Intersectional Feminism Theory

Different groups of women will experience oppression differently and each of these experiences needs to be understood using intersectional theory.

Intersectionality is a term that investigates ‘how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life’ (Collins & Bilge, 2020).

In feminist theory, intersectionality looks into how women’s complex and intersecting experiences contribute to gender inequality.

Consider a working-class woman. She may experience oppression in two ways: for being a woman and for being working-class.

Further oppression can be added if she is also an ethnic minority, disabled, or homosexual. Each of these structures shapes a person and produces unique inequalities.

The history of intersectional feminism

Crenshaw Names Intersectionality

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1989. She recognized that many kinds of oppression intersect. People at those intersections face unique challenges and dilemmas.

In her paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, Crenshaw focused on Black women. They experience social inequality in two ways: first for being a woman, and second for being Black (Crenshaw, 1989).

To show how this plays out, Crenshaw examined a real employment case. A group of Black women sued a car manufacturer. They challenged its seniority-based layoff policy.

The company had not hired Black women until several years after it began hiring white women. When layoffs came, seniority decided who kept a job.

Black women were the last hired and the first fired.

The court refused to hear a combined claim of race and sex discrimination. It treated the two as separate categories.

The women could not merge them into a new hybrid claim. The company could point to the Black men it had hired, which defeated a race claim.

It could also point to the white women it had hired, which defeated a sex claim. The women fell into a legal blind spot.

Crenshaw called this single-axis thinking: treating race and gender as separate, parallel tracks. Anyone at the intersection of two or more disadvantaged categories is erased from legal protection. Their experience matches neither track alone.

The flaw lay in how the law was built, not in how judges applied it. A framework that protects people on one ground at a time will fail anyone disadvantaged on several.

Crenshaw extended the argument in Mapping the Margins, which examined domestic violence and rape (Crenshaw, 1991). She distinguished two ways intersectionality operates:

• Structural intersectionality: Race, gender, class and immigration status combine to shape the obstacles women of color face when escaping violence, such as language barriers.
• Political intersectionality: Women of color are marginalized within movements built around one axis of identity. Anti-racist politics centers men, and feminist politics centers white women.

Earlier Roots in Black Feminist Thought

Although the word is recent, the idea is not. Several Black feminists developed it long before Crenshaw gave it a name:

• Sojourner Truth (1851): In her speech Ain’t I a Woman?, the abolitionist contrasted white, middle-class women, treated as delicate, with Black women, who faced grueling labor and racist abuse.
• Combahee River Collective (1977): Black lesbian feminists committed to fighting racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression together, as they experienced them simultaneously (Combahee River Collective, 1977).
• Angela Davis (1981): In Women, Race, & Class, Davis traced how racial subjugation, gendered labor and economic exploitation together shaped Black women’s lives under slavery and its aftermath (Davis, 1981).
• Audre Lorde (1984): Lorde argued that women’s lives were too varied for a single feminist agenda. She described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” (Lorde, 1984).
• Patricia Hill Collins (1990): Collins described a ‘matrix of domination’: race, gender, class and sexuality form interlocking systems of oppression at structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal levels (Collins, 1990).

The Combahee River Collective rejected two movements at once. One was ‘white feminism,’ a white-led movement that treated gender as the only axis of oppression. The other was a Black liberation movement that often centered men.

Collins’s matrix of domination has a similar implication: women are subordinated not only by men, but also by race and social class.

How is intersectional feminism different from other types of feminism?

Intersectional feminism broadens the scope of feminist issues. It considers the differences between women rather than treating women as one all-encompassing group.

White Feminism in the Early Waves

Early feminist movements may often be labeled ‘white feminism,’ since the issues and experiences of white women were at the forefront. Other intersecting factors that make up different groups of women were rarely considered.

Intersectional feminism criticizes these movements for focusing mainly on white, western, middle-class women.

The first wave shows the pattern. The women’s suffrage movements were instrumental in granting women the right to vote. Yet the voting rights of the working class and minority ethnic groups were mostly ignored.

The second wave was no different. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), instrumental in that wave, targeted middle-class housewives dissatisfied with housework and childcare.

Friedan proposed that women hire domestic workers to do the household chores while they worked. That solution ignored many Black and working-class women.

They could not afford to hire help. Many were themselves domestic workers for middle-class white women.

Liberal and Marxist Feminism

Intersectional feminism criticizes liberal feminism for a blind spot. It overlooks how race, social class, sexual orientation, and ability, among others, are interwoven. Together they create different levels of women’s oppression.

Many liberal feminists believe the issues facing white, mostly Western women are issues all women face. They may celebrate a high number of white women in positions of power. Yet women who are non-white, of different sexual orientations, or disabled rarely hold these positions.

Marxist feminism is intersectional in one sense. It considers how women experience two forms of oppression: first by being a woman, and second by their social class.

However, Marxist feminist theory did not initially consider the other intersections that can oppress women. A Black working-class woman, for instance, has different experiences of a white capitalist society than a white working-class woman.

The table below compares four perspectives. It shows where intersectional feminism departs from each.

Perspective	Locates oppression in	Intersectional response
Liberal feminism	Unequal legal and civil rights; pursues reform within existing institutions.	Necessary but insufficient. Removing formal barriers helps most the women who already face the fewest other barriers (Crenshaw, 1989).
Radical feminism	Patriarchy, treated as a single, near-universal structure.	Male dominance is real, but patriarchy is lived differently depending on a woman’s race, class and sexuality (Collins, 1990).
Marxist feminism	Two axes at once: gender and class, through women’s unpaid or underpaid labor under capitalism.	Stops at two categories, so it cannot explain why a Black working-class woman’s position differs from a white working-class woman’s (Crenshaw, 1989).
Standpoint feminism	Social position, which shapes what people are able to know.	A close relative, not a rival. Intersectionality is an analytic claim about how categories combine; standpoint theory asks whose knowledge counts (Collins, 1990).

Why is intersectional feminism important?

Intersectional feminism has provided a stronger understanding of how oppression uniquely affects women. Four ideas sit behind that understanding:

• Experiences Differ: Women of different ethnicities, religions, sexualities, social classes, abilities, and ages cannot be assumed to experience sexism in the same way.
• Multi-Dimensional Lives: Women cannot be reduced to single categories, because their lives are complex.
• Combined Factors: Theorists of intersectionality insist that no single form of disadvantage can be understood unless a woman’s other intersecting factors are also considered.
• Visible Injustice: Social inequality, problems, and injustices are less visible when gender, race, and social class are analyzed separately.

Intersectional feminism does not just apply to marginalized groups of women. Social structures that disadvantage certain groups also privilege other groups (Weldon, 2008).

Social relations are complex. Nearly everyone is privileged in some ways while simultaneously being disadvantaged in others. A lesbian woman who is white is privileged for being white but faces oppression for being a woman and not heterosexual.

Moreover, a woman of a high social class is privileged for being wealthy, but she may have a disability that disadvantages her.

Context matters too. How much someone is oppressed or privileged by their social structures depends on the situation. Intersectional feminism therefore shows how complicated individuals and society are.

Applications of Intersectional Feminism

Intersectional feminism has moved well beyond theory. It now shapes research, clinical practice, workplaces, classrooms and public campaigns.

Research and Clinical Practice

Intersectionality replaces an additive model of oppression with an interactive one. In the additive model, race, sex and class disadvantage stack up like separate weights.

In the interactive model, categories combine into experiences unlike any single category alone.

That poses a methodological challenge for psychology. Standard quantitative designs default to additive main effects.

Bowleg (2008) argued that treating race and gender as statistically independent variables, as a factorial design does, risks reproducing the additive logic that intersectionality rejects. A poorly chosen method can label a study intersectional while quietly re-testing an additive model.

Bowleg’s answer was to mix methods.

Qualitative work can surface categories that participants treat as fused, such as ‘Black lesbian woman’ rather than ‘Black’ plus ‘lesbian’ plus ‘woman.’ Quantitative work must then look for interaction effects. An interaction effect is a combination that produces something different from the sum of its parts.

Warner (2008) distilled these lessons into best-practice recommendations. They help researchers study intersectionality without stripping out its central claim.

The same logic reaches the clinic. The American Psychological Association’s Multicultural Guidelines take “an ecological approach to context, identity, and intersectionality” (American Psychological Association, 2017).

Psychologists are asked to consider how a client’s multiple social identities jointly shape their difficulties. The same identities affect their access to care and their relationship with the clinician. They are not separate boxes to tick.

Take a disabled, working-class lesbian client. Her clinician should ask how those identities interact in her life, rather than address each as an isolated demographic fact.

A clinician who treats ‘women’ and ‘Black people’ as two separate groups will miss whatever is specific to the intersection.

Workplaces, Education and Public Policy

Employment data are often reported along single axes, with separate breakdowns for ‘women’ and for ‘racial/ethnic minorities.’ Bowleg (2012) argued that this convention obscures the position of women of color.

Women of color can be undercounted in both categories. ‘Women’ may be read as white women, and ‘minorities’ as men of color. This intersectional invisibility hides disparities that appear only when race and gender are examined together.

Examples include differences in promotion or pay for women of color compared with white women and men of color.

Education research shows the same pattern. A large study of undergraduate STEM students found that ‘sense of belonging’ changed the likelihood of switching out of STEM majors. Its effect differed by group (Rainey et al., 2018). White women, Black women and Black men responded differently.

An intervention that worked for one group did not straightforwardly work for another. ‘Women in STEM’ and ‘Black students in STEM’ are not two additive problems needing two additive solutions.

The #SayHerName campaign applies the same insight to advocacy. Co-authored by Crenshaw, it countered media coverage and policy responses that framed police violence as affecting Black men almost exclusively.

That framing made Black women’s and girls’ experiences of police violence largely invisible in the public record and in policy debate (Crenshaw & Ritchie, 2015).

The campaign descends directly from Crenshaw’s original legal argument.

A harm at the intersection of race and gender can vanish from view, and from redress, unless someone deliberately names it.

Critical Evaluation of Intersectional Feminism

Scholars who work within intersectionality have also questioned it. Three conceptual criticisms recur, and empirical research adds a fourth about measurement:

• Definitional Looseness: Its rapid spread has blurred what counts as an intersectional analysis and what would count as evidence against it.
• Fragmentation: If oppression always divides further, a movement of ever-smaller groups may struggle to organize collectively.
• Cultural Reach: A framework built from U.S. legal and racial history may not transfer to societies stratified along other axes.

Is Intersectionality Too Vague?

Davis (2008) took a sociology-of-science perspective. She argued that intersectionality’s ambiguity helped it spread, because researchers could define and apply it in different ways.

That same openness makes it hard to say what would count as evidence against it.

Nash (2008) pushed further. Scholarship often treats Black women’s experience as the self-evident example of intersectionality. It rarely works out how the framework applies to other combinations of identity. That leaves its core claims under-specified rather than genuinely tested.

Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) replied that the word itself does not make an analysis intersectional. What does is the “adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference.”

On this view, the looseness is a deliberate feature of an analytic disposition, not a failure of a testable theory.

Psychology expects its constructs to be measurable. So it sits uneasily between these positions. In fact, 27% of quantitative studies claiming to use intersectionality never defined it (Bauer et al., 2021).

Does Intersectionality Fragment Feminism?

Some scholars worry that oppression can always be divided further. Consider Black women, disabled Black women, working-class disabled Black women, and so on.

Categorization then has no natural stopping point. A movement built on ever-smaller identity groups may struggle to organize collectively. Nash (2008) places this among wider tensions over whether an emphasis on difference can be reconciled with a shared feminist politics.

Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) disagree. They argue that naming difference is what makes coalition possible. A feminism that suppresses real differences in the name of solidarity, they say, has historically represented only its most privileged members.

Collins (2015) calls this tension between unity and specificity one of intersectionality’s genuine ‘definitional dilemmas.’ The field is still negotiating it, not settling it either way.

Does Intersectionality Travel Beyond the United States?

Intersectionality grew out of American employment law and the racial history of Black and white America. That raises a fair question. Does it transfer to societies organized around other axes, such as caste, ethnicity, colonial history or religion?

Collins and Bilge (2020) traced how the framework has been adopted and adapted across many national and disciplinary contexts. They argue that its core claim travels well.

Systems of power are mutually constituting, not separable. This holds even when the categories differ, such as caste rather than race.

The question is best read as ongoing adaptation, not settled fact. Applying the framework elsewhere still requires care about which categories of power matter locally. U.S. categories do not map directly onto other societies.

Contemporary Research

Psychology took up intersectionality recently, and its uptake is incomplete. Two bodies of research show how the framework performs in practice.

How Well Has Psychology Measured Intersectionality?

The strongest evidence comes from a systematic review. It sits above individual studies in the hierarchy of evidence because it synthesizes the whole published literature.

The review confirms, across a whole literature, a worry that Bowleg (2008) and Warner (2008) raised from individual studies. It is a consistent pattern, not an isolated complaint.

Testing intersectionality well takes qualitative or mixed methods, or statistical techniques built to detect interaction (Bauer et al., 2021).

Do Race and Gender Combine Additively?

Experiments in social psychology suggest that race and gender are not processed additively. Even basic person perception shows this.

Goff et al. (2008) ran face-categorization tasks. A predominantly white sample made significantly more errors judging the gender of Black women’s faces than any other combination of race and gender. This fits an implicit tendency to associate Blackness with maleness.

Ghavami and Peplau (2013) compared stereotypes. Participants generated stereotypes for single-axis groups, such as ‘women,’ and for intersectional groups, such as ‘Asian American women.’

The intersectional stereotypes held distinctive content that combining the two single-axis stereotypes could not predict. Participants attributed different traits to Latina women than to Latino men or to women in general.

Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) proposed intersectional invisibility. People with two or more subordinate-group identities are less likely to be seen as prototypical members of either group. Their concerns become harder to see, research and address.

Two papers in American Psychologist argued that the discipline must change how it thinks, not only how it counts. Cole (2009) proposed three guiding questions for any study population:

• Who is included in this category?
• What role does inequality play in their lives?
• Where are the similarities across groups usually assumed to be different?

Rosenthal (2016) added that incorporating intersectionality is not only a matter of statistical correctness. It is also an opportunity for psychological science to represent, and better serve, populations that single-axis research has systematically under-described.

Where the Evidence Stands

Two claims have the strongest support. First, single-axis analysis misses effects that appear only when categories are examined jointly. Experiments support this directly (Goff et al., 2008; Ghavami & Peplau, 2013).

Second, psychology has struggled to operationalize intersectionality with the rigor the theory demands (Bauer et al., 2021).

The weaker ground is normative and definitional. Scholars still disagree about whether the framework’s reach has outpaced its precision. They also disagree about what its spread means for feminist strategy (Davis, 2008; Nash, 2008; Cho et al., 2013; Collins, 2015).

One direction follows clearly. The field needs techniques, beyond simple interaction terms, that detect multiplicative rather than additive patterns of disadvantage. Bauer et al. (2021) found this to be its clearest unmet methodological need.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a criticism of intersectional feminism?

While intersectional feminism tries to avoid putting women into singular identity boxes, it still tends to put people into categories. While the groups may be more complex, intersectionality still groups people based on identity markers, e.g., Black women or disabled women.

That can miss how unique each woman’s experience is. In principle, an infinite number of shared characteristics could split women into smaller and smaller groups, until only one person fits a new category.

Perhaps everyone’s societal experience is so unique that they cannot be classified so simply.

Who are some key intersectional feminists?

Aside from Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term ‘intersectionality,’ there are many other noteworthy intersectional feminists.

One of these is Angela Davis, who incorporated intersectional feminism into her book Women, Race, & Class before the term ‘intersectionality’ was coined. In her book, she considers how Black women have been oppressed based on being Black, women, and of a lower social class (Davis, 1981).

Audre Lorde also contributed. She argued that women were too complex, and their experiences too different, for a single feminist agenda (Lorde, 1984). She called herself a ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,’ embracing her intersectional identities.

How can feminist research incorporate intersectionality?

In feminist research, an intersectional approach avoids excluding most women. It also stops researchers fitting women’s experiences into the same group as women whose lives are very different.

Data collection works the same way. Factors such as gender, class, and disability, among others, are considered together.

This produces a more specific and in-depth analysis of how these factors influence the data. Feminist research should be more accurate as a result.

However, researchers should not make generalized assumptions for each intersectional factor based on quantified data.

References

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