Introduction to Intersectionality

Introduction to Intersectionality

While law professor Kimberle Crenshaw coined the word "intersectionality" in nineteen eighty-nine, the notions of overlapping and converging identities and social institutions had been part of black feminist thought since the days of Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. Crenshaw gave a name to this concept that explains how black women's experiences of the ways overlapping identities (in this case gender and race) uniquely shape their experiences as "black women" within social institutions, such as work and law. Crenshaw drew specifically from court cases that highlighted the ignored effects of intersections in the lives of black women. In DeGraffenreid versus General Motors, for example, five black women sued General Motors for discrimination. They claimed that General Motors' system of seniority disadvantaged black women because the company had not hired black women prior to nineteen sixty-four and that made black women most vulnerable to the seniority-based layoffs that cost all of the black women hired after nineteen seventy zero their jobs during a recession. The court found in favor of General Motors, declaring that black women were not a special class to be protected. The court stated that the lawsuit either had to claim discrimination on the basis of sex or on the basis of race but not both. General Motors, the court pointed out, had hired women long before nineteen sixty-four-white women-and therefore the plaintiffs could not claim sex discrimination. The court also dismissed the race discrimination claim and encouraged the plaintiffs to join another race-discrimination complaint against GM. The women refused, noting that their claim was one of both race and sex discrimination. The court reiterated its belief that "black women" were not a protected category, affirming what Crenshaw explains as protections that only apply if black women's experiences coincide either with the experiences of white women or of black men.

In naming intersectionality, Crenshaw gave social justice theorists and activists an important tool for analyzing the nuances and complexities of oppression. The word has now become ubiquitous in social justice theory and practice, but its roots in the theorizing of black women are crucial to a full understanding of its multifaceted and simultaneous analysis and application, particularly as we move toward developing a method of intersectional theology.

WHAT IS INTERSECTIONALITY?

Intersectionality is a tool for analysis that takes into account the simultaneously experienced multiple social locations, identities, and institutions that shape individual and collective experience within hierarchically structured systems of power and privilege. In other words, intersectionality is a lens for understanding how gender, race, social class, sexual identity, and other forms of difference work concurrently to shape people and social institutions within multiple relationships of power. It is kaleidoscopic, constantly rendering shifting patterns of power visible. It is confluent, a juncture point where identities, locations, institutions, and power flow together creating something new. It is a praxis-an ongoing loop of action-reflection-action-that integrates social justice-oriented theory with activism toward social justice on the ground so that theory informs practice and practice informs theory.

Social justice is a structuring of institutions and relationships so that people's basic needs are met, people are treated with equity and fairness, differences are welcomed and valued, and economic, social, political, and religious equality is achieved. Intersectionality's greatest impacts have been in community organizing toward social justice and in the academy in fields such as women, gender, and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies and, to some extent, in more traditional disciplines such as sociology, law, and political science. For example, theories of intersectionality have been central in the transformation of women, gender, and sexuality studies as a discipline so that issues of race ethnicity, sexual identity, social class, ability, and other forms of difference are deeply and inextricably embedded in contemporary feminist thought and pedagogy. In STEM fields, intersectional thinking has led to examination of the disparate experiences of white women, women of color, and LGBTQ scientists and engineers in the field and recent analysis of the impact of social differences on the way science itself is done and interpreted. Intersectional analysis helps us understand why Latina and black women scientists are frequently mistaken for janitors, when their white counterparts are not, or why the gender and sexual identity of a scientist or research subject can affect the results of a study. Using an intersectional lens helps us view phenomena in more complicated and nuanced ways that pay special attention to social differences, institutions, and power.

The next sections provide a brief overview of the history and workings of intersectionality that can begin to advance theological thinking toward an intersectional center. Traditionally, theology has assumed a white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied subject with very little self-reflection on the impact of theologians' social location on theology. In other words, for most of Christian history, straight white male theologians have spoken for everyone else, as if their theologies do not reflect the bias of their own social positions and power. This has meant that our theologies have been partial, a reflection of only a very small slice of the whole of human experience. In many ways, we have missed out on a great deal we could have learned about God and ourselves by ignoring and subordinating the experiences and theological reflections of most of humanity. An intersectional center demands that theology attend to difference and power and recognize the significant contributions to theology from diverse contributors and the limitations of theologies that only reflect a dominant or single-axis view.