Intersectionality

As Canada continues to diversify, it is becoming even more important to have a true holistic view of development including social factors through intersectionality.

Intersectionality, popularized in 1989 by an American, Black Feminist and activist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, describes the complexities of our identities and how they are cohesively tied to our histories and daily experiences. It suggests our identities co-exist in an interconnected web of various social categories, such as, race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality, education, language, citizenship status, disability, neurodiversity, religion, culture, marital status, employment status, family structure, body size, and many other categories (Hankivsky, 2014).

These social categories intersect, and so, are not experienced in isolation from one another (Collins, 2015; Hankivsky, 2014). Individual experience can be very different depending on the context, including country, government, or system (education, legal, etc.) (Collins, 2015). As a result, as seen throughout history, people experience structural inequalities due to systemic racism, sexism, and many other types of ‘isms’.

Originally, Crenshaw (1989) highlighted how Black women experience compounded levels of racism, discrimination and sexism. This led to the understanding that each of our identities contain intersecting social categories that can translate to very different life experiences of power and privilege or inequity and oppression (Collins, 2015).

References

Collins, P.H. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1-20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24807587

Crenshaw, K. W. (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, 1989(1), 139 – 167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf

Hankivsky, O. (2014). Intersectionality 101. The Institute for Intersectionality Research & Policy, SFU. https://resources.equityinitiative.org/handle/ei/433