Informing Intersections
The cover photo contains the covers of Gender Journal’s volumes 1, 19, 20, and 38.
Image Description: On the far left is a picture of the cover of Gender Journal's first volume. The cover includes the title "Berkeley Women's Law Journal" and underneath "Fall 1985 Volume 1 Number 1." The cover includes a picture of three feminine faces. The face at the top left looks to the left, the face in the middle is turned halfway to the viewer, and the face at the bottom right looks directly out from the page. Next to the first cover, is a picture of Gender Journal's 19th volume. The cover includes the title "Berkeley Women's Law Journal" and underneath "Volume 19 Number 1 2004." In the background is the journal's mandate. Then the third journal cover is from volume 20. The cover includes the title "Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice" and underneath "2005 volume 20 a continuation of Berkeley Women's Law Journal." In the background in large print says "20 years." The last cover on the far right is Gender Journal's 38th volume. The cover includes the title "Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice" and underneath "2023 volume 38 a continuation of Berkeley Women's Law Journal."
“Intersectionality is about capturing dynamics and converging patterns of advantage and disadvantage. Those are going to change from context to context.” - Kimberlè Crenshaw
More than three decades ago, the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal held a symposium titled Black Women Law Professors: Building a Community at the Intersection of Race and Gender. This was the first time the Journal – now the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice – published on intersectionality. The intersectional framework had been introduced by Kimberlè Crenshaw two years earlier,; “intersection” was destined to become a controversial political buzzword. But then, it was just sound legal theory.
By 1996, attention to the intersections of identity became part of our Journal mandate. This intersectional focus became the operative purpose of our Journal, while language used since our founding – the dictate to address “the lives and struggles of underrepresented women” – faded out of publication.
In another Post, I explore the evolution of the Journal’s name, mandate, and language use as Crenshaw’s intersectional approach came to dominate legal discussions of representation. That exploration lacks what I try to provide here: a bird’s eye view of “intersectionality” itself, from its origins with Crenshaw to its invocation today. A plethora of writing attempts to follow “intersectionality” as it evolves; in my short time here, I look to the source, Crenshaw, and intersectionality in her words, throughout time. In doing so, I hope to spark new insights and developments for our membership, readers, and – of course – myself.
***
Frequently named as coining “intersectionality,” Kimberlè Crenshaw authored Demarginalizing the Intersection: 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 in 1989 and 1991 respectively. Both pieces focus on the double-discrimination experienced by Black women in legal cases using a single-axis approach to understanding marginalization. In Demarginalizing the Intersection, Crenshaw interrogates the essentialism of feminist and anti-racist frameworks for discrimination laws, focusing on the unique experience of Black women plaintiffs alleging race and sex discrimination. “Intersectionality” is introduced to challenge the single-axis approach to discrimination then – and now – legally dominant. Of course, “intersect” and its conjugations do not begin here; Crenshaw employs the lasting, literal meaning of “intersect” – where lines cross one another – to aid the reader in comprehending a new legal framework. Intersectionality names the existence of more than one axis – or line – of identity and power, and finds fault in the legal approaches that allow for the interpretation of only one axis at a time.
Mapping the Margins furthers this idea, as Crenshaw uses her intersectional method to examine identity politics in liberation movements. Crenshaw again hones in on the intersection of race and sex, looking at the experiences of women of color. For the reader, Mapping the Margins demonstrates how an intersectional analysis can empower liberation movements by focusing on those at the margins of a movement. Feminist and anti-racist organizing have a greater impact when attending to the unique position of women of color, who are marginalized across axes of both sex and race.
Little of Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality looks at the experiences of people who are not women of color, or who experience multiple forms of subordination outside of a sex and race analysis. At the time of writing, sex and race were often representative of all that discrimination could be; though other forms of discrimination occurred and were protected against by law, sex and race ruled the national political stage. For many, looking to the “intersection” thus came to stand for looking to where sex and race collide.
Though Crenshaw certainly intended to emphasize women of color in her writing, the metaphor of intersections that the framework originates from is not exclusive. This became clearer as “intersectionality” developed cultural meaning outside the legal field. In part because of its association with critical race theory, the term has been employed politically – both in praise and to detriment – and thus slowly leans further from its theoretical origin. In 2015, “intersectionality” entered linguistic history with its addition to the Oxford English Dictionary; with each new usage in new contexts, the word is used somewhat differently. Crenshaw has repeatedly been put to the task of giving reporters, academics, and the public an accurate and succinct definition; here are a few such attempts that I find accessible in my work:
This last definition sticks with me, and may be the most appropriate to the work of our Journal today. What Crenshaw meant when she wrote of intersectionality thirty years ago has evolved since then and will continue to evolve. Similarly, the mandate we introduced in 1996 – to publish about “the intersection of gender with one or more other axes of subordination including, but not limited to race, class, sexual orientation, and disability” may mean something now that it did not then.
Ultimately, there is no single answer to the meaning of “intersectionality,” but there are themes I can glean from this surface view. To consider an intersection, in its legal, theoried meaning, involves looking at experiences of discrimination and power. It involves locating people along more than one axis of power, and looking to how the experience of multiple identities imbued with legal meaning – race and sex, certainly, but also class, sexuality, ability, nationality, religion, and more – cannot be synthesized down to the experience of just one identity, just one working of power.
This reading left me challenged – it is hard to work with a concept that you cannot define. Holding onto intersectionality as a “work-in-progress” invites constant exploration. That, perhaps, is the work of our Journal. Rather than give our mandate definite meaning, each article we publish must progress the definition further. At our origins, the Journal sought to give new meaning to what legal scholarship could be. Now, each time we publish, we shape what an intersection can be.