Intersectionality Essay

I am applying intersectionality and the sociological imagination to my intersecting identities: class, gender, and ethnicity. By employing intersectionality and the sociological imagination, I am analyzing how my positionality affected my personal experiences while connecting those events with society. I also included five peer-reviewed articles as supporting evidence.

Intersectionality is a framework that must be applied to all social justice work, a frame that recognizes the multiple aspects of identity that enrich our lives and experiences. This framework synthesizes and complicates oppressions and marginalization’s. In the article, “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait” Kimberle Crenshaw talks about how the purpose of intersectionality has been lost. Intersectional somehow creates an environment of bullying and privilege checking. This society cannot afford to have movements that are not intersectional because all races need to be embraced and have equality.

Intersectionality has truly opened my eyes in cases where there is a possibility where two systems of oppression can be working together to make life a struggle for a certain group or race. In the political world when someone feels that they are being mistreated or being taken advantage of they make their voice heard. They search for the correct people to help them in their situation and once in court and they feel that they have been mistreated for example racially and gender discrimination the question now becomes well which one is it? Gender or race? It cannot be both. Well, why can’t we choose both options each is a brick in the wall of oppression that everyone has faced at least once in their life. Not to generalize the fact that people face more walls in their life than others based on certain privileges from the type of skin, class, or the global power of wealth and how much it is used for ill intentions. Intersectionality creates lenses in seeing the “bricks” of the wall, seeing what each one stands for and what it does to us. However, it also shows us where it is weak and way for us as scholars to find the weak points and change our groups future where we will no longer fear to speak about the injustices we see every day and will be able to fight and give knowledge to our “enemy” as well for they could see their error as well.

In the memoir “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure”, Dorothy Allison recites stories from her life that ultimately depict the oppression and liberation seen in gender, sexuality, and social class. Intersectionality is a theme that can be seen throughout the book. Intersectionality is the overlapping of characteristics (such as sex, gender, race, class, and sexuality) that forms a person’s identity. Although people may have similar traits and characteristics, they are distinct from person to person. They can depict different features about different people throughout society.

Intersectionality has been partly criticized for being nebulous in nature and difficult to define and apply in practice. For the purposes of this paper, I do not wish to offer a defininitve definintion of the term, but instead offer an understanding of several key concepts which have particular salience for social work practice. Intersectionality can function both as a theory for understanding structural inequality but also as a paradigm through which to investigate these systems. Intersectionality scholarship has functioned primarily to highlight the complexity of interlocking systems of oppression. In doing so intersectional scholarship seeks to center the experience of marginalized groups, revealing how oppression manifests both inside and outside of social justice movements.

Power and oppression is something that has been in our world for a long time. With each generation, power and oppression come up in a new way and they are in peoples lives in different ways. A girl is told that they are not pretty enough if they are not like a Barbie doll and how men are constantly being taught that they need to be nothing but masculine. We constantly have a power over children to be what society wants them to be, no matter what gender they are. Society often tries to put them in a box at an early age and it leads to problems within our society. Intersectional analysis is something that is beneficial to our society and trying to move on from these societal problems.

As many women struggled to retain their values and traditions, there were existing male dominated conceptions of race and white dominated conceptions of gender. Kimberle Crenshaw describes the concept of intersectionality where race and gender interact in various ways to shape multiple dimensions experiences for different groups

Intersectionality is putting individuals within a population into certain categories based on assumed, or even true, similarities of those individuals and treating the individual differently, and most of the time unfairly, based on the category they are placed in. For instance, putting all people of color into one category and then treating them different just based on the fact that they are colored.

Intersectionality is a term that describes the ways which oppressive institutions such as, sexism, homophobia, racism, classism etc interact. Categories such as gender, ethnicity, poverty and mental illness reinforce each other in ’‘Women on the Edge of Time’’ and they overdetermine a negative outcome. Piercy put Connie in positions where she came to understand sexism, working class opression and white supremacy in both her personal life and in Mattapoisett.

An intersectional approach is an approach which seeks to demonstrate how race, class, gender and sexuality make certain experiences different. Intersectionality is the overlapping of social categories such as race, class, gender and sexuality that leads to further discrimination against a certain individual or group. To take an intersectional approach to understand race, class, gender and sexuality, is to consider hardships not as a similar element for all individuals without regards to race, but instead consider where in a specific hardship different races, genders, classes and sexualities are affected different. According to Crenshaw, “many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the woman race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (Crenshaw, 357). Crenshaw explains that the personal experiences of women of color cannot be fully understood by looking at race or gender discrimination as two separate factors, but in fact can be understood if both aspects are looked at together. When race and gender are examined separately, this causes for women of color to be “erased”. Crenshaw says, “ And so, when the practices expound identity as “woman” or “person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate

Intersectionality is a relevant theory for some gay, lesbian or bisexual individuals. Intersectionality studies "the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations" (McCall, 2005). The theory argues, pursues and considers how gender, race, sexual orientation and other categories of identity interact on many and often concurring levels of social relationships, therefore allowing discrimination and social inequity. Intersectionality explains how the notion of social injustice, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and belief-based bigotry such as religion are not independent of one another; instead, they are interconnected, and thereby reflect “intersectionality” in regards to social

Kimberlé Crenshaw is an esteemed civil rights advocate and law professor. Crenshaw introduced the concept of “intersectionality” to the acclaimed feminist theory close to 30 years ago in a paper written for the University of Chicago Legal Forum, describing the “intersectional experience” as something “greater than the sum of racism and sexism. (Crenshaw)” She wrote in terms of intersectional feminism, which examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face, based not just on gender but on ethnicity, sexuality, economic background and a number of other axes. She speaks on it in a sense that the term intersectionality provides us with a way to see issue that arise from discrimination or disempowerment often being more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion because of the protected clauses they may possess. Crenshaw speaks on the “urgency of intersectionality” in her Ted talk. This as well as her spreading awareness for the #SayHerName campaign drives a tie between the necessity for intersectionality advocaism and the the occurrences of neglect and violence present in societal happenings today. The question that stands in the forefront of her work is how can we effectively apply an intersectional methodology to analysis of violence and other acts against people who are often being neglected of any sort of recognition in social issues today? Intersectionality is one of the better known concepts within the

Today, a serious problem exists all over the world. Racial oppression takes place in the poorest and the richest countries, including America. Racial oppression is characterized by the majority, or the ruling race, imposing its beliefs, values, and laws on the minority, or the ruled race. In most areas, the ruling race is upper class whites that run the “system”, and have a disproportionate amount of power. In other areas, it may not be the white race, but it is still the race that is comprised of the majority, makes the laws, or has the most money. These are the keys to domination over the weaker minorities that don’t have the power to thrive under the majority’s system according to their own cultural beliefs,

Intersectionality is the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities. The theory of intersectionality stems from various socially and culturally constructed categorical groups, who are discriminated against based on their race, class, gender or other social inequalities. Historically, these groups have interacted on multiple levels and are simultaneously oppressed, stigmatized, marginalized through many means, such as indentured servitude, mass incarceration, collateral consequences, etc. Additionally, the issues racism and sexism are intertwined on many levels, and cannot be abolished individually. Therefore, in order to eliminate these different types of oppressions, the system (body of government, society) should be made more

The theory of intersectionality has received a widespread of various distinct definitions and usage; it is often unclear of its designed function may be. Intersectionality is defined as “the acknowledgment that different forms of identity-based discrimination can combine to give rise to unique brands of injustice”(Lucas 8). In other words, how the classification of one’s individuality such as gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and class can intertwine with each other among the social structure. The term was first coined by feminist and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw who spoke upon the discrimination and marginalization of black women and how both institutions interconnect with one another. The significance of