ABSTRACT
Social stratification reflects the power equations in society, whereby multiple social identities influence the lives of people enmeshed in such relationships. This chapter explores intersectionality as a theoretical engagement with the multiple ways in which identities are constructed in the social world and mapped onto varying and simultaneous systems of oppression, domination and discrimination. As social hierarchy presumes the relational dynamic of domination and subordination, there emerges a need to examine the perspectives and experiences of multiply-marginalised people and groups, whereby multiple institutions act to produce complex configurations. The chapter examines the ways in which caste and gender interact with other dimensions of identity to structure and determine complex social interactions, lived experiences and patterns of inequality to determine access, equality and scope for justice. Using the intersectional framework to understand how multiple marginalisations at individual and institutional levels create forms of social, political, economic, historical and other exclusions, the chapter elaborates ways in which the entangled realities of caste and gender hierarchies shape everyday social life, from relationships in the socio-cultural arena, from families to educations systems to the organisation of labour in the material domain to communities, political parties and social organisations in the cultural ideological domain to power and the politics of representation.
