Purpose Of Intersectionality In Sociology

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.

Chapter#2 discusses the meaning of intersectionality. It also discusses ways to apply intersectional analysis to research on racism. This chapter also informs its readers on how to design a research on perceived racism.

It is mandatory to understand the history behind Intersectionality and it’s upbringing to understand how it ties into cultural identity. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s classic article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” helps to understand the struggle that women of color face with entwined differences that are not confronted and dealt with accordingly. Crenshaw mentions that, “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite -- that is frequently conflates or ignores infra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is

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 holds that the theories of oppression within society do not act independently of each other, but are interrelated. This creates a system of oppression that reflects the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination. An advantage would be recognizing that all people are at the center of multiple intersections of power, inequality and privilege. They are shaped by their class, race and gender. These categories represent our views of the world and our actions taken, and includes other peoples views of us. No one fits into just one category because we have multiple categories. Within our own identities, we form our opinions of what we constitute as legal or illegal, right or wrong, and necessary or unnecessary.

I liked one definition of intersectionality which I would like to put here. “Intersectionality seeks to provide a tool for analyzing the ways in which gender, race, class and all other forms of identity and distinction, in different contexts, produce situations in which women and men become vulnerable to abuse and discrimination.”(1). When we try to study how the intersection of race, gender, social class, effects humans and how are they connected then it means we are using intersectionality theory. For example what are the problems of white, young, female and what are the problems of black, young female. What will happen if we remove young from the equation and replace it with old? Inequality of gender is clearly defined but inequality of same sex is complicated. If we want to know the problems of women and man then we might just find some sex related issues. But when we talk about just men or women then it’s a different story. I heard that all men are created equal but people use different lens to see it. For example, some time man is called black man or white man, Muslim man or Christian man. They are all men but their gender intersects with other identities and makes them different from one another. When somebody is discriminated on the basis of color, we know this exist. Intersectionality tells us about other kind of discrimination. For example black man with different religion. It means same gender, same color, same language but different religion.

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 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

Intersectionality according to Patricia Hill Collins is the “theory of the relationship between race, gender and class” (1990), also known as the “matrix of domination” (2000). This matrix shows that there is no one way to understand the complex nature of how gender, race and class inequalities within women’s lives can be separated; for they are intertwined within each other.

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