Entry · catalog no. 1321
intersectionality
/ /ˌɪntərsɛkʃəˈnælɪti/ /in-tur-sek-shuh-NAL-ih-tee
noun · Los Angeles and New York legal academy; carried nationwide and then worldwide · 1980s
✓ Verified
1.
The way overlapping forms of discrimination — race and sex above all — combine into a harm that neither category alone can describe or remedy. Crenshaw's original case was Black women shut out of employment suits because the law would hear race claims or sex claims but not both at once.
“The suit failed because the court made her pick. That is the exact gap intersectionality was coined to name.”
2.
In looser popular use: attention to the several identities a person holds at the same time.
“The panel was billed as intersectional, which mostly meant everybody got a turn.”
Origin & Attribution
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black legal scholar, in "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. Crenshaw was writing about real cases — DeGraffenreid v. General Motors among them — in which Black women lost because the courts treated race and sex as separate boxes. The thinking behind it is older and also Black: the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper. Crenshaw gave it a legal name and a second paper in 1991 extending it to violence against women of color.
1977
The Combahee River Collective Statement lays out the interlocking analysis the term later formalizes
1989
Crenshaw coins intersectionality in the University of Chicago Legal Forum
1991
Mapping the Margins extends it to violence against women of color in the Stanford Law Review
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Los Angeles and New York legal academy; carried nationwide and then worldwide · 1980s
Spoken by
Black feminist scholars and lawyers; organizers; now general academic and political speech
$INTERSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady37 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
84/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1989
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, iss. 1, art. 8
law review article · 1989
■
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review 43(6)
law review article · 1991
■
+ Cite a sourceCombahee River Collective Statement
manifesto · 1977
See also