GWST 1502 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Intersectionality
7 Oct 2019
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Intersectionality: Articulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), the
concept of intersectionality identifies a mode of analysis integral to women,
gender, sexuality studies. Within intersectional frameworks, race, class,
gender, sexuality, age, ability, and other aspects of identity are considered
mutually constitutive; that is, people experience these multiple aspects of
identity simultaneously and the meanings of different aspects of identity are
shaped by one another. In other words, notions of gender and the way a
person’s gender is interpreted by others are always impacted by notions of
race and the way that person’s race is interpreted and how they experience
privilege and oppression. For example, a person is never received as just a
woman, but how that person is racialized impacts how the person is received
as a woman. So, notions of blackness, brownness, and whiteness influence
gendered experience, and there is no experience of gender that is outside of
an experience of race. In addition to race, gendered experience is also
shaped by age, sexuality, class, and ability; likewise, the experience of race is
impacted by gender, age, class, sexuality, and ability.
