Crenshaw's Original Argument

The term intersectionality entered academic vocabulary in a 1989 article by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum under the title 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.' The article was not a general theory of identity. It was a specific critique of how US anti-discrimination law handled claims by Black women, and the argument was sharpened by close analysis of decided cases (Crenshaw 1989, pp. 139-142).

The paradigm case Crenshaw examined was DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, a 1976 suit in which five Black women sued General Motors, alleging that the company's seniority-based layoff policy — combined with its hiring practices — had systematically disadvantaged them. The evidence showed that General Motors did hire women, but the women it hired were white; it did hire Black workers, but the Black workers it hired were men. Black women, as a group, had been largely absent from the plant's workforce before 1970 and were therefore the first laid off under a last-hired-first-fired policy when layoffs came (Crenshaw 1989, pp. 141-143).

The federal district court refused to allow the plaintiffs to proceed as a combined class of Black women. The court reasoned that anti-discrimination law recognized claims of race discrimination and claims of sex discrimination but did not recognize a compound category. The plaintiffs could not show sex discrimination because white women had been hired; they could not show race discrimination because Black men had been hired. Their actual complaint — that they, specifically as Black women, had been excluded — fell between the legal categories and disappeared (Crenshaw 1989, p. 143).

Crenshaw's analytical move was to treat this legal disappearance as the symptom of a deeper conceptual error. Anti-discrimination law and, she argued, much feminist and antiracist theory treated race and sex as single-axis categories: each could be analyzed alone, and analysis of the sum was just the addition of each analysis taken separately. The experience of Black women was then understood as the experience of being Black plus the experience of being a woman, where 'Black' implicitly meant the experience of Black men and 'woman' implicitly meant the experience of white women. The specific configuration produced at the intersection — being a Black woman — was rendered invisible, because the categories assumed the modal member of each group was the intersection's absence.

Crenshaw returned to the framework two years later in a second influential article, 'Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,' published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. This piece extended the analytical move beyond employment discrimination into domestic violence policy and rape law, showing that advocacy frameworks organized around 'women' typically centered white women, while frameworks organized around 'the Black community' typically centered Black men, with the consequence that violence against women of color was systematically under-addressed by both movements (Crenshaw 1991, pp. 1241-1245).

Two features of the original argument deserve emphasis. First, intersectionality began as a critique of a specific institutional practice — legal doctrine — and was grounded in the close reading of actual cases, not in abstract theorizing about identity. Second, Crenshaw's target was the arithmetic conception of overlapping categories: she did not argue that Black women experienced race discrimination plus sex discrimination. She argued that the experience at the intersection was structurally distinct, produced by mechanisms that could not be decomposed into the separate axes. This structural claim, rather than the metaphor of intersection, is what has carried the concept into sociological research.