Excerpt
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” elaborated the concept of intersectionality through the metaphor of a traffic intersection. By visualizing Black women’s experience of discrimination as the experience of being run over by traffic from multiple directions, Crenshaw provided particularly evocative imagery to accompany her analysis of legal cases in the USA, where Black women were falling through the cracks in the US anti-discrimination doctrines. Although the traffic intersection has since been taken up as intersectionality’s central image, it has also received its share of criticism. Most objections center on the additive dimensions of the image of the traffic intersection: it portrays social categories – like gender, race, class and sexuality – as separate and independent, making it possible to add them to each other. It seems hard to deny that the image of the traffic intersection is additive in the sense that it separates independent roads that lead into and out of the intersection. In the three decades that have passed since the publication of Crenshaw’s essay, an abundance of – more and less eccentric – alternative metaphors have been proposed. This, then, has also become one of the important ways in which intersectionality travels: the idea has journeyed far and wide by continuously being given new interpretations and elaborations through metaphor and analogy.