Kimberlé Crenshaw is most frequently credited for providing the first explicit articulations of intersectionality, that is, naming intersectionality as a concept and theoretical framework. Consequently, many accounts of the history of this concept only go back to 1989 or 1991, the publication dates of her articles ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ and ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, respectively. But some scholars reach back further into history, tracing the concept to women of colour feminist activism and scholarship operating a few decades earlier. For example, in a genealogical essay on intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins makes the case for tracing intersectionality back to the black feminist politics of the 1960s and1970s. She notes, ‘ironically, narratives of the emergence of intersectionality rarely include this period of social movement politics, and instead confine themselves to locating a point of origin when academics first noticed, named and legitimized this emerging field of study’.

Although this is an assessment with which I agree, I think that we can go back even further than the 1960s and 1970s to unpack the ‘knowledge project that was honed within social movements’ now more commonly referred to as intersectionality.