ABSTRACT
The concept of intersectionality emerged in the United States out of black feminist critiques of mainstream (white) feminism’s racial blindness. Rejecting the idea that the experiences of white, middle-class women were comparable to those of most African American women, black feminists began to argue for the consideration of race and class as pivotal factors in determining any individual woman’s identity. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks, for example, uses the phrase “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to foreground her discussions of oppression in terms of race and class, as well as gender. Critics like hooks highlighted the failure of feminism to identify and study other forms of domination and asked white middle-class feminists to look at where they may have been the oppressors. Such criticisms have had an impact: intersectionality’s concept of a matrix of domination or “multiple, interlocking levels of domination” (Andersen and Collins 4) has been influential in changing the methodology and direction of disciplines such as gender studies, sociology, and cultural studies.
