Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139-167.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1989

Link

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/

Cited from

law_governance, mathematics, psychology, sociology_anthropology

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Cultural Hegemony
  • Legal theorists examine how "reasonable person" standards encode unmarked assumptions about class, race, gender, and ability: what counts as reasonable is defined by whoever gets to set the standard, a pattern critical race theorists analyze through intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990).

    This sourceNames 'intersectionality'; shows how single-axis doctrines erase harms at intersecting axes.

• Equity
  • Alternatively, fear of undemocratic discretion leads to the elimination of equitable authority, leaving the system rigid and unable to respond to injustice in particular cases, a structural blind-spot Crenshaw (1989) names with respect to intersecting axes of disadvantage that single-axis equity doctrines erase.

    This sourceCoins 'intersectionality' and shows how single-axis antidiscrimination doctrine erases harms suffered at intersecting axes (race and sex together).

• Intersection
  • In public policy and demographics it is the population defined by several criteria together — and the analytic core of intersectional reasoning, where membership in multiple categories produces effects single-category framing misses.
• Social Identity Theory
  • This means that a person's behavior and identity-expression can shift markedly across contexts without reflecting any change in underlying attitudes or group membership — a context-sensitivity that Crenshaw's (1989) intersectionality analysis reframes structurally: which axis of identification (race, gender, class, function) becomes operative depends on the configuration of overlapping categories made comparatively relevant by the situation.

    This sourceNames "intersectionality" and shows how single-axis equity doctrines (race or sex, but not their intersection) systematically erase the harms suffered at intersecting axes — a canonical failure mode of formally equitable but practically narrow remedial frameworks.

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