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INTERSECTIONALITY MATTERS!��

Dr. Susanne Luhmann

Associate Professor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

University of Alberta, Canada

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Combahee River Collective 1977

  • “…we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”

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Intersectionality – the Concept

  • Coined by African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989)
  • Builds upon a century Black queer feminist thought
  • Initially: to begin understanding the specific ways that racist and sexist oppressions interact and together shape the specific conditions of work and life for Black women

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Intersectionality�

“It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.” (Crenshaw 2020)

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Diagram adapted from: Simpson, 2009, p. 5

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Risks of Mainstreaming Intersectionality�

  • Intersectionality as aspiration rather than reality
  • The risks of mainstreaming intersectionality
    • Erase or appropriate Black feminist intellectual history and activism
    • lose view of the specificity of Black women’s oppression
    • reduce intersectionality to “diversity management”

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Intersectionality as compromise and compromised

  • Desire for better and more socially just research
  • Grounded in “ethics of improvement” (Nash 2014: 49)
  • Asks us to reckon with the whiteness, heteronormativity, androcentrity etc. of dominant forms of research
  • Aspiration rather than reality

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Challenges to intersectional research design

  • Lack of disaggregated data
  • Lack of intersectional training
  • Lack of diverse researchers/ teams
  • Funding frameworks
  • Not required or standard of excellence in publication and other research dissemination

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Without intersectional research design and data…

  • we cannot fully understand the role racism, colonialism, sexism and other structures of inequality as social determinants of the economic, social, and physical well being and health for some -- and illness and death for others

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References and further resources

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  • “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977 . Web page. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Accessed February 23, 2022. https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0028151/.
  • Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 138–67.
  • Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.
  • “She Coined the Term ‘Intersectionality’ Over 30 Years Ago. Here’s What It Means to Her Today.” 2020. Time Magazine. February 20, 2020. https://time.com/5786710/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality/.
  • Hankivsky, Olena, and Ashlee Christoffersen. 2008. “Intersectionality and the Determinants of Health: A Canadian Perspective.” Critical Public Health 18 (3): 271–83. Hankivsky, Olena, and Renee Cormier. 2011. “Intersectionality and Public Policy: Some Lessons from Existing Models.” Political Research Quarterly 64 (217–229): 14.
  • Nash, Jennifer C. 2014. “Institutionalizing the Margins.” Social Text 32 (1): 45–65. Simpson, Joanna. 2009. “Everyone Belongs: A Toolkit for Applying Intersectionality.” CRIAW.. https://www.criaw-icref.ca/publications/everyone-belongs-a-toolkit-for-applying-intersectionality/.

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