ABSTRACT
Critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Crenshaw argued that Black women faced discrimination along multiple axes, in particular gender and race. Crenshaw intended to both broaden and narrow analyses of discrimination beyond single-axis arguments that looked at either class, or race, or gender. She argued that Black women (and later other women of color) faced employment discrimination based on the confluence, or “intersection,” of oppressions like racism, classism, and sexism that acted in concert. The impact of intersectionality on women of color is often misunderstood and unrecognized in higher education. In this chapter, our sister-circle will forego traditional academic conventions and use counternarratives to inform what we describe as the praxis of intersectionality. You will see in this chapter our own lived experiences of how intersectionality has manifested in our professional and personal lives, interspersed with the broader literature on race, class, gender, sexuality, and other axes of oppression. We conclude this chapter by providing guidance for women of color in the academy toward intentionality in the cultivation of their sisterships.
