Introduction

The ‘genealogy’ of intersectionality, or where it actually derives from, is the subject of much discussion. While some authors track down its origin to ‘intersectionality’ scholars, with emphasis on black feminism and critical race theory, others argue the influence of ‘non-intersectional’ authors in the emergence of intersectionality. Such a discussion exceeds the purpose of this section, which attempts to provide the reader with an overview of the emergence of intersectionality scholarship, without attributing the exclusive ‘ownership’ of the perspectives to any author in particular.

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, different notions of gender were discussed in different academic disciplines, bringing tension within feminism. Black feminists, but also Chicana, Lesbian and Marxist feminists, questioned essentialised views of women and argued the interconnection of systems of power, distancing themselves from segments of feminism that presented women as a homogeneous group and relied on patriarchy as the one system of power primarily oppressing women. These critical voices contributed to a more nuanced understanding of gender (and the category women), as they emphasised the interconnection of gender inequality with other ‘inequalities’, particularly inequality based on race and class.

Among the authors challenging the centrality of gender as sole explanation of oppression and for capturing the experience of all women, Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ referring to the intersecting inequality that African American women suffered based on the convergence of their race and gender. The layered nature of oppression and the complexity of inequality were effectively captured by the intersectional approach, which introduced different layers of analysis and by doing so, it departed from simplistic one-dimensional understandings of inequality. Her work inspired many feminist theorists, and gradually ‘intersectionality’ has become a field of study that has largely channelled many of the precursor theories that had a similar or the same goal. Since then, the notion has been expanded and reconfigured by the work of many authors from different disciplines and places.