"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 study of the ways in which gender intersects with other forms of social inequality, and how to challenge these hierarchies to empower women and people of other genders.
Patriarchy: Patriarchy refers to a social system where men hold power and women are oppressed based on their gender.
Intersectionality: Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that highlights the interconnections between different forms of oppression, including gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability.
Third Wave Feminism: Third Wave Feminism refers to a feminist movement that emerged in the 1990s and aimed to challenge the limits of Second Wave Feminism by focusing on the experiences of marginalized and intersectional identities.
Sexuality: Feminism focuses on sexuality and how it is constructed by social norms and cultural expectations.
Gender: Feminism focuses on the performativity of gender, the ways in which individuals enact gender roles, and the social construction of gender.
Colonialism: Feminism addresses the ways in which colonialism has impacted gender and sexuality, as well as how feminist theories and practices are shaped by colonial legacies.
Race: Feminism acknowledges the ways in which race intersects with gender and sexuality to produce unique experiences of oppression and marginalization.
Ableism: Feminism considers the ways in which ableism impacts disabled women and how ableism intersects with other forms of oppression.
Queer theory: Queer theory is an approach to understanding gender and sexuality that challenges binary conceptions of gender and sexuality.
Feminist Methodology: Feminist methodology incorporates feminist theories into research practices to address gender and sexuality.
Liberal Feminism: This type of feminism seeks equality for women through changes made in the legal and political system. It focuses primarily on legal reforms that address gender discrimination in areas such as employment, education, and politics.
Radical Feminism: This feminist theory aims to expose and challenge the patriarchy as the root cause of all inequalities, including gender and sexuality-based oppressions. Radical feminists believe in the need for women to come together in solidarity and create radical social change.
Marxist Feminism: This type of feminism assumes that capitalism is the primary cause of women's oppression. This theory is based on the idea that women's status is tied to their relationship with the means of production.
Eco-Feminism: This theory maintains that the root cause of women's oppression is their relationship with nature. This theory seeks to highlight the parallels between the destruction of the earth and the domination of women.
Black Feminism: This type of feminism emerged from the feminist movement when racism and discrimination could not be adequately addressed. The theory argues that gender discrimination is not only due to being a woman, but also due to race and other forms of oppression, making it more complex.
Postcolonial Feminism: This theory explores the complex relationships between gender and colonialism. It emphasizes the need to take into account the effects of colonization on women's experiences.
Intersectional Feminism: This type of feminism acknowledges that a person's identity is made up of multiple intersecting oppressions, such as gender, race, class, and sexuality. It focuses on the need to address these multiple layers of oppression simultaneously.
Queer Theory: This theory challenges the cultural and social norms that define gender and sexuality while also identifying and analyzing prejudices and inequities based on these norms.
Transfeminism: This theory focuses on advocating for the rights and needs of transgender women, recognizing that transgender women often experience more oppression and marginalization than cisgender women.
"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."