Kimberle Crenshaw

6 Key excerpts on "Kimberle Crenshaw"

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  Object Lessons

  • Robyn Wiegman(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  To be sure, Crenshaw’s theoriza-tion encouraged just such a critical extrapolation, as the concept was initially developed by twinning a radical rereading of the atomization of race and gender in U.S. discrimination law with an equally radical, indeed devastat-ing, critique of the way that both black antiracist politics and feminist the-ory repeated the law’s tactical mistake. In the first of her two foundational essays, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” Crenshaw ana-lyzed a series of court cases with black female plaintiffs by examining the doctrinal “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive catego-ries” in order to rethink “the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands .” 15 The state was thus the central and, I will argue, paradig-matic agency of power toward which the political stakes of intersectional-ity, no less than its rhetorical invocation, were turned, which formally con-stituted the practices of antiracist activism and feminist theory as political projects in an explicitly juridical sense—as contestatory, plaintiff-based, and representational. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that Crenshaw’s 15. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection,” 140, emphasis added. CRITICAL KINSHIP { 247 inaugural formulation worked to confer statelike authority on its own criti-cal discernments, inaugurating intersectionality as a figure of value set not simply against the law but toward the fulfillment of justice that the juridical state was said to inadequately deliver. Today of course intersectional analysis travels well beyond the disci-plinary domain of law and its strategies of representation and resolution, and yet it is my sense that the juridical imaginary first emergent in Cren-shaw’s theory continues to govern intersectionality wherever it goes.

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  The futures of feminism

  • Valerie Bryson(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  As a black feminist concept, intersectionality has troubled the assumptions of many white western feminists by revealing the unthinking racism that has permitted them to think they can speak for ‘women’. However, now that the term is on the brink of assimilation into ‘mainstream’ feminist vocabulary, it sometimes seems little more than a sloppy buzzword, thrown around by feminist groups to indicate a wish to be inclusive, but without any serious self-examination or real content. Such usage also tends to focus on individual experiences rather than on structural forms of oppression. Throughout the chapter and in its conclusion, I seek to defend intersectionality’s subversive potential against these deradicalising tendencies.

  Crenshaw’s metaphor: who injures the pedestrian when two roads intersect?

  Intersectional thinking did not originate with Crenshaw. She was, however, probably the first to use the term, in an article first published in 1989. Writing in the context of radical ideas and approaches around feminism, social justice, postmodernism, civil rights, critical race studies and critical legal studies that were circulating in US law schools at the time, her aim was to expose and contest the way that black women’s specific needs, experiences and very existence were rendered invisible by US anti-discrimination legislation. In particular, she wanted to convey the inability of this legislation, ostensibly in place to defend the interests of women and black people, to see, let alone meet, the needs of those who were in both categories – that is, black women.

  Crenshaw based her initial arguments on the case of a group of black women who had lost their jobs but who were unable to claim that they had been unfairly discriminated against on grounds of either sex or race: white women remained employed (so there was no sex-based discrimination) and so too did black men (so there was no race-based discrimination either). She likened this to the situation of an individual knocked down at the intersection of two roads, who may have been injured by a vehicle coming from either direction, or both at once, but who can call for an ambulance only once the driver who caused the accident is identified: if this is unclear, ‘the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the involved parties simply get back in their cars and zoom away’ (1989/1998

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  Marxism and Intersectionality

  Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism

  • Ashley J. Bohrer(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  The intersectional tradition, especially as it took hold within the field of legal studies, was impacted through not only Crenshaw’s powerful articu-3 | Sirma Bilge, “Whitening Intersectionality: Evanescence of Race in Intersectionality Scholarship,” in Racism and Sociology: Racism Analysis Yearbook 5-2014 , ed. Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin (Berlin: Lit Verlag/Routledge, 2014), 175–205. Marxism and Intersectionality 18 lation, but through her conversations and collaborations with Mari Matsuda, Trina Grillo and others. 4 Equally important to not overlook, many of the women involved in all of these projects were themselves biracial and multiracial. The best way to honor the women of color who are the foundational thinkers of intersectionality is to recognize them in their complexities: Crenshaw, Collins, Thornton Dill, and the many others who have been variously crowned as the originators of intersectionality were themselves engaged in activism, conversa-tion, coalition, and collaboration with many activists, academics, and thinkers, some of whom were non-black women of color. The narrative that intersection-ality was or is only about black women reduces the plurality, expansiveness, and coalitional work that these black women were engaged in. Indeed, Ange-Marie Hancock explains that it is essential both to pluralize the foundational narra-tive of intersectionality and to think about the ways in which non-black women of color were specifically integral parts of these conversations. 5 Marxism I treat intersectionality as the name for a tradition in much the same way that I treat Marxism in a rather heterodox fashion, as a group of texts, thinkers, and organizing histories that are widely heterogeneous and often internally conflictual.

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  A Companion to Multiethnic Literature of the United States

  • Gary Totten(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Race and Racism as Intersectional I who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed see causes in colour as well as sex —Audre Lorde, “Who Said It Was Simple” Critical race theory foregrounds analysis of race and recognizes that race (as an identity) and rac- ism (as a system of oppression and privilege) do not exist in isolation. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking law review articles three decades ago placed women of color at the center to demonstrate the need for intersectional analysis to address discrimination and gendered violence: “[T]he experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of rac- ism and sexism, and … these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism” (1991, pp. 1243–1244). Racism as intersectional finds rich illustration in US literature by women of color, where reproductive and sexual labor is examined within the contexts of racialized and gendered vio- lence. Reproduction is a terrain where gender intersects with race, sexuality, and economics, today and during chattel slavery. Harriet Jacobs breaks down laws that make white-fathered children of enslaved women property: “[S]laveholders have been cunning enough to enact that ‘the child shall follow the condition of the mother’ not of the father; thus taking care that licen- tiousness shall not interfere with avarice” (1987, p. 76). She portrays intersectionality operating at personal and structural levels. “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been,” she writes of giving birth to a daughter deemed property, knowing what lies ahead. “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (p. 77).

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  Identity in Communicative Contexts

  • Kamila Ciepiela(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  originally pointed out: “because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take in- tersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (Crenshaw 1991, 140)� This concept thus encourages us to view individuals not just as members of a particular category, but as complex individuals both unique and belonging to several categories (infra)� However, the success of the concept has also exposed it to criticism, since it has been suggested by some scholars that intersectionality constitutes too loose a

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  Solidarity Politics for Millennials

  A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics

  • A. Hancock(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  14. Young, Iris Marion. Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 20. 15. This more nuanced question genuinely considers the answer an open empirical question, which could mean at some point that these catego- ries may shift in relevance for American politics. 16. Intersectionality can carry out the promise of both/and constructions of multicultural feminist theory without falling victim to the additive language embedded within multicultural feminist thought. It takes this claim seriously through its pursuit of analyses that have consciously avoided such attempts at dissociation. Earlier scholars like Cathy Cohen, Michelle Tracey Berger, Nancy Naples, and Ange-Marie Hancock have engaged in this effort through case-based, content-related research of a specific intersectional population through attentiveness in design to the contingencies of categories based on the dynamic aspects of their production and/or the acknowledgement of the diversity within such groups, whatever the categorization strategy. Changing the first-order question allows intersectionality to achieve the potential of select mul- ticultural feminist claims without the concomitant pitfalls. See also Yuval Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics” and Weldon, “Intersectionality” for further concrete steps in this direction. Intersectiona l it y to the R escue 59 17. It is Crenshaw who is thought to have first coined the term “inter- sectionality,” though these premises were percolating in several different disciplinary domains. 18. Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Law Review 139 (1989). 19. According to an unpublished manuscript by Heath Fogg-Davis (2006), this formulation has been encapsulated in the law by Canadian courts.

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