersectionality framework).
- Systems of domination (e.g. violence against women in the form of state regulation of women's reproduction/colonialism).
What is complex religion according to Wilde & Glassman (2016)?
Wilde & Glassman introduce a complex religion approach to the analysis of inequality and politics. This approach is based on the premise that structures of inequality are so deeply intertwined with religion that religion is part of racial, ethnic, gender, and class differences. According to them it is impossible to view race as separate from religion when using an intersectional approach. Processes of racialization (e.g. viewing Sikhs as terrorizing Muslims based on their physical appearance) gather onto themselves and cannot be separated from discourses of gender and sexuality or following social problems.
What is secondary marginalization?
Secondary marginalization refers to the fact that intersectionally marginalized groups receive a quality of representation that is inferior to that received by advantaged subgroups. This uneven attention and effort for the intersectionally marginalized subgroups is based less on instrumental choices (like the pursuit of a broad coalition) and more on the status of the affected subgroup. It is an example of intersectional-type research that focuses on between-category relationships.
What is the strategic intersectionality framework?
Strategic intersectionality refers to leveraging the intersectionality of ethnicity and gender (and other intersectional factors) in ways that are of strategic benefit. An example is when a Latino woman who wants to be an elected official may use her gender to soften her ethnicity to limit race-based white backlash, or a Muslim woman counselor who at different times may emphasize her gender, religious identity or ethnicity, depending on what is a better strategy to reach her goals.
