Quotes From Intersectionality Scholarship: Crenshaw, 1991
In Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw lays out many of her views and ideas about how race and gender intersect in society.
Because intersectionality is such a widely used term, and because Crenshaw is so frequently cited when it is used, I thought it might be helpful to look beyond the Twitter threads, blog posts, and comments sections and deliver some of the actual sections of that seminal paper. All quotes are Crenshaws, from the academic paper linked to above. I’m not going to insert my own commentary, other than to say that going to the source is often the best way to gain clarity and understanding, and if you have time to read the entire Mapping the Margins paper, I hope you will.
Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as “woman” or “person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.
I should say at the outset that intersectionality is not being offered here as some new, totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender considered here. Indeed, factors I address only in part or not at all, such as class or sexuality, are often as critical in shaping the experiences of women of color. My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.
Because of their intersectional identity as both women and people of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, the interests and experiences of women of color are frequently marginalized within both.
These observations reveal how intersectionality shapes the experiences of many women of color. Economic considerations-access to employment, housing, and wealth-confirm that class structures play an important part in defining the experience of women of color vis-à-vis battering. But it would be a mistake to conclude from these observations that it is simply the fact of poverty that is at issue here. Rather, their experiences reveal how diverse structures intersect, since even the class dimension is not independent from race and gender.
While the intersection of race, gender, and class constitute the primary structural elements of the experience of many Black and Latina women in battering shelters, it is important to understand that there are other sites where structures of power intersect. For immigrant women, for example, their status as immigrants can render them vulnerable in ways that are similarly coercive, yet not easily reducible to economic class.
These examples illustrate how patterns of subordination intersect in women’s experience of domestic violence. Intersectional subordination need not be intentionally produced; in fact, it is frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with preexisting vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment.
The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one’s political energies between two sometimes opposing political agendas is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront. Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of the entire group.
Women working in the field of domestic violence have sometimes reproduced the subordination and marginalization of women of color by adopting policies, priorities, or strategies of empowerment that either elide or wholly disregard the particular intersectional needs of women of color. While gender, race, and class intersect to create the particular context in which women of color experience violence, certain choices made by “allies” can reproduce intersectional subordination within the very resistance strategies designed to respond to the problem.
The struggle over which differences matter and which do not is neither an abstract nor an insignificant debate among women. Indeed, these conflicts are about more than difference as such; they raise critical issues of power. The problem is not simply that women who dominate the anti-violence movement are different from women of color, but that they frequently have power to determine, either through material or rhetorical resources, whether the intersectional differences of women of color will be incorporated at all into the basic formulation of policy. Thus, the struggle over incorporating these differences is not a petty or superficial conflict about who gets to sit at the head of the table. In the context of violence) it is sometimes a deadly serious matter of who will survive-and who will not.
I want to suggest that intersectionality offers a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics.
Or instead, that any discourse about identity has to acknowledge how our identities are constructed through the intersection of multiple dimensions? A beginning response to these questions requires that we first recognize that the organized identity groups in which we find ourselves are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions waiting to be formed.
Intersectionality may provide the means for dealing with other marginalizations as well. For example, race can also be a coalition of straight and gay people of color, and thus serve as a basis for critique of churches and other cultural institutions that reproduce heterosexism.
With identity thus re-conceptualized, it may be easier to understand the need for, and to summon the courage to challenge, groups that are after all, in one sense, “home” to us, in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home. This takes a great deal of energy, and arouses intense anxiety. The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of “the group” has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few.
Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics.
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color
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With I Am Intersectionality, I hope to provide thought-provoking resources that will help us understand more about our own personal intersections, and what those intersections mean in the historical and social moment we are living in today. If you’d like to get an occasional email with articles and resources on intersectionality, sign up here!
