COEXISTENCE - Thesaurus of intersectionality and decolonial issues: black studies, gender, sexuality and feminist studies

Intersectionality

The term was coined by American civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities. These identities that can intersect include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, and physical illness as well as other forms of identity.[1] These aspects of identity are not "unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather...reciprocally constructing phenomena." The theory proposes that individuals think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all of the other elements in order to fully understand one's identity.

This framework, it is argued, can be used to understand how systemic injustice and social inequality occur on a multidimensional basis. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society—such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and belief-based bigotry—do not act independently of each other. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw introduced that within systems of oppression, domination or discrimination intersect and frequently reinforce each other. For example, all women are impacted by sexism but a transgender woman of color has a different experience of sexism than a white cisgender woman because the sexism she experiences is intersected with racism and transphobia.
Source: https://werepair.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Glossary-of-Racial-Justice-Terms.pdf
  1. An approach largely advanced by women of color, arguing that classifications such as gender, race, class, and others cannot be examined in isolation from one another; they interact and intersect in individuals’ lives, in society, in social systems, and are mutually constitutive.
  2. Exposing [one’s] multiple identities can help clarify they ways in which a person can simultaneously experience privilege and oppression. For example, a Black woman in America does not experience gender inequalities in exactly the same way as a white woman, nor racial oppression identical to that experienced by a Black man. Each race and gender intersection produces a qualitatively distinct life.

SOURCE:

  1. WPC Glossary from 14th Annual White Privilege Conference Handbook, White Privilege Conference, 2013.
  2. Intergroup Resources, 2012

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