Kimberle Crenshaw Intersectionality

UNDERSTANDING INTERSECTIONALITY

Submitted to – Prof Akila

Submitted by – Sonal Sarda

Roll No. : 72LLB12

Subject: Jurisprudence - II

National Law University, Delhi

2015

UNDERSTANDING INTERSECTIONALITY

INTRODUCTION

Emerging as a critique to the dominant understandings of feminist theory and antiracist politics in the 1980s, intersectionality sought to highlight the problematic consequences of treating race and gender as mutually exclusive, as was being done in feminist and antiracist practices. Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality and authored two articles, was a leading figure in this movement which accentuated the need to account for the ‘multidimensionality in the lived experiences of marginalised

She argues that disregarding other dimensions of intersectional identities in discourses dealing with one such dimension, say ignoring impact of racism in feminist discourses, leads to marginalisation in all such dialogues.

Crenshaw, in her two papers, uses interaction between gender and race to highlight its role in shaping structural, political and representational aspects of various social realities. She uses this to emphasize on the need for intersectionality, to account for multiple grounds of identity. She additionally concedes that the concept can be expanded by factoring in other issues like age, class, sexuality etc which also play an important role in shaping the experiences of the subjects.

Richard Delgado, a civil rights and critical race theorist, critiquing the concept of intersectionality in general, and that of Crenshaw in particular, does not understand when the process of formation of sub groups stops because several sub groups may arise with one or more characteristics different from the original group. This would prove to be an impediment in the functioning of the legal system, politics and political work, which all presuppose the existence of

But Crenshaw’s model in using Black woman as a monolithic entity, neglects how these experiences may vary across women in the group, and ignores how the experiences are further influenced by attributes other than race and gender. However, Crenshaw does admit that there are other factors which do influence experiences, her focus on two limited attributes just serves to ‘highlight the need to account for multiple grounds of identity.’

She also fails to take stock of the fact that race and gender could have operated in varied forms for particular black women in different historical moments. Thus, she treats these attributes as being the same for all women without accounting for temporal and/or spatial