gender and intersectionality essay topics

86 Intersectionality Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best intersectionality topic ideas & essay examples, 🔍 simple & easy intersectionality essay titles, ✅ most interesting intersectionality topics to write about, ❓ intersectionality research questions.

• Concept of Gender Intersectionality in Society This can only be explained by understanding the social significance of the minority groups and what significance they have to the majority, and in this case it deals with the issue of same sex marriage.
• Intersectionality in Domestic Violence Another way an organization that serves racial minorities may address the unique needs of domestic violence victims is to offer additional educational and consultancy activities for women of color.
• Intersectionality and Career Advancement Barriers When applied in conjunction with barrier theories, intersectionality allows for the understanding of the limitations that individuals of a particular race, class, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, or disability experience in their access to various opportunities.
• Theories of Identity: Intersectionality It is painful to experience, and I struggle with personal guilt to this day, that my ‘gayness’ is the root of so many problems in the relationships I had with family and friends.
• Intersectionality and Feminist Activism Therefore, I hope to study the academic literature to discuss the existing tendencies and difficulties to contribute to the understanding of the identified topic in terms of gender and female studies.
• Intersectionality as an Intellectual Tool Assignment The primary step in evaluating the approaches to analyzing oppression is to define this phenomenon, which, in turn, allows for specifying the scope of the analysis.
• Intersectionality and a Young Girl’s Unequal Experiences Intersectionality will enable the public to listen to Indigenous girls to understand the insidious and hidden scopes of colonial policing and eradicate such dimensions. In conclusion, intersectionality allows people to consider how unequal the experiences […]
• Poverty, Social Class, and Intersectionality I prefer the structural approach to the issue as I believe the created structures are responsible for the existence of diverse types of oppression.
• The Intersectionality Theory: Overview The reason for this is the presence of different systems of oppression, in the case of the above example, racial. In such cases, this theory helps to analyze how exactly different types of oppression affect […]
• Intersectionality and Activism: Politics of Inclusivity Nevertheless, it is crucial to introduce intersectionality into modern movements to ensure the inclusion and protection of the rights of vulnerable groups.
• Intersectionality Oppression and Discrimination in Latin America One of the major reasons for the intersectionality is lack of awareness. Class intersectionality means discrimination based on the class of the people.
• Canadian Families Understanding: Intersectional Approach In order to understand the relevance of the intersectional approach of analyzing Canadian families, it would be important to understand the diversity in this country, and how it is manifested in Canadian families.
• Intersectionality and Gendered Racism The intersectionality concept enables people to understand the different experiences with regard to the social categories of a person. Intersectionality brings in revolution of the extent in which gender racism affects women, and the rational […]
• Affirmative Action and Intersectionality at the Top: Evidence From South Africa
• Black Womanhood and Intersectionality: An Analysis
• Intersectionality Laws in the UK and Europe
• The Intersectionality of Gender, Race, and Class
• Doctor Distrust: Pragmatism, Intersectionality, and the Confluence of Expertise and Interests
• Earnings Inequality and the Intersectionality of Gender and Ethnicity in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Intersectionality and Identity: How Do We Research Identity Intersectionalities in Youth Meaningfully?
• Feminist Sociological Theory: What Is Intersectionality?
• Gender, Intersecting Identities, and Entrepreneurship Research: Introduction to Intersectionality
• Illuminating Intersectionality for Tourism Researchers
• Incorporating Intersectionality Theory Into Population Health Research Methodology
• Gendered Race: Are Infants’ Face Preferences Guided by Intersectionality of Sex and Race?
• Intersectionality Affects Our Experiences Within Our Social
• Overview of Intersectionality and Battle for Feminism
• The Problem of Intersectionality and Gender Discrimination
• Intersectionality and the Social Determinants of Women’s Health
• The Relationships Between Intersectionality and Gendered Racism
• Intersectionality and Youth Identity Development Research in Europe
• The Link Between Intersectionality and Social Interequality
• Overview of Intersectionality Concepts and Theories
• Intersectionality: Gender and Social Suppression Runs
• Methods for Analytic Intercategorical Intersectionality in Quantitative Research
• Intersectionality: Inequality of the Labour Market
• More Than Culture: Structural Racism, Intersectionality Theory, and Immigrant Health
• Intersectionality: The Cross Between Race and Gender
• New Lands, New Languages: Navigating Intersectionality in School Leadership
• Intersectionality: The Link Between Poverty and Homelessness
• Property Rights, Intersectionality, and Women’s Empowerment in Nepal
• Representational Intersectionality and Persons of Mixed Races
• The Intersectionality Between Capitalism and Sexism
• Transformative Intersectionality: Moving Business Towards a Critical Praxis
• The Intersectionality Between Race, Gender, and Religion in Slave Culture
• The Theory and Praxis of Intersectionality in Work and Organisations
• Understanding How Race/Ethnicity and Gender Define Age-Trajectories of Disability: Intersectionality Approach
• Wedding Intersectionality Theory and Identity Work in Organizations
• Women’s Health, Men’s Health, and Gender and Health: Implications of Intersectionality
• Work-Life, Diversity, and Intersectionality: A Critical Review and Research Agenda
• Gender Intersectionality With Race or Class
• Intersectionality in the Example of Black LGBT Stand-Up Performers
• Overview of Peculiarities of Intersectionality Concept
• Intersectionality: Evolution, Development, and Social Equality
• Analysis of the Critiques of Intersectionality Concept
• How Can Intersectionality Advance Developmental Science?
• What Is Intersectionality in Culture?
• What Does Intersectional Feminism Mean?
• What Is the Connection Between Intersectionality and Identity Development?
• How Does Intersectionality Affect Our Understanding of Gender?
• What Is the Relationship Between Intersectionality and Gender Racism?
• Why Is Intersectionality Important in Women’s Health?
• What Are Theories of Intersectionality?
• Can Intersectionality Help With Understanding and Tackling Health Inequalities?
• How Is Intersectionality Used as an Analytic Tool?
• What Is an Example of Intersectionality?
• What Are the Concepts of Intersectionality?
• What Does Intersectionality Mean in Simple Terms?
• What Is Representative Intersectionality Among People of Mixed Race?
• How Does Gender Inequality Relate to Intersectionality?
• What Is the Theory and Practice of Intersectionality in Work and Organizations?
• Who Created Intersectionality Theory?
• What Is the Wedding Theory of Intersectionality?
• What Are the Implications of Intersectionality?
• Why Is Intersectionality Important in Policy?
• What Is Intersectionality and Why Is It Important to Understand?
• What Does Intersectionality Mean in Diversity?
• What Is an Intersectionality Identity?
• Why Is Intersectionality Important to Human Rights?
• What Is Navigating Intersectionality in School Leadership?
• How Do You Explain Intersectionality to a Child?
• Intersectionality: What Is the Connection Between Poverty and Homelessness?
• How Does Social Justice Relate to Intersectionality?
• What Is Intersectionality in Gender Inequality?
• What Are Some Examples of Intersectionality in Everyday Life?
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113 Intersectionality Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Intersectionality is a concept that was coined by scholar Kimberl'' Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how various social identities, such as race, gender, sexuality, and class, intersect and overlap to create unique experiences of discrimination and privilege for individuals. This concept has since become a cornerstone of critical social theory and has been widely applied in various academic disciplines, including sociology, gender studies, and critical race theory.

When it comes to writing essays on intersectionality, there are countless topics and examples to explore. In this article, we will provide you with 113 intersectionality essay topic ideas and examples to help you get started on your research and writing. These topics cover a wide range of issues related to intersectionality, including gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and more. Whether you are a student looking for inspiration for your next essay assignment or a researcher interested in diving deeper into the complexities of social identity, this list is sure to spark your curiosity and creativity.

• The impact of intersectionality on the experiences of Black women in the workplace
• Intersectional feminism and the fight for reproductive rights
• Exploring the intersectionality of LGBTQ+ identities
• Disability and intersectionality: challenges and opportunities
• The role of intersectionality in shaping healthcare disparities
• Intersectionality and environmental justice
• Indigenous perspectives on intersectionality
• Intersectionality and the criminal justice system
• Intersectional analysis of media representation
• Exploring the intersections of race and class in education
• The impact of intersectionality on mental health
• Intersectional perspectives on immigration and citizenship
• Intersectionality and the politics of representation
• The role of intersectionality in shaping beauty standards
• Intersectional approaches to anti-racism activism
• Exploring the intersections of gender and technology
• Intersectionality and the reproductive justice movement
• Disability justice and intersectionality
• The impact of intersectionality on voting rights
• Intersectionality and the #MeToo movement
• Exploring the intersections of religion and identity
• The role of intersectionality in shaping family dynamics
• Intersectional perspectives on climate change
• The impact of intersectionality on access to healthcare
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of poverty
• Exploring the intersections of race and mental health
• Intersectional analysis of environmental racism
• Intersectionality and the politics of disability rights
• The role of intersectionality in shaping LGBTQ+ rights
• Intersectional approaches to feminist activism
• Exploring the intersections of race and immigration
• The impact of intersectionality on access to education
• Intersectionality and the politics of language
• Disability justice and the fight for accessibility
• Intersectional perspectives on the refugee crisis
• The role of intersectionality in shaping housing policies
• Exploring the intersections of gender and sports
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of homelessness
• Intersectional analysis of food insecurity
• The impact of intersectionality on access to clean water
• Intersectionality and the politics of labor rights
• Disability justice and the fight for inclusive workplaces
• Intersectional perspectives on global health disparities
• The role of intersectionality in shaping social movements
• Exploring the intersections of race and maternal health
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of drug addiction
• Intersectional analysis of policing and racial profiling
• The impact of intersectionality on access to public transportation
• Intersectionality and the politics of urban planning
• Disability justice and the fight for affordable housing
• Intersectional perspectives on climate justice
• The role of intersectionality in shaping immigration policies
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of sex work
• Intersectional analysis of LGBTQ+ youth homelessness
• The impact of intersectionality on access to mental health services
• Intersectionality and the politics of reproductive healthcare
• Disability justice and the fight for inclusive education
• Intersectional perspectives on domestic violence
• The role of intersectionality in shaping disability rights
• Exploring the intersections of race and environmental justice
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of youth of color
• Intersectional analysis of the war on drugs
• The impact of intersectionality on access to affordable childcare
• Intersectionality and the politics of elder care
• Disability justice and the fight for inclusive transportation
• Intersectional perspectives on LGBTQ+ youth rights
• The role of intersectionality in shaping immigration detention policies
• Exploring the intersections of race and mass incarceration
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of mental illness
• Intersectional analysis of foster care systems
• The impact of intersectionality on access to affordable housing
• Intersectionality and the politics of gentrification
• Disability justice and the fight for accessible public spaces
• Intersectional perspectives on the impacts of colonialism
• The role of intersectionality in shaping indigenous rights
• Exploring the intersections of gender and disability
• Intersectionality and the criminalization of undocumented immigrants
• Intersectional analysis of racial profiling in schools
• The impact of intersectionality on access to clean air
• Intersectionality and the politics of food justice
• Disability justice and the fight for inclusive employment
• Intersectional perspectives on LGBTQ+ rights in the military
• The role of intersectionality in shaping healthcare access for trans folks
• Exploring the intersections of race and environmental racism
• Intersectional analysis of police violence against people with disabilities
• The impact of intersectionality on access to affordable healthcare
• Intersectionality and the politics of immigration detention
• Disability justice and the fight for inclusive voting rights
• Intersectional perspectives on LGBTQ+ youth homelessness
• The role of intersectionality in shaping youth empowerment movements
• Exploring the intersections of race and educational equity
• Intersectional analysis of mass incarceration and mental health
• Disability justice and the fight for accessible transportation

These are just a few examples of the many intersectionality essay topics that you can explore in your research and writing. Whether you are interested in issues related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, or class, there is no shortage of topics to delve into when it comes to intersectionality. By examining the ways in which different social identities intersect and interact with one another, you can gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of discrimination and privilege in society. So pick a topic that interests you, do some research, and start writing your own intersectionality essay today!

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What is intersectionality and why does it make feminism more effective?

Professor of Psychosocial Studies, UCL

Disclosure statement

Ann Phoenix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The way we talk about society and the people and structures in it is constantly changing. One term you may come across this International Women’s Day is “intersectionality”. And specifically, the concept of “intersectional feminism”.

Intersectionality refers to the fact that everyone is part of multiple social categories. These include gender, social class, sexuality, (dis)ability and racialisation (when people are divided into “racial” groups often based on skin colour or features).

These categories are not independent of each other, they intersect . This looks different for every person. For example, a black woman without a disability will have a different experience of society than a white woman without a disability – or a black woman with a disability.

An intersectional approach makes social policy more inclusive and just. Its value was evident in research during the pandemic, when it became clear that women from various groups, those who worked in caring jobs and who lived in crowded circumstances were much more likely to die from COVID.

A long-fought battle

American civil rights leader and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw first introduced the term intersectionality in a 1989 paper. She argued that focusing on a single form of oppression (such as gender or race) perpetuated discrimination against black women, who are simultaneously subjected to both racism and sexism.

Crenshaw gave a name to ways of thinking and theorising that black and Latina feminists, as well as working-class and lesbian feminists, had argued for decades. The Combahee River Collective of black lesbians was groundbreaking in this work.

They called for strategic alliances with black men to oppose racism, white women to oppose sexism and lesbians to oppose homophobia. This was an example of how an intersectional understanding of identity and social power relations can create more opportunities for action.

These ideas have, through political struggle, come to be accepted in feminist thinking and women’s studies scholarship. An increasing number of feminists now use the term “intersectional feminism”.

The term has moved from academia to feminist activist and social justice circles and beyond in recent years. Its popularity and widespread use means it is subjected to much scrutiny and debate about how and when it should be employed. For example, some argue that it should always include attention to racism and racialisation.

Recognising more issues makes feminism more effective

In writing about intersectionality, Crenshaw argued that singular approaches to social categories made black women’s oppression invisible. Many black feminists have pointed out that white feminists frequently overlook how racial categories shape different women’s experiences.

One example is hair discrimination. It is only in the 2020s that many organisations in South Africa, the UK and US have recognised that it is discriminatory to regulate black women’s hairstyles in ways that render their natural hair unacceptable.

This is an intersectional approach. White women and most black men do not face the same discrimination and pressures to straighten their hair.

“Abortion on demand” in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK and USA took no account of the fact that black women in these and many other countries needed to campaign against being given abortions against their will. The fight for reproductive justice does not look the same for all women.

Similarly, the experiences of working-class women have frequently been rendered invisible in white, middle class feminist campaigns and writings . Intersectionality means that these issues are recognised and fought for in an inclusive and more powerful way.

In the 35 years since Crenshaw coined the term, feminist scholars have analysed how women are positioned in society, for example, as black, working-class, lesbian or colonial subjects . Intersectionality reminds us that fruitful discussions about discrimination and justice must acknowledge how these different categories affect each other and their associated power relations.

This does not mean that research and policy cannot focus predominantly on one social category, such as race, gender or social class. But it does mean that we cannot, and should not, understand those categories in isolation of each other.

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Gender and Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a term used to explain the idea that various forms of discrimination, such as those centered on race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and other forms of identity, do not work independently but interact to produce particularized forms of social oppression. Intersectionality acknowledges that power dynamics and social systems and structures are complicated and […]

— February 8, 2021

Home > How to Guides > Gender and Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a term used to explain the idea that various forms of discrimination, such as those centered on race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and other forms of identity, do not work independently but interact to produce particularized forms of social oppression . Intersectionality acknowledges that power dynamics and social systems and structures are complicated and that people can experience multiple forms of oppression like racism, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, and homophobia at the same time. This synchronicity creates unique experiences of oppression ( Taylor, 2019 ).

Origin and Explanation of the Term

Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 article, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics . Her 1991 article, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color builds on her initial thinking. In this video , Crenshaw speaks about how intersectionality expands our understanding of social oppression and how it operates in a given society, culture, or environment.

Put simply, viewing discrimination through an intersectional lens, the inequities and inequalities that people experience are never the result of a single, distinct factor. Rather, they are the outcome of intersection and overlap of different social identities enmeshed in power dynamics and contextual factors in a given environment (YW Boston Blog, 2017).

Application to Gender

Regarding gender, as is explained in What is Intersectionality and What Does it Have to Do with Me? (Hopkins, 2018), intersectionality accounts for gender and its interaction and overlap with other social identities. People experience disadvantages according to the relative value and social standing of their multiple social identities, which creates a complex convergence of oppression:

Another Angle to Consider

At the same time, Hopkins explains, intersectionality can also consider the privileges or advantages that people experience in line with their social identities, and how those advantages and disadvantages interact and overlap. That is, depending on a person’s society, culture, or environment, they can experience specific advantages over other individuals or groups in line with power dynamics and contextual factors, but if that same person lived in a different setting, they could experience distinct disadvantages. Thus, intersectionality provides an essential framework to truly engage with how privilege, oppression, and power operate in a given environment.

Intersectionality, Gender, and Social and Behavior Change

The Gender and Development Network states that an intersectional approach to gender-transformative programming in social and behavior change (SBC) means being mindful of three main points:

• Anyone can experience gender discrimination in one way or another, with some groups being more disproportionately burdened. But not only gender shapes experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and oppression, but also race, socio-economic status, and other factors.
• An individual’s particular experience of intersecting discriminations is unique; it is not simply the sum of different discriminations.
• Politically, gender equality proponents must tackle all forms of discrimination and oppression whether based on gender, race, or class.

As Hopkins states:

This work is challenging and requires a lot of introspection and reflection on the part of SBC professionals as we negotiate the ways in which our own social identities impact how we do work that is truly intersectional and inclusive.

In this Trending Topic we share resources and tools to help with understanding and applying an intersectional lens to SBC programming, and several examples of intersectionality as applied to gender-integrated programming across the globe. If you have materials you would like to share with us, please upload the items , or contact [email protected] .

Hopkins, P. (2018, April 22). What is Intersectionality? YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1islM0ytkE

Taylor, B. (2019, November 24). Intersectionality 101: what is it and why is it important? Womankind Worldwide. https://www.womankind.org.uk/intersectionality-101-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-important

YW Boston Blog. (2017, March 29). What is intersectionality, and what does it have to do with me? YW Boston. https://www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me

Photo credit: MONUSCO Pictures / Myriam ASMANI Retrieved from Flickr

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Essay Samples on Intersectionality

What is intersectionality? Intersectionality is a multidimensional framework that acknowledges the complex intersections of social identities and systems of oppression. Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, this concept recognizes that individuals possess multiple identities, such as gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and more. These identities do not exist in isolation but interact and intersect, shaping our experiences and interactions within society.

Intersectionality moves beyond single-axis analysis by highlighting the interconnected nature of various identities. It recognizes that systems of power and privilege operate simultaneously, affecting individuals differently depending on the intersections of their identities. For example, a black woman may experience discrimination differently from a white woman or a black man due to the compounded effects of racism and sexism.

How to Write an Intersectionality Essay

When writing an intersectionality essay, it is crucial to grasp the intricacies of this concept. Begin by selecting an intersectionality essay topics that sparks your interest. Consider exploring how intersectionality informs social justice movements, challenges dominant power structures, or influences public policy.

To effectively structure your essay, start with a concise introduction that defines intersectionality and its significance. Provide a historical context to demonstrate its evolution and highlight key scholars who have contributed to its development, such as Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks. As you delve deeper, incorporate intersectionality essay examples to illustrate real-world applications and experiences.

Analyze the interconnectedness of various social identities, examining how they intersect and interact within specific contexts. Explore the challenges faced by individuals who occupy multiple marginalized identities and the unique oppressions they encounter. Discuss the ways in which intersectionality has been applied in various disciplines, such as law, sociology, gender studies, and beyond, and look at the intersectionality essay example.

In your conclusion, summarize the key findings and emphasize the importance of intersectionality in fostering inclusivity, dismantling oppression, and promoting social change.

Aspects of Canadian Political Reality Intersectionalities Approach

Intersectionality may be defined as a theory that shows how social and cultural categories interact. It shows that various social identities like race, gender class, disability, sexuality, place of origin and nationality are interconnected and contribute to systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by some societies....

• Intersectionality
• Political Philosophy

Intersectionality: How Our Names Give Us Identity

Growing up in school, I’ve always overheard people say that they hated their names. That they wish they could change their name or they use only a portion of their names. I could never relate because I have always loved my name, that could be...

• Cultural Identity

The Time-Based Traffic Sign Systems at Intersections

Traffic sign systems have been employed for centuries as a method of constantly managing traffic waft and saturation at intersections to allow smooth and protected motion amongst automobiles and different street users. Due to the non-stop expand of traffic congestion in city areas, there is...

• Traffic Congestion

Principle of Intersectionality and the Determinants of Racial Discrimination

All of the identifiable factors that make up an individual interconnect together to form an overall perception of them as a whole. Whether this social categorization effects somebody in a positive or negative light is linked to the systemic oppression and discrimination of certain targeted...

• Racial Segregation

Intersectionality in Brussel's Hip Hop Scene

Brussels is known as the heart of Europe for its geographical location, hosting the EU institutions and unique cultural diversity, but few are aware that Brussels is also home to a fast-growing movement in the hip hop industry, becoming an increasingly enticing hub for artists...

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Practice of Intersectionality in the Nursing Environment and Patient's Treatment

Introduction As I walked out of the nursing station I noticed Waker sitting alone at the corner of the hallway just peering out the window to the courtyard, he noticed the nursing students entering the common area and waived us over. My fear and anxiety...

Bringing Awareness to Marginalized Groups Through Intersectionality

The notion of intersectionality can be defined as a concept that connects oppressive notions of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ageism and genderism. These notions are all interconnected and play a major role in one’s life. Kimberlé Crenshaw presented the term of intersectionality as she...

Concept of Intersectionality and Community Engagement

Intersectionality Originally introduced as a concept to challenge a feminist analysis which spotlighted a woman’s gender experience while seemingly rendering invisible and irrelevant her other experiences and realities intersectionality is now used to better understand the plight of various marginalized groups and individuals. Intersectionality plays...

"The Color Purple": A Tale of Struggle and Empowerment

Alice Walker's The Color Purple is a novel that is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece that explores the intersectionality of oppression. The novel is set in the American South during the early 1900s and follows the life of Celie, a black woman who faces...

• Sexual Orientation
• The Color Purple

Best topics on Intersectionality

1. Aspects of Canadian Political Reality Intersectionalities Approach

2. Intersectionality: How Our Names Give Us Identity

3. The Time-Based Traffic Sign Systems at Intersections

4. Principle of Intersectionality and the Determinants of Racial Discrimination

5. Intersectionality in Brussel’s Hip Hop Scene

6. Practice of Intersectionality in the Nursing Environment and Patient’s Treatment

7. Bringing Awareness to Marginalized Groups Through Intersectionality

8. Concept of Intersectionality and Community Engagement

9. “The Color Purple”: A Tale of Struggle and Empowerment

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3 Intersectionality and the Study of Sex, Gender, and Crime

S.J. Creek is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hollins University.

Jennifer Dunn is Professor of Sociology at Texas Tech University.

• Published: 01 July 2014
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This essay explores intersectionality as a paradigm and attends to its application to the study of crime. This interdisciplinary and critical theoretical approach emphasizes the imperative that scholars consider the multiplicative (rather than simply additive) effects of varying systems of oppression in the lives of both victims and offenders. Sections in this essay address intersectional insights into criminological discourses and research on intimate-partner violence, victimization, offending, and criminal justice processes. By reviewing literature that deconstructs and blurs binary categories of identity and social action, the essay provides many examples of “what difference our difference made” (Crenshaw 2005, p. 312).

3.1. Introduction

Intersectionality is a paradigm for understanding inequalities. Rooted in critical race theory and black feminist thought, intersectionality initially emerged from efforts to theorize violence against women. Since its introduction, the term has become part of the lexicon of many criminologists. Because intersectionality treats identity categories as socially constructed yet structurally consequential, it has affinities with critical criminology and victimology and creates important theoretical leverage for explicating complex social processes. It also has commonalities with postmodern approaches to identity and the social construction of reality, in that it views identity categories as analytically and empirically inseparable and refuses to organize oppressions hierarchically. As an orientation, approach, or theoretical construct ( Davis 2008 ), intersectionality has begun to move beyond studies of violence against women into the broader literature on gender and crime. This essay explores that process.

Crenshaw (1991) , a black feminist scholar and critical race theorist, provides the earliest articulation of the term intersectionality. Crenshaw lays bare the experiences of many African American women at the margins of both the (male-dominated) antiracist movement and the (white-dominated) feminist movement. This marginalization is especially evident in the experiences of women of color who are victims of violence at the hands of men of color and who find that the help-seeking strategies of the white antiviolence movement leave them and their communities vulnerable to further violence. Since 1991, scholars across many disciplines, particularly feminist scholars in criminology, have drawn from Crenshaw’s insights. To cite just one example, in the inaugural issue of Feminist Criminology , the journal of the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime, Burgess-Proctor (2006 , pp. 27–28) argues that “the future of feminist criminology lies in our willingness to embrace a theoretical framework that recognizes multiple, intersecting inequalities” and is “informed by multiracial feminism.”

This essay begins with a detailed introduction to Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. It moves forward to highlight gender victimization and the implications of an intersectional approach to this topic. It then “blur(s) the boundaries” ( Daly and Maher 1998 ; Ferraro 2006 ) between victimization and offending by exploring where the labels victim and offender intersect and the consequences of that intersection. Next, it examines how scholars are incorporating intersectionality into the study of criminal victimization, offending, and the criminal justice system’s responses to these. The final section discusses the theoretical, methodological, and analytical complexities raised by this approach and its current and potential future contributions to the study of gender and crime. Although intersectionality can be challenging for scholars to grapple with, operationalize, discern, and illustrate, it is too important conceptually to dismiss on the basis of the difficulties it poses for empirical research and understanding. Therefore, the conclusion argues that the approach will gain in popularity as it becomes increasingly clarified conceptually and its practical parameters better specified.

3.2. The Paradigm of Intersectionality

In rendering visible the overlapping dynamics of discrimination, Crenshaw (1991 , p. 1242) is critical of an identity politics that “frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences” and focuses on how “the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class.” She argues (p. 1242) that when scholars and activists treat categories of oppression and subordination as “mutually exclusive terrains,” they fail to capture the theoretical implications and empirical consequences of social location at the intersections of multiple dimensions of social stratification. For Crenshaw, “the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (p. 1244). Years later, Crenshaw explains why she chose to focus on violence as her exemplar. Reflecting on her own experience of violence perpetrated against her by her African American, radical ex-boyfriend and the “racial rhetoric” that protected him at the time, she says:

To me the real challenge was the task of mapping, context by context, what differences our difference made. And it was in the arena of violence that experience indicated it was the most acute. It seemed to me that only when we can articulate when and how difference matters can we effectively work to include our difference within the broader struggle to end the violence that circumscribes our lives. (2005, p. 312)

Crenshaw identifies herself explicitly as a black feminist to make the point that women of color have been excluded from feminist theory and adds that black feminists are concerned with “other factors such as class, sexuality, and age” (1991, supra note 8, p. 1244). These other dimensions are often crucial determinants of life chances and lived experience, and Crenshaw (p. 1245) notes that her “focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.”

From the standpoint of critical race theory, Crenshaw’s work began to expand the then most academically salient categories of oppression beyond race and gender. She also articulates the position that it is the interactions between multiple politically consequential identities that are important, a position that theoretically blurs boundaries and through this tends toward the postmodern position that identities are fluid, permeable, and socially constructed rather than fixed, discrete, or objective entities ( Schneider 2004 ). Indeed, in a footnote, Crenshaw (1991 , supra. p. 124) says that she considers intersectionality “a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.” According to McCall (2005 , p. 1771), feminists have “embraced” a conceptualization of intersectionality as “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations—as itself a central category of analysis.” McCall also highlights more radical strands of intersectional thought that “encompass perspectives that completely reject the separability of analytical and identity categories” (p. 1771, fn 1).

Scholars such as Daly (1993) and Daly and Stephens (1995) were early advocates for intersectional approaches. According to Burgess-Proctor (2006) , however, the dominance model that characterized early third-wave feminism did not consider “multiple, intersecting sites of dominance,” and thus many questions about the implications of an intersectionality paradigm remain:

Do women of color or lesbian women who are “multiply burdened” experience dominance in the same ways as straight White women? What about women victims and offenders? How do they experience dominance, both by perpetrators and by practitioners of the criminal justice system? (p. 34)

For Burgess-Proctor (p. 35), a synthesis of intersectional and multiracial feminist approaches makes “universal relevance” possible for feminist scholarship on race, class, gender, and crime. Multicultural feminists argue for an intersectional approach that “recognizes that race, class, gender, sexuality, and other locations of inequality are dynamic, historically grounded, socially constructed power relationships that simultaneously operate at both the micro-structural and macro-structural levels” (p. 37). Applied to crime and criminal justice, practices formerly theorized as “racist/sexist” or “white/male” become “racialized/gendered” and all people were included in the matrix, broadening the scope and utility of feminist criminology. Scholars can examine the role of social location in criminal justice system responses to offenders, as Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer (1998) do in their quantitative analysis of sentencing outcomes and the “punishment costs” of being young, black, and male and as Spohn and Holleran (2000) do in their extension of that analysis to include Hispanic ethnicity and employment status. Both of these studies point to the interactive rather than additive effects of being “at the margins” of race, class, age, and gender ( Burgess-Proctor 2006 ), in ways similar to Richie’s (1995) research on African American battered women’s criminality, Maher’s (1997) exploration of multiple intersections in low-level women drug dealers, and Sokoloff and Dupont’s (2005) call for intersectional theorizing of domestic violence.

For Collins (2000 , p. 229), arguably one of the most influential black feminist theorists, race, class, and gender also are woven into “interlocking systems of oppression.” She protests against either/or binaries that silence African American women’s experiences, and she foregrounds the “fallacy that gender affects all women the same way—race and class matter greatly” (p. 229). Drawing on Crenshaw and her own earlier work, Collins (2004 , p. 11) notes that “[i]‌ntersectional paradigms view race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and age, among others, as mutually constructing systems of power.” In reflecting on her scholarship, she observes she has “consistently tried to theorize intersectionality in the overall corpus of [her] work,” and she does so in order to avoid “competing frameworks” and “ranking” oppressions (pp. 10–11).

Exploring similar, “competing” tensions, Volpp (2001) addresses cultural narratives that pit feminism against multiculturalism, arguing that this positioning assumes that minority women are victims of their culture and that Western liberal cultures are far less patriarchal than the cultures of minority women. This obsession with the violence against women in other cultures ignores colonialism’s impact on the evolution of minority cultures and deflects reflexive consideration of violence against women in the West. Volpp (p. 1187) offers that too often the focus is “‘They burn their women there.’ As opposed to ‘we shoot our women here,’” and points to examples of men who commit violence against women and claim “culture” as the motivator. As a consequence, media “happily” pick up this explanation and ignore the perspectives of women in the now excoriated culture.

For Simpson and Gibbs (2006 , p. 269), the idea that women’s identities are “multifaceted” is crucially important. Bograd, drawing explicitly on Crenshaw (1991 , 1992 , 1993 ), discusses this in terms of inequalities:

We exist in social contexts created by the intersections of systems of power (for example, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation) and oppression (prejudice, class stratification, gender inequality, and heterosexual bias)...These systems are not mutually exclusive, static, or abstract. They operate independently or simultaneously, and the dynamics of each may exacerbate and compound the consequences of another. (2005, p. 26)

Bograd (p. 27) goes on to say that “intersectionality suggests that no dimension, such as gender inequality, is privileged as an explanatory construct...and gender inequality itself is modified by its intersection with other systems of power and oppression.” Intersectionality, as a means of “mapping, context by context, what difference our difference” makes ( Crenshaw 2005 , p. 312), is a theoretical tool to lay bare the ways in which men’s and women’s experiences of crime and victimization are complicated by their multiple, intersecting identities. For example, an intersectional perspective challenges assumptions that gender inequality is the most salient factor we need to understand the ways in which women experience victimization. Multiple dimensions or “axes” (Collins 2000) of women’s social locations, when understood more fully, reveal themselves as interacting to create vulnerability to violence and shape strategies of resistance against victimization.

3.3. Intersectionality and Victimization: Looking at Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence

Criminologists, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists have, with a growing awareness, brought an intersectional lens to their analyses of victimization. Particularly with regard to domestic violence and sexual assault, researchers’ use of an intersectional process complicates how we understand the perpetration of, experience of, and resistance to these crimes ( Crenshaw 1991 , 1993 ; Josephson 2002 ; Collins 2004 ; Sokoloff 2004 ; Bograd 2005 ; Erez, Adelman, and Gregory 2009 ; Singh 2010 ). As briefly discussed in this section, early feminist work on the nature of violence against women and the potential solutions to it are arguably inadequate and fail to address women’s lived experiences of violence and victimization (see Bumiller this volume and Williams, McKelvey, and Frieze this volume). Drawing from Crenshaw, researchers have begun to use intersectional lenses to gain insight into how violence against women intersects with class ( Hall 2000 ; Josephson 2002 ), immigration status ( Abraham 2000 ; Bhatarrcharjee 2001 ; Erez, Adelman, and Gregory 2009 ; Singh 2010 ), race ( Hall 2000 ; Collins 2004 ; Sokoloff 2004 ), ethnicity and nationality ( Volpp 2001 ; Buss 2009 ), and histories of colonialism ( Smith 1999 ).

Josephson (2002) , for example, argues that poor women experiencing domestic violence may seek out federal assistance as a means of gaining independence from an abuser. Yet in seeking such benefits, low-income women face significant barriers. Women in Josephson’s study noted that abusers often sabotaged efforts to gain skills for and maintain steady employment. If access to assistance requires employment, women may lose a resource that might otherwise facilitate greater independence. Josephson also highlights anecdotal evidence that federal assistance time limits may encourage women to stay with their batterers rather than leave and not have the means to survive.

Other scholars consider the experiences of female immigrants coping with domestic violence (see Kubrin and Trager this volume). Erez, Adelman, and Gregory (2009) , for example, call attention to the experiences of legal and undocumented immigrants in the United States. They highlight (a) how immigration affects the types, rates, and severity of intimate-partner violence; (b) the ways in which immigration changes the contours of partnerships with one or more immigrant partner; and (c) the compromising of women’s safety and help-seeking opportunities by heightened policing of immigration in the United States. More than 75 percent of the 137 immigrant women in the United States whom Erez and colleagues interviewed reported that their abusers had used their immigration status to force them into compliance. As one research subject put it, “He knows the system; I don’t” ( Erez, Adelman, and Gregory 2009 , p. 46). Moving to the United States led to increased isolation for women in this study and significantly changed the dynamics of their relationships with their abusers. Further, many respondents argued that the economic challenges they and their partners faced heightened the abuse.

Erez, Adelman, and Gregory (2009) contend that these factors, together, produced a chilling effect on women’s help-seeking strategies. Similarly, Singh (2010) argues that silence is commonly a safer option for immigrant women in Canada, who potentially face the removal of batterers from the home, batterers on whom they are dependent for economic support, linguistic assistance, and immigration status. Those willing to brave this reporting may yet risk further violations at the hands of law enforcement and the courts. The work of Singh and Erez and colleagues demonstrates that dominant understandings of domestic violence ultimately will be of little help to immigrant women coping with violence in their lives. Mainstream solutions of leaving the abuser, calling the police, and seeking a women’s shelter implicitly rest on the assumptions that the survivor is a white woman with citizenship. For such a woman, the police are more likely to be a resource, not a potential source of violence, and shelters are places likely to affirm her culture and language; however, for many immigrant women, leaving means losing vital support networks. Calling the police puts undocumented family and community members at risk and opens up the community to further scrutiny in an already xenophobic society. Thus the experiences of the women in Singh’s and Erez and colleagues’ studies cannot be understood solely as a “gender issue.” Other identities and oppressions intersect at the points of violence in these women’s lives and require a more complex and nuanced approach by both scholars and advocates.

Relatedly, Buss (2009) points to Western preoccupation with rape and violence against third-world women and instances when such violence can be used to justify militarization and colonial intervention. Acknowledging both the above complexities and mainstream interpretations of the “other” as violent, Sokoloff (2004 , p. 141) writes that “this approach fails to understand the impact of US imperialism and the oppression of the state both within and outside.” The imagery of the violent “other” was used to justify the colonization of North and South American indigenous peoples. Smith (1999) points to early writings in which Europeans “worry” about the plight of indigenous women:

Thomas Jefferson argued that Native women “are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people...It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their equality.” The Mariposa Gazette similarly noted that when Indian women were safely under the control of white men, they are “neat, and tidy, and industrious, and soon learn to discharge domestic duties properly and creditably.” In 1862, a Native man in Conrow Valley was killed and scalped, his head twisted off, with his killers saying, “You will not kill any more women and children.” Apparently Native women can only be free while under the dominion of white men. (p. 23)

That women in Western cultures had far fewer rights than many indigenous women or that European women who joined indigenous cultures often did not wish to return was not discussed ( Smith 1999 ).

This long-standing Western preoccupation with third-world women’s experiences of violence feeds into the silence of contemporary women of color. Smith (1999) argues that in the face of centuries of colonization, diaspora, and disenfranchisement, indigenous women in the United States now experience disproportionate levels of violence; simultaneously, Native Americans face disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates, as well as significant exposure to police brutality. But to speak out about violence can be interpreted as “airing dirty laundry” and as making vulnerable communities open to further colonial interference and violence.

The fear of airing dirty laundry by reporting violence extends beyond immigrant and indigenous communities to other communities of color. Collins (2004) contends that many African American women remain silent in the face of fears that friends and family will abandon them and that they will be accused of violating racial solidarity. This pattern is evident in survivor Pierce-Baker’s (2000, p. 64) account of her experiences:

I didn’t want my nonblack friends, colleagues, acquaintances to know that I didn’t trust my own people, that I was afraid of black men I didn’t know. Or was it that I didn’t want those people to know “what I had been doing”? I felt responsible for upholding the image of the strong black man for our young son and for the white world with whom I had contact.

Women of color seeking to end the violence they face are constrained by looming possibilities of differential treatment by police ( Richie and Kanuha 1993 ; Robinson and Chandek 2000 ; Bhattacharjee 2001 ; Coker 2005 ), discrimination in the criminal justice system ( Sokoloff 2004 ), loss of community ( Collins 2004 ; Erez, Adelman, and Gregory 2009 ; Singh 2010 ), and perpetuation of the racist and classist prison industrial complex ( Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2001 ; Collins 2004 ; Sokoloff 2004 ).

As shown in this section, merely using gender as the primary lens of analysis with regard to women’s victimization has been challenged by growing numbers of sociologists, legal scholars, and criminologists. Their research highlights how poverty, race and racism, immigration status, and colonization serve not only to complicate our earlier understandings of women’s victimization but also to increase our understanding of the heterogeneous cultural contexts in which women experience and resist victimization. In some cases, resistance in the context of the matrix of domination ( Collins 2000 ) is itself read as criminal offending.

3.4. Blurred Boundaries: At the Intersection of Victimization and Offending

An intersectional lens also encourages scholars to attend to the permeability and ambiguity between categories of “victim” and “offender”—a blurring that is only heightened by structural inequalities ( Daly and Maher 1998 ). A number of feminist scholars criticize oversimplified, mutually exclusive social categories that obscure the complex realities of the women they purport to describe. Dunn (2010) , for example, finds that many women who experience violence in their lives negotiate available social categories of “blameless” or “blameworthy” but not both simultaneously. These oppositional categories dominate the ways in which the public thinks about intimate violence and agency and lead to popular perceptions of victims and offenders in dichotomous terms. She notes that conceptions of agency are inextricable from images of victimization and also tied to gendered normative expectations. In her analysis of abuse by the clergy, she writes that the “qualities (weakness, helplessness, dependence, and passivity) we associate with victims are so much more stereotypically feminine than masculine” (p. 192). This has implications for the ability of men to talk about or report victimization in that “heterosexism and homophobia may restrict adult male victims from telling this kind of story” (p. 192).

An intersectional approach provides avenues toward explicating how some types of people are more readily assigned blame than others within the social structural and historical context of definitional processes. For example, Ferraro (2006) and Stubbs and Tolmie (2008) suggest that women sentenced to prison for killing their batterers do not fit easily in either “victim” or “offender” categories. Ferraro (2006 , p. 9) critiques the artificial “victim/offender” binary, arguing instead for a “more complex, more nuanced understanding of intimate partner violence...less focused on control and ‘accountability’ of individuals than on developing social conditions that promote safety, hope, and well-being for women, children, and men.” Stubbs and Tolmie also challenge the victim/agent dichotomy in their consideration of indigenous women in Australia. They write:

Since Indigenous women are substantially overrepresented within the criminal justice system as offenders, they are much more likely than non-Indigenous battered women to have a prior record, which in turn may be interpreted to undermine their claim to victim status. (2008, p. 140)

Stubbs and Tolmie note, too, that like many marginalized groups in the United States, indigenous groups in Australia may be less likely or less able to use the police or social services as a strategy of resistance. Violence becomes one of the few options available for resisting violence, leading to more indigenous women in the Australian criminal justice system labeled as “offenders.” By virtue of the nature of this dichotomy, there is no room for these women to be simultaneously understood as “victims.” There is no “complex, nuanced understanding of intimate partner violence” ( Ferraro 2006 , p. 9); there is no conceptual space to consider the relationship between the violence perpetrated by and toward Aboriginal women; and there certainly is no “mapping context by context what difference [their] difference” makes ( Crenshaw 2005 , p. 312).

The blurring of the boundaries between victimization and offending should be understood as occurring in interaction with intersecting structural inequalities. Thus, Stubbs and Tolmie (2008) use an intersectional lens, situating indigenous women’s offending within a broader historical context of colonization and dispossession and challenging the false dichotomy of “victim/offender.” Erez and Berko (2010) document the impact of prior abuse and oppressive cultural mores upon Arab-Palestinian women’s “pathways” to prison. During the course of interviews with young girls sentenced as adults in the US criminal justice system, Gaarder and Belknap (2002) noticed that “some of the most significant experiences in the lives of the young women interviewed were the interlocking oppressions of gender, race, class, and sexuality that brought them to this blurred domain of victimization and offending” (p. 509). An intersectional focus fosters a consideration of individuals not as “atomized subsets but as (complete) entities” ( Joseph 2006 , p. 300) and allows for a “both/and conceptual stance” ( Collins 2004 , p. 206). This shift permits the blurring of boundaries and the simultaneous identification with categories that have traditionally been constructed as mutually exclusive, such as “victim” and “offender.”

3.5. Intersectional Approaches to Gender, Offending, and Criminal Justice Processes

In the third edition of their introductory criminology textbook, Barak, Leighton, and Flavin (2010) , take an intersectional approach, perhaps an indication of its potential for “mainstreaming.” Building on critical race theory, critical race feminism, and critical white studies, Barak and colleagues (p. 25) assert “there is no standardized ‘class’ experience, ‘race’ experience, or ‘gender’ experience, but rather there is a repertoire of interacting class, race, and gender identities” that shapes individuals’ crimes and experiences of the criminal justice system.

An example of work that has drawn on intersectionality to understand offending is De Coster and Heimer’s (2006) study of violent crime. Taking the question of why black females’ offending rates are closer to the rates of white males than white females as their starting point, they claim that research to that point had not shown how “race, class, and gender simultaneously operate to shape experiences of crime and violence,” despite increasing interest in intersectionality ( De Coster and Heimer 2006 , p. 138). To understand the “macrolevel interlocking structural inequalities and microlevel interactions that define racialized, classed, and gendered positions,” De Coster and Heimer propose that criminologists “focus on socially constructed identities and experiences that are embedded within structures of race, class, and gender inequality” (p. 140).

Using a symbolic interactionist approach to masculinities, femininities, and violence, De Coster and Heimer review Wilkinson’s (2001) study of disadvantaged minority males, Mullins, Wright, and Jacobs’s (2004) research on “extremely marginalized” African American men, as well as Anderson’s (2000) classic ethnography of street interactions in Philadelphia to illustrate the idea of a “ racialized masculinity that is specific to [disadvantaged males’] history and structural position” (2006, pp. 142–43, emphasis in original). They then introduce other research, such as Richie’s (1995) study of battered black women and Miller’s (2002) investigation of girls in gangs and violent femininities, as evidence that researchers have to be able to account for differences within groups and the multiplicity of gender identities and coping strategies found in the literature. De Coster and Heimer argue that, from a structural symbolic interactionist perspective, criminologists can show how “intersecting inequalities affect the situations encountered by people, and thus their negotiated meanings of selves and the social world” (2006, p. 147). People’s opportunities to enact gender without resorting to violence are constrained by their social locations, and understanding their definitions of their situations can explain the “heterogeneity in violence within and across race-class-gender groups” ( De Coster and Heimer 2006 , p. 153).

Other research drawing on an intersectional approach to explore offending includes Mullins and Miller’s (2008) examination of the escalation of violence in disputes between poor black girls and women. Analyzing the stories of violence of Lisa, Sugar, and Pumpkin, they ask how “situational and interactional processes associated with girls’ and women’s violent conflicts are gendered, [and] how this gendering is embedded within social locations of intersecting inequalities” (p. 37). Additionally, they overlay neighborhood contexts and proceeding events on their analysis, arguing such details are commonly neglected in criminological research. While these three case studies are not generalizable, their rich detail allows Mullins and Miller to get at the intersectional backdrop to women’s violence and crime and to build theory.

Scholars have also used an intersectional approach to examine criminal justice responses to crime and reintegration after incarceration. Huebner, DeJong, and Cobbina (2010) bring an intersectional focus to their quantitative exploration of long-term patterns of recidivism among women offenders. With this approach, they highlight significant intragroup variation in the effects of education, drug use, and neighborhood-concentrated disadvantage on recidivism. At the center of her analysis of the disproportionate number of African American women imprisoned in the United States, Sokoloff (2004) lays out the multiple and multiplicative inequalities that result from their overincarceration. Similarly, Christian and Thomas (2009) use an intersectional perspective to illuminate the experiences of the large numbers of black women in the United States who are connected to the prison industrial complex through personal experiences of imprisonment, as well as through the imprisonment of relatives and community members. The incarceration of family members and community members particularly is “heavily borne by African-American women,” exacerbating day-to-day challenges and further marginalizing these women ( Christian and Thomas 2009 , p. 75).

Increasingly, scholars are also bringing an intersectional lens to global contexts. Erez and Berko (2010 , p. 157) find that Arab/Palestinian women end up in Israeli prisons due to “intersections of gender, national identity, ethnicity, and class [that] lead to both similar and different experiences of oppressions compared with other female offenders.” Vargas and Alves (2010) situate police lethality in São Paulo within a racialized, gendered, aged, and classed urban space, producing a richer analysis of this unequally distributed lethal violence. While police violence has traditionally been understood simply as an issue of class conflict, Vargas and Alves consider the interaction of race, gender, and “spacialization” of São Paolo’s lethal police violence, creating what they call a “geography of death” (p. 618).

In light of intersectional feminist critique of the strategies of the antiviolence movement, a number of scholars and activist have discussed the possibilities of restorative justice models to address violence against women. Daly (2006) , for example, grapples with the promise of “restorative justice” in an Australian context. She notes that early in her career she became uncomfortable with (white, middle-class) feminist reliance on the criminal justice system, at the expense of marginalized offenders, and as a consequence, she found alternative means of justice increasingly attractive. One such alternative, “restorative justice,” may appeal to intersectional scholars and is associated with

[c]onferences, circles and sentencing circles....The common elements of restorative justice are an informal process; a dialogic encounter among lay (not legal) actors, including offenders, victims, and their supporters; an emphasis on victims describing how the crime has affected them and offenders taking responsibility for their acts; and consensual decision-making in deciding a penalty, which is normally centered on “repairing the harm” caused by the crime. (2006, p. 135)

Despite its potential, Daly acknowledges that this set of processes has received mixed reviews, with feminists around the globe noting the ways that the needs of women of color, particularly indigenous women’s needs, are met (or not met) by these alternative forms of justice ( Stubbs 2002 ; Coker 2006 ; Balfour 2008 ; Marchetti 2010 ; Smith 2010 ). For example, in an analysis of Navajo peace-maker processes, Coker (2006 , p. 67) argues that restorative justice may be beneficial to survivors of domestic violence only if these processes

prioritize victim safety over batterer rehabilitation; offer material as well as social supports for victims; work as part of a coordinated community response; engage normative judgments that oppose gendered domination as well as violence; and do not make forgiveness a goal of the process.

While both Daly (2006) and Coker (2006) highlight times when restorative justice can be empowering for indigenous women, they also acknowledge the potential shortfalls of such approaches. Coker, for example, describes instances in which peacemakers failed to hold abusers responsible for their abuse, saw domestic violence as mere “conflict,” or refused to see divorce as a viable option.

Restorative justice, then, holds some promise for intersectional scholars and activists concerned with violence against women because of the following: (a) It does not rely on the state/the prison-industrial complex as much as does the mainstream antiviolence movement; (b) it can offer additional options for women beyond leaving the home, going to a shelter, or calling the police; (c) it reduces fears of airing dirty laundry to agents of an oppressive state; and (d) it allows women to build strategies in connection with their direct communities. Yet it can, as some have discussed, still lead to instances in which women choose between their status as “women” and as members of a racial/ethnic community. Most important, restorative justice is inadequate when it acknowledges the economic and racial marginalization of offenders while failing to place women’s safety at the center of concern ( Coker 2006 ; Daly 2006 ; INCITE! n.d.).

As this brief and selective review has shown, criminological and legal studies over the past two decades have increasingly incorporated and even expanded on the theoretical insights from Crenshaw’s early work on intersectionality. Sociologists, political scientists, criminologists, legal scholars, and many others have drawn from this paradigm to gain richer understandings of men and especially women’s experiences with intimate violence, offending, trials, sentencing, alternative forms of justice, incarceration, parole, and recidivism.

3.6. Intersectional Complications

Scholars have criticized intersectionality from a number of fronts. Some have likened it to a postmodern “buzzword” ( Davis 2008 ), and a number, both within and outside criminology and the social sciences ( McCall 2005 ; De Coster and Heimer 2006 ; Simpson and Gibbs 2006 ; Hancock 2007 ; Barak, Leighton, and Flavin 2010 ) are concerned with methodological as well as theoretical complications related to the complexity of the construct ( Hancock 2008 ; Bowleg 2008 ; Choo and Ferree 2010 ; Felson this volume; but cf. Shields 2008 for an argument that methodological concerns are an unfortunate and unnecessary diversion). Davis discusses the “remarkable success” of intersectionality across disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and political persuasions but argues that scholars are reasonably confused:

Some suggest that intersectionality is a theory, others regard it as a concept or heuristic device, and still others see it as a reading strategy for doing feminist analysis...It is not at all clear whether intersectionality should be limited to understanding individual experiences, to theorizing identity, or whether it should be taken as a property of social structures and cultural discourses. (2008, p. 68)

Calling the theory “vague,” Davis (2008 , p. 69) cites McCall’s (2005) call for a “more coherent conceptual framework and methodology” and ultimately decides that intersectionality addresses “the most central theoretical and normative concern within feminist scholarship [of difference and diversity]” (pp. 71–72), provides new ways of looking at these central concerns, appeals to both generalists and specialists, and is “ambiguous and open-ended” (p. 77) such that it “encourages complexity, stimulates creativity, and avoids premature closure” (p. 79).

McCall (2005) addresses the “complexity” of intersectionality in her often-cited essay. Her concern is primarily methodological: If intersectionality is “the most important theoretical contribution” made to date by feminists, it is problematic that it is so “challenging” to study empirically (pp. 1771–72). Framing the issues in terms of whether to treat analytical categories as “simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences” or to reject them completely, McCall (p. 1773) argues for “provisionally adopting existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions.” Put more simply, can scholars make use of categories without slipping into essentializing practices or reifying social constructions? Citing her own research methodologies as an exemplar, she concludes that “a wider range of methodologies is needed to fully engage with the sets of issues and topics falling broadly under the rubric of intersectionality” (p. 1774).

Because McCall uses quantitative data, she advocates for the use of “‘interaction effect’—or ‘multilevel,’ ‘hierarchical,’ ‘ecological,’ or ‘contextual’ modeling—all of which introduce more complexity in estimation and interpretation than the additive linear model” (2005, p. 1778). Importantly, she points out that her use of “advanced quantitative techniques and large data sets from impersonally administered survey questionnaires” is thought by some feminists to be antithetical to feminist epistemologies (p. 1791). In the end, McCall urges scholars to transcend disciplinary divisions and the methods associated with them “in order to embrace multiple approaches to the study of intersectionality” (p. 1795).

Criminologists Simpson and Gibbs (2006) also note the epistemological critique of quantitative studies of intersectionality. They cite Daly’s (1994) preference for qualitative methods “because the phenomenon cannot be easily reduced to quantifiably distinct categories that are separate from one another (and thus treated as additive or interactive in their effects)” (p. 271). To test the applicability of quantitative methods, they study general theories of delinquency, comparing pooled models to an intersectional model. While they find some benefit to the intersectional analyses, they state that, “[o]‌verall, the application of quantitative techniques produces mixed results and an interpretive challenge for feminist scholars” (p. 282). Simpson and Gibbs conclude that mixed methods will be more successful than quantitative analyses on their own because adding qualitative methods shows how criminogenic processes “texture the life of real actors” with more nuance, while “giving voice to intersectional members, so that interpretations emerge from the subjects themselves rather than being imposed on them by the researchers” (p. 286).

Like many of the scholars whose work is discussed in this essay, Burgess-Proctor (2006) suggests that intersectionality lends itself to qualitative or mixed-methods research designs due to its emphasis on lived experience. Drawing from the work of Way (2004) , Burgess-Proctor notes the suitability of “historical institutionalism” (a type of institutional ethnography that situates women’s experience over time) for intersectional scholarship. Because of intersectionality’s “concern for the simultaneity of micro- and macro-level systems,” qualitative data from the former and quantitative data revealing the latter can be fruitfully combined. She notes that qualitative methods lend themselves to sensitive questions and may better elicit the experiential reality of life at the intersections of power and privilege. Burgess-Proctor offers the work of Bridges and Steen (1998) as an illustration; their quantitative analysis shows that legal variables mediate the relationship between probation officers’ assessments of juvenile offenders, but qualitative data reveal that the social location of the offenders was equally important.

De Coster and Heimer (2006 , p. 153) also comment on the difficulties of doing research “that allows for study of a variety of race-class-gender groups simultaneously.” It is difficult to do ethnographic research in many different groups, and, in their view, quantitative studies “have not targeted the issues most relevant for understanding intersectionalities and crime” (p. 153). While they take a structural interactionist, qualitative approach, they conclude that combined methods are the “best route to follow...Each research style brings important insights, and the synthesis of their findings allows us to learn more than we could with each methodological approach alone” (p. 154).

Barak, Leighton, and Flavin (2010) devote an entire chapter to the challenges of doing research on intersectionality, asserting that, even now, theorists are “just starting to develop the vocabularies and conceptual frameworks for grasping the multiple meanings and implications of these crosscutting social relations” (p. 137). Like others, they recognize the tensions between avoiding essentializing while simultaneously attending to patterns, and they argue that because different dimensions of social location will be salient in different situations (or, as they put it, “there is no master status”), criminologists cannot yet specify under what conditions particular categories will take precedence. According to Barak and colleagues (pp. 138–39), “the emphasis must be on how they work together.” Attending to people’s simultaneous experiences of privilege and oppression presents further challenges, and the many possible permutations of class, race, and gender become unwieldy quickly in quantitative analyses. Data on “subtle” differences are often lacking in large data sets or collapsed into one category. Barak and colleagues provide as illustration the case in which “adding together Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and nonwhite Latinos creates a category so diverse it defies interpretation” (pp. 141–43).

Quantitative studies (arguably privileged in criminology), while helped by the use of interactive terms, additional variables, and nonlinear or reciprocal dynamics, remain dependent on categories that are static, while the lived experience of intersectionality is “quite fluid in ways that theory cannot yet capture” ( Barak, Leighton, and Flavin 2010 , p. 144). This means that, thus far, the most useful research “tends to be qualitative, descriptive, and narrative, emphasizing the contextual aspects of people’s day-to-day existence” (p. 144). Thus Barak and colleagues join others in calling for combined methods, suggesting that quantitative data supplement the “nuanced meanings of class, race, gender, and their intersections” (p. 144) that qualitative data and methods illuminate.

Finally, it is important to attend to a complication addressed by Williams (2009) in her analysis of a rare integration of intersectional insights into legal policy. Shifts in Canadian penal policy in the mid-1990s allow and encourage judges to take into account broader contexts of the lives of indigenous individuals, with the explicit goal of reducing the number of indigenous people incarcerated. Despite the promise of bringing intersectional knowledge to this point in the legal process, Williams finds that incarceration of indigenous women has actually increased since the enactment of this policy. She notes that “[w]‌hile intersectionality claims may lend support to decisions that seek to contain the defendant’s risk/needs in the community, now reconfigured to serve punitive ends, similar claims may appear also in justifications for assigning the defendant to carceral space” (p. 95). Ultimately, she advocates a shift from strategies that focus on judicial behavior to those that highlight more direct efforts to prevent the imprisonment of indigenous women. Her analysis bears important implications for future scholarship arguing for the integration of intersectional understandings into legal policy.

3.7. Conclusion

This essay examines the emergence of intersectionality as a theoretical paradigm and the ways in which it enables researchers in a variety of fields, particularly those interested in gender and crime, to gain deeper and more sociologically complex understandings of the effects of social location on victimization and offending. It reviews theory and research that shows why gender is limited as a structure on which to hang theory and why one ought to consider other systems of stratification and lived experience as well as the intersections of multiple social forces. By reviewing literature that deconstructs and blurs binary categories of identity and social action, the essay provides many examples of “what difference our difference made” ( Crenshaw 2005 , p. 312).

Certainly, the more deeply the paradigm of intersectionality and its application to research on gender and crime are delved into, the more interesting the possibilities become, and, at the same time, the more challenging the work of effectively engaging them in ways that allow feminist and “mainstream” criminologists—as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologists, positivists and post-positivists, and social scientists who do and do not take activism for social justice as the natural consequence of doing criminology—to “talk across the aisles.” The paradigm of intersectionality, variably interpreted, operationalized, and utilized, has clearly taken many disciplines by storm and made significant advances within criminology. There are good reasons for this; intersectionality is rooted in the premise that a useful approach must give attention to the complexity of interrelated identities, processes, and social structures as they operate in ever-changing and always consequential ways.

The future of research and theory from an intersectional approach requires a meeting of the minds at scholarly intersections. That is, sociologists, critical and feminist theorists, criminologists, and victimologists are not themselves always separable; some occupy all these categories simultaneously even as they view the social worlds they study from their own raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, and other perspectives. There is no topic within the area circumscribed by the label “gender and crime” that cannot benefit from taking intersectionality as a starting point, but in order to do this, the process of blurring boundaries and deconstructing binary categories of research methods and analysis must begin. Work is needed across disciplines that specifies what constitutes intersectionality as a construct and that makes the construct applicable and as parsimonious as possible, given its complexity and deliberate complicating of the categorical, whether it is called a “variable” or a “theme.”

It does not serve criminology well to dismiss the importance of the multiplicative effects of different dimensions of social location (including gender but not always privileging it) on vulnerability to victimization, the sometimes ambiguous and complicated relationships among victimization, offending, and the myriad criminal justice responses to crime and victimization. However, because intersectionality always interrogates inequalities and is therefore inherently a critical approach, and because it is a phenomenon that appears to be easier to make tangible in qualitative research, it remains to be seen whether it will make further inroads into “mainstream” criminology, which has tended toward the conservative and quantitative end of the continuum in social science for reasons that deserve an essay in themselves.

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Digging into intersectionality

Intersectionality is a concept that’s getting a lot of attention these days. So, what is “intersectionality” and why does it matter to LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion?

Intersectionality—a brief history

Intersectionality might seem like a new concept, but it’s actually been around for a pretty long time. The legal scholar Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989 in response to a series of court cases, including the 1976 case, DeGraffenreid vs. General Motors (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”).

This case concerned seniority-based layoffs carried out by General Motors during a recession that hit the U.S. in the early 1970s. Basing layoffs on seniority—essentially, last hired, first fired—might seem like the fairest way to make tough decisions about who gets to keep vs. lose a job. But General Motors, like many companies, had a long history of discrimination and had just started to hire Black women in the 1960s. So, when seniority-based layoffs were instigated in the 1970s, nearly all Black women at GM lost their jobs (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, 1976).

Five Black women filed a class action Title VII lawsuit charging that the seniority policy was discriminatory. But the court disagreed, noting that General Motors had long hired Black men and White women and therefore could not have been practicing discrimination based on either race or gender. The court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that Black women faced a unique combination of racial and gender-based discrimination that was distinct from the experiences of either Black men or White women (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, 1976).

As Dr. Crenshaw pointed out, the court’s single lens focus meant that it literally could not recognize the discrimination experienced by Black women. It would take an intersectional approach—one that could consider an individuals’ position at the intersection of racism and gender-based discrimination—to address more nuanced circumstances. Over time, Dr. Crenshaw’s analysis has been extended to encompass the ways that numerous aspects of our identities, including race, gender, social class, sexual identity and disability, overlap and combine in ways that shape individual experiences, including experiences of privilege and/or oppression.

Is everyone intersectional?

You could say that everyone is intersectional to the extent that we are all complex individuals with multi-faceted identities—none of us fit neatly into single little boxes. That’s a concept that’s conveyed via the identity wheel pictured above. Any one of us can find different elements that come together to make up who we are as unique individuals. But intersectionality was conceived primarily to analyze and address discrimination as experienced by individuals whose identities place them at the intersection of two or more axes of oppression —such as race and gender, or gender and sexual identity, or social class and disability. So, in that sense, some people are more intersectional than others.

Roots in the LGBTQ+ community

Dr. Crenshaw’s work and our own understanding of intersectionality owe a lot to pioneering efforts within the LGBTQ+ community. Although Dr. Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, her work rested on prior frameworks developed by Black feminists in the 1970s, many of whom identified as lesbians. These women founded an organization called the Combahee River Collective to focus on the concerns of Black LGBTQ+ women which were not being addressed by either the mainstream women’s movement or the civil rights movement. The Combahee River Collective’s efforts to understand multiple systems of advantage and disadvantage—including sexual identity--laid the foundation for Crenshaw’s legal analysis in the 1980s and helped pave the way for a more holistic approach in addressing discrimination (The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977).

Intersectionality and the LGBTQ+ community today

Fast-forward several decades, and intersectionality helps us to see both commonality and diversity within the LGBTQ+ community. As gender and sexual minorities, LGBTQ+ people have a lot of common ground. They are a community— in that respect. They share a common history of both discrimination and the struggle to achieve equality. But LGBTQ+ people are also multi-faceted individuals, and they have distinct experiences, including degrees of advantage and/or disadvantage. For instance, overall poverty rates among the LGBTQ+ community are higher than in the non-LGBTQ+ population. But when we look more closely, important distinctions emerge. One group, cisgender gay white men, have a lower poverty rate, on average, than their straight counterparts—that is, cisgender straight white men. That suggests that the advantages this group has in being cisgender, white and male outweigh the disadvantage of being a sexual minority when it comes to earning power. For other groups—LGBTQ+ persons of color and LGBTQ+ women for instance--discrimination works along multiple lines to put them at an economic disadvantage vis-à-vis their straight counterparts (Badgett et al., 2013).

LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion—an intersectional approach

Intersectionality helps us see that If we want to achieve more equal outcomes for LGBTQ+ people, our policies need to take into account different facets of identity, and how they interact and compound one another. For instance, LGBTQ+ youth of color are disproportionately represented in populations of homeless youth and in populations of young people caught up in the criminal justice system. If we want to address youth homelessness and lower the population of young people in the criminal justice system, we must address discrimination along lines of both race and LGBTQ+. And we need to consider the specific challenges facing young people whose identities place them at the intersection of these two axes of oppression. If we just address one form of discrimination but leave out the other or fail to consider the specific challenges facing LGBTQ+ youth of color, then many young people will fall through the cracks—just like the Black women at General Motors did back in the 1970s.

By the same token, organizations can best be served by taking a holistic approach to policies and procedures to combat discrimination. If we take a single-lens approach to equity and inclusion efforts for LGBTQ+ individuals, we risk leaving out whole swaths of people. Only an intersectional approach provides a nuanced understanding of who is or is not benefitting from existing diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, allowing organizations to make adjustments accordingly. Are women of color benefitting equally to white women, for instance, or are the needs of transgender individuals being addressed alongside employees who are gay or bisexual? Are women or nonbinary individuals with disabilities finding opportunities within the organization?

An intersectional lens

Intersectionality helps us all to see one another as we really are so that we may act accordingly. Every one of us is a complex individual, and we experience different facets of our identity simultaneously, not discreetly. None of us can divide ourselves up into neat little boxes—much as the legal system, or some social frameworks—might want us to. As contemporary scholars Linda E. Carty and Chandra Talpade Mohanty put it, “All of us live complex lives . . . [W]e are [all] actually living at the intersection of overlapping systems of privilege and oppression" (Coleman, 2019). That’s why intersectionality is at the forefront of diversity, equity and inclusion strategies—including for the LGBTQ+ community.

About the author--Kathleen Clark is Chief Learning Officer of Identiversity Inc. She lives with her family in Charlotte, NC and writes widely on topics relating to diversity, equity and inclusion.

References:

Badgett, M. V. L., Durso, L., & Schneebaum, A. (2013, June). New patterns of poverty in the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community . Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgb-patterns-of-poverty/

Coleman, Arica L. (2019, March 29). What's Intersectionality? Let These Scholars Explain the Theory and It's History. Time. https://time.com/5560575/intersectionality-theory/

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, Issue 1, Article 8. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

The Combahee River Collective. (1977). The Combahee River Collective Statement. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/

U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. 413 F. Supp. 142, E.D. Mo., 1976. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/413/142/1660699/

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Sociological Theories / Intersectionality

Intersectionality Essay Examples

Research report on intersection of collider and dark matter phenomenology.

As a particle physicist, my goal is to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature. Some of the questions that interest me are - what elementary particles constitute the universe and what symmetries govern their interactions? Why there are more particles than anti-particles in the...

Intersectionality Within the American Media

Intersectionality is the concept that in order to understand the amount of oppression one experiences in relation to others, one must first break down the amount of different disadvantage groups the individual is in. The more disadvantaged groups the individual is in, the more oppression...

The Idea and Views of Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a concept that is often use as a mean for understanding race and colorism we see on everyday lives and in the media in daily basics. It is a concept created to help understand the multiple identities of a person, or a group...

Understanding the Concept of Intersectionality

Defined over and over, intersectionality is ultimately stripped down to layers of uniqueness with which we identify ourselves with. Initially this word was utilized to describe an individual’s lifetime experiences, such as oppression and privilege. Taken at face value, Deaf and/or Hard of Hearing (HoH)...

The Importance of Intersectionality

In Intersections: The Simultaneity of Race, Gender and Class in Organization Studies, Evangelina Holvino notes that even though there has been progress in the inclusion of race in mainstream organization theorizing, there has not been much progress in the field of organization development and change...

An Issue of Intersectionality in the Film Mean Girls

As was all know there are various forms of discrimination, including things like prejudice based on race, age, and gender to name a few. We often consider these things in isolation. However, intersectionality looks at these multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage and how they...

Intersectionality and Social Identifiers in Modern Society

In the months leading to the writing of this essay, and after reading a handful of passages from The Contexts Reader I have found that the overlapping of race, gender, class and the disadvantages that stem from these social divisions are much more common that...

Intersectionality in India: Assam State

Assam is state arranged in the northeastern piece of India encompassed by other managerial units of area, i.e., Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya and furthermore by outside nations like Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Topographically Assam contains rich waterway valleys encompassed and sprinkled by mountains...

Critiques of Intersectionality

If we look at identity politics, a lot has changed since the 1960s. While the American Left rhetoric was all about colorblindness and national unity back then, it’s now changed to a group-based rhetoric, and intersectionality is no exception. In current political discourse, intersectionality divides...

The Impact of Social Order on Me: Race, Gender and Class

Social order can be defined as the system that links social classes, groups, economic classes, beliefs, cultural traditions and norms to work in unison with each other. Every country and region have its own peculiar social order. In Western societies, social order revolves around racial...

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About Intersectionality

Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.

According to Crenshaw, there are three forms of intersectionality: structural, political, and representational intersectionality.

These factors include: race, indigeneity, socioeconomic status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, (dis)ability, spirituality, immigration/refugee status, language, and education. One of the ideas of intersectionality is for individuals, groups and communities to self-identify.

The concept of intersectionality describes the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects.

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