"Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege."
The interconnected nature of social categories like race, class, and gender, and how they shape oppression and privilege.
Intersectionality: The study of overlapping social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination, especially based on sex and gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Social identity: The way individuals define themselves in relation to group memberships, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, social class, religion, and nationality.
Privilege: The unearned advantages or benefits that members of certain social groups have over others, often based on their race, gender, class, sexuality, or ability.
Oppression: The systemic and institutionalized mistreatment, exclusion, or marginalization of individuals or groups based on their social identity, often resulting in unequal access to resources, opportunities, and power.
Gender: A socially constructed system of practices, norms, and values that define and regulate the roles, expectations, and behaviors of women, men, and gender non-binary people in society.
Sexuality: A multidimensional construct that encompasses different aspects of sexual orientation, attraction, behavior, and identity, including homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality, asexuality, and others.
Race: A social construct that categorizes people based on physical and cultural traits, such as skin color, facial features, hair texture, and customs, often used as a basis for discrimination and inequality.
Class: A form of social stratification based on economic and occupational status, income, education, and lifestyle, often characterized by different levels of power, prestige, and privilege.
Feminism: A social and political movement that advocates for the rights, interests, and dignity of women and challenges the systemic inequalities and injustices that affect them.
Queer theory: A critical perspective that challenges traditional assumptions and categories of sexuality and gender, and explores the fluidity, complexity, and diversity of human identity and desire.
"Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance."
"These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing."
"Intersectional feminism 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."
"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 engages in similar themes as triple oppression, which is the oppression associated with being a poor or immigrant woman of color."
"Criticism includes the framework's tendency to reduce individuals to specific demographic factors, and its use as an ideological tool against other feminist theories."
"Critics have characterized the framework as ambiguous and lacking defined goals."
"As it is based in standpoint theory, critics say the focus on subjective experiences can lead to contradictions and the inability to identify common causes of oppression."
"However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality."
"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."
"The analysis ... 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."
"In 2022, a quantitative approach to intersectionality was proposed based on information theory, specifically synergistic information."
"In this framing, intersectionality is identified with the information about some outcome (e.g. income, etc.) that can only be learned when multiple identities (e.g. race and sex) are known together."
"Intersectionality is identified with the information about some outcome [...] that can [...] not [be] extractable from analysis of the individual identities considered separately."
"Critics [argue] the inability to identify common causes of oppression."
"Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, [...] to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups."