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Intersectionality is an Analytic frame for understanding how groups' and individuals' Social identity result in unique combinations of discrimination and Social privilege. Examples of these intersecting and overlapping factors include gender, caste, sex, race, Ethnic group, Social class, Human sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and ageing. These factors can lead to both empowerment and oppression.
Intersectionality arose in reaction to both white feminism and the then male-dominated black liberation movement, citing the "interlocking oppressions" of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. It broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were White women, cisgender, and Middle class, to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups, and aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women's differing experiences and identities.
The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. She describes how interlocking systems of power affect those who are most Social exclusion. Activists and academics use the framework to promote Social equity and political egalitarianism. Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation. In this framework, for instance, discrimination against black women cannot be explained as a simple combination of misogyny and racism, but as something more complicated.
Intersectionality has heavily influenced modern feminism and gender studies. Its proponents suggest that it promotes a more nuanced and complex approach to addressing power and oppression, rather than offering simplistic answers. Its critics suggest that the concept is too broad or complex, tends to reduce individuals to specific demographic factors, is used as an ideological tool, and is difficult to apply in research contexts.
In her 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, Sojourner Truth spoke from her racialized position as a formerly enslaved woman to critique essentialist notions of femininity. She highlighted the differences between the treatment of white and Black women in society, saying that white women were often regarded as emotional and delicate, while Black women were stereotyped as brutish and subjected to both gendered and racialized abuse. These observations were largely dismissed by many white feminists of the time, who prioritized the suffrage movement over addressing the intersecting oppressions faced by Black women.
Early writers and intellectuals such as Cooper, Stewart, Wells, Stuart Hall and Nira Yuval-Davis also emphasized the interconnected nature of racial and gender oppressions, prefiguring intersectionality. In her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office", Cooper identified Black women as crucial agents of social change, emphasizing their unique understanding of multiple forms of oppression. In Cooper's publication of "A Voice from the South" (1892), she emphasized the importance of considering the "whole race" by focusing on the lived experiences of Black women. Cooper said that their oppression was just not racial or gender-based but a complex combination of the two.
W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain specific aspects of the Black political economy. Patricia Hill Collins writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power." Du Bois nevertheless omitted gender from his theory and considered it more of a personal identity category. In 1947, Pauli Murray used the phrase "Jane Crow" to describe the compounded challenges faced by black women in the Jim Crow south."Jane Crow: Pauli Murray's Intersections and Antidiscrimination Law." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29, no. 1 (2013): 155–160.
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In 1974, a group of Black feminists organized the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts, in response to what they felt was an alienation from both white feminism and the male-dominated Black liberation movement, citing the "interlocking oppressions" of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. The collective developed the concept of "simultaneity": the simultaneous influences of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which informed the members' lives and their resistance to oppression. The Combahee River Collective advanced an understanding of African-American experiences that challenged analyses emerging from Black and male-centered social movements, as well as those from mainstream cisgender, white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists.
In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), Emma DeGraffenreid and four other Black female auto workers alleged compound employment discrimination as Black women resulting from General Motors' seniority-based system of layoffs. The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination separately, finding that the employment of African-American men in the factory disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white women in the offices disproved gender discrimination. The court declined to consider compound discrimination, and dismissed the case. (2025). 9781479867455, New York University Press. ISBN 9781479867455 Crenshaw said that in cases such as this, the courts have tended to ignore Black women's unique experiences by treating them as women or Black.
In 1978, Senegalese write Awa Thiam wrote of the "threefold oppression" of racism, sexism and class oppression which impacted African women:
By the 1980s, as second-wave feminism began to recede, scholars of color including Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Angela Davis brought their lived experiences into academic discussion, shaping what would become known as "intersectionality" within race, class, and gender studies in U.S. academia. Scholar bell hooks, in her groundbreaking work Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), described the exclusion of Black women's experiences from mainstream feminist narratives and underscored the importance of addressing race, gender, and class as intersecting systems of oppression. For hooks, the emergence of intersectionality "challenged the notion that 'gender' was the primary factor determining a woman's fate". Inspired by Lorde, Afro-Germans women also began to explore issues of overlapping oppression in Germany.
Also in 1981, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology centering the experiences of women of color, which challenges who made claims to solidarity based on sisterhood, calling for greater recognition of their multiple identities. Among other things, works in the anthology call for greater attention to race-related subjectivities in feminism, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism.Aenerud, Rebecca " Thinking Again: This Bridge Called My Back and the Challenge to Whiteness" in
In 1988, Deborah K. King published the article "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology". In it, King addresses what soon became the foundation for intersectionality, saying, "Black women have long recognized the special circumstances of our lives in the United States: the commonalities that we share with all women, as well as the bonds that connect us to the men of our race".
In order to demonstrate that women of color have different experiences to white women, Crenshaw explores domestic violence and rape committed by men, which for women of color consist of a combination of both racism and sexism. She says that because the discourses designed to address either race or sex do not consider both at the same time, women of color are marginalized within both of them a result.
Crenshaw also delves into several legal cases that exhibit the concept of political intersectionality and how anti-discrimination law has been historically limited, such as DeGraffenreid v Motors, Moore v Hughes Helicopter Inc., and Payne v Travenol. There are two commonalities, amongst others, between these cases: firstly, each respective court's inability to fully understand the multidimensionality of the plaintiff's intersecting identities, and the limited ability that the plaintiffs had to argue their case due to restrictions created by the very legislation that exists in opposition to discrimination such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The term became more widely used in the 1990s, particularly following further development of Crenshaw's work by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. Collins says Crenshaw's term replaced her own previous coinage "Black feminist thought", and "increased the general applicability of her theory from African American women to all women". Collins sought to create frameworks to think about intersectionality, rather than expanding on the theory itself. She identified three main branches of study within intersectionality: one dealing with the background, ideas, issues, conflicts, and debates within intersectionality; another that seeks to apply intersectionality as an analytical strategy to examine how various social institutions might perpetuate social inequality; and one that uses intersectionality to bring social change through social justice initiatives.
Though intersectionality began with the exploration of the interplay between sexist and racist oppression, with classist and homophobic/biphobic oppression sometimes included, the theory has since expanded to cover other forms of oppression. Additionally, intersectionality has been used to address the differences between women of color even regarding shared experiences such as racism. For example, Asian American women have reported intersectional experiences that set them apart from other women of color as well as Asian men. Gloria Wekker says the Chicana feminist work of Gloria E. Anzaldúa is important because "existent categories for identity are strikingly not dealt with in separate or mutually exclusive terms, but are always referred to in relation to one another". (2025). 9780415493833, Routeledge. ISBN 9780415493833
In 2020, Alesha Durfee used the structural intersectional approach to examine the inability of "multiply marginalized" people, such as women of color, to file for, obtain, serve, and enforce protective orders in domestic violence situations, and suggested that the systems in place replicated wider social inequalities. Durfee said the basis for such inequalities were "policies and procedures based on inappropriate assumptions about individuals" that do not account for the complexity of their lived experiences. In 2021, a group of researchers using a structural intersectional approach found that the impact of overlapping structural racism, sexism, and income inequality in U.S. healthcare varied considerably across the country but was most consistently associated with poor health in Black women.
Sameena Azhar et al. have argued that are subject to myths that they "do not experience racialized, sexualized, and gendered microaggressions". They suggest these attitudes serve to socially and politically delegitimize Asian Americans' experiences of racism. They suggest that stereotypes of Asian Americans that frame their sexuality "in ways that maintain the social and political dominance of white men" affect Asian American men and women differently. For example, Asian American women were often perceived as romantically desirable and overly-sexualized, while their male counterparts were perceived as asexual.
Analyzing film and television, bell hooks suggests women of color are frequently portrayed as hyper-sexualized, "sassy", or docile tropes—such as the "fiery Latina', "submissive Asian", "angry Black woman"— which erase the full complexity of their intersecting identities, perpetuate oppressive societal attitudes and norms (such as sexism, racism, and classism), and even lead to violence against women of color. According to Mari J. Matsuda and others, these tropes also appear in advertising and marketing campaigns, which often portray women of color in "exotic" or "hyper-feminine" terms and thereby reinforce stereotypes of them as commodities or objects of consumption. (2025). 9780367314040, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 9780367314040
In their analysis of news media, including over two million articles published by Fox News and The New York Times between 2000–2022, Elliot Ash and others found that news stories involving women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other minority groups often used sensational or stereotypical lenses, ignoring socioeconomic contexts or broader structural inequalities, and effectively "flattening" the narrative of complex identities. They especially noted tropes of criminality, cleanliness, and invasion about immigrants, single parents, and Transgender people, which they found had shaped broader perceptions of marginalized communities.
Both Postcolonial and transnational feminists advocate attending to "complex and intersecting oppressions and multiple forms of resistance". Vrushali Patil argues that intersectionality ought to recognize transborder constructions of racial and cultural hierarchies. About the effect of the state on identity formation, Patil says: "If we continue to neglect cross-border dynamics and fail to problematize the nation and its emergence via transnational processes, our analyses will remain tethered to the spatialities and temporalities of colonial modernity."
Chandra Mohanty discusses alliances between women throughout the world as intersectionality in a global context. She rejects the western feminist theory, especially when it writes about global women of color and generally associated "third world women". She argues that "third world women" are often thought of as a homogeneous entity, when, in fact, their experience of oppression is informed by their geography, history, and culture. When western feminists write about women in the global South in this way, they dismiss the inherent intersecting identities that are present in the dynamic of feminism in the global South. Mohanty questions the performance of intersectionality and relationality of power structures within the US and colonialism and how to work across identities with this history of colonial power structures.
This is elaborated on by Christine Bose, who discusses a global use of intersectionality which works to remove associations of specific inequalities with specific institutions while showing that these systems generate intersectional effects. She uses this approach to develop a framework that can analyze gender inequalities across different nations and differentiates this from an approach (the one that Mohanty was referring to) which, one, paints national-level inequalities as the same and, two, differentiates only between the global North and South. This is manifested through the intersection of global dynamics like economics, migration, or violence, with regional dynamics, like histories of the nation or gendered inequalities in education and property education.
Within the institution of education, Sandra Jones' research on working-class women in academia takes into consideration meritocracy within all social strata, but argues that it is complicated by race and the external forces that oppress.
In the United States, studies of the labor market suggest there are economic inequalities due to the intersections of race and gender, including for African American women. In a book by Esther Chow and others, the authors write: "The impact of patriarchy and traditional assumptions about gender and families are evident in the lives of Chinese migrant workers, sex workers and their clients in South Korea, and Indian widows, but also Ukrainian migrants and Australian men of the new global middle class." (2025). 9780857247445, Emerald Group Publishing. ISBN 9780857247445
People of color in general often experience differential treatment in the healthcare system. For example, in the period immediately after 9/11 researchers noted low birth weights and other poor birth outcomes among Muslim and Arab Americans, a result they connected to the increased racial and religious discrimination of the time. Some researchers have also argued that immigration policies can affect health outcomes through mechanisms such as stress, restrictions on access to health care, and the social determinants of health.
Social determinants of health, such as food security, access to clean air and water, housing stability, and employment conditions, can also have significant impacts on health outcomes, particularly for marginalized communities. Environmental racism, a form of systemic racism where communities of color disproportionately bear the burden of environmental hazards, contributes to elevated rates of asthma, cancer, and other chronic illnesses. Rising temperatures and natural disasters as a result of climate change also disproportionately impact populations with limited economic resources and restricted access to healthcare.
Historical medical exploitation are continuing to inform health disparities today. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which Black men were denied treatment for syphilis without their consent or knowledge, and the forced sterilization of Indigenous and Latina women, driven by the eugenics movement, racial and colonial control, and targeting through welfare and public health programs, are all examples of systemic medical abuse. These events have contributed to longstanding distrust in healthcare institutions among marginalized communities. Additionally, medical research has historically excluded people of color, women, and disabled individuals from clinical trials, resulting in gaps in knowledge about how various treatments affect these populations. This underrepresentation persists in many areas of research and contributes to unequal health outcomes today.
Loretta Ross and the SisterSong Collective suggest that healthcare policies disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, highlighting the importance of applying an intersectional lens in policy-making. This ensures that systematic disparities are identified and addressed to create equitable healthcare policies and resources for marginalized communities. The Women's Institute for Science, Equity and Race advocates for the disaggregation of data in order to highlight intersectional identities in all kinds of research. Additional organizations such as the National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, and the Disability Justice Collective also work to center intersectionality in health justice advocacy, public policy, and community-driven research efforts.
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Even if an objective definition of oppression was reached, person-by-situation effects would make it difficult to deem certain persons or categories of persons as uniformly oppressed. For instance, black men are stereotypically perceived as criminals, which makes it much more difficult for them to get hired for a job than a white man. However, gay black men are perceived as harmless, which increases their chances of getting employed and receiving bonuses, despite the fact that gay males are also socially disadvantaged. The stereotype of gay men as harmless helps black men transcend their reputation for criminality. Several psychological studies have likewise shown that possessing multiple oppressed or marginalized identities has effects that are not necessarily additive, or even multiplicative, but rather, interactive in complex ways.
One of the main issues that affects the research of intersectionality is the construct problem. Constructs are what scientists use to build blocks of understanding within their field of study. It is important because it gives us something to measure. As mentioned previously, it is incredibly difficult to define oppression and, specifically, the feeling of being oppressed and ways that different kinds of oppression may interact as a construct. As psychology grows and changes its ability to define constructs, this research will likely improve.
Some scholars suggest intersectionality is often weaponized against other forms of feminism. Barbara Tomlinson, of the Department of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, has been critical of the applications of intersectional theory to attack other ways of feminist thinking. Downing says intersectionality, seen through the framework of Andrea Dworkin's class-based radical feminism, focuses too much on group identities and interests over individuality, leading to simplistic analysis and inaccurate assumptions about how a person's values and attitudes are determined. Iris Marion Young suggests that differences must be acknowledged in order to find unifying social justice issues that create coalitions that aid in changing society for the better. More specifically, this relates to the ideals of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).
Scholar Jennifer Nash says that, using an Afropessimist framework, intersectionality may flatten the unique experiences of blackness and gender by treating different forms of identity as equivalent. Nash also criticizes the superficial use of intersectionality by some institutions without addressing systematic inequalities.
Rekia Jibrin and Sara Salem suggest that because intersectional theory creates a unified but complex idea of anti-oppression politics, this creates difficulties achieving praxis and results in significant ambiguity in how the framework should be applied. As it is based in standpoint theory, Lisa Downing says the focus on subjective experiences can lead to contradictions and the inability to identify common causes of oppression.
Brittney Cooper says that "intersectionality does not deserve our religious devotion" but that "as a conceptual and analytic tool for thinking about operations of power, intersectionality remains one of the most useful and expansive paradigms we have". In responding to critics of intersectionality who find it to be incomplete, or argue that it fails to recognize the specificity of women's oppression, Chiara Bottici says that "there is something specific about the oppression of women and that in order to fight it you have to fight " all other forms of oppression". Cheryl Townsend Gilkes and Joy James say there is value in focusing on the experiences of black women.
Patricia Hill Collins also argues that without Critical theory, intersectionality falls flat. She argues that the mission of intersectionality currently within academia is too broad as a theoretical project, leading to its meaning being diluted both by the left and the right. As a result, intersectionality needs to take a position as a critical social theory in order to further it as a discipline and as a theory that can be utilized to dismantle systematic oppression.
There have been recent attempts to apply the intersectionality theory to research that involves disability, gender, and poverty. For example, Jacqueline Moodley and Lauren Graham focused on the intersection of disabled, impoverished, South African men and women to find what effect different combinations of the characteristics and identities had on outcomes of education, income, and employment. Also, researchers have used data from the National Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Research Project to explore the interactions among disability, gender, age, race, and employer characteristics and it connection to the outcome of workplace harassment.
Others suggest that generating hypothesis from intersectionality theory can be complex. Liam Kofi Bright, Daniel Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson suggest a framework of Causal graph to provide "Graphical model of intersectional theory" to address such concerns.
An analysis of academic articles published through December 2019 found that there are no widely adopted quantitative methods to investigate research questions informed by intersectionality and provided recommendations on analytic best practices for future research. An analysis of academic articles published through May 2020 found that intersectionality is frequently misunderstood when bridging theory into quantitative methodology.
Conservatives such as American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro suggest that intersectionality creates a "hierarchy of victimhood", where individuals are categorized as "members of a victim class by virtue of membership in a particular group".
On the international political scale, intersectional lenses have not been applied to the topic of human right laws. Gauthier de Beco found using an intersectional lens that people with disabilities that belong to racial or ethnic, gender, and age minorities lack suitable human rights.
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