Legal Theory Lexicon 121: Intersectionality

Introduction

The idea of “intersectionality” has played an important role in antidiscrimination law and in critical approaches to legal theory. But what is “intersectionality”? Here is a hypothetical that illustrates the concept. Imagine a plaintiff who sues her employer for discrimination. The employer has hired Black men for factory jobs and white women for office jobs, but it has hired no Black women at all. The hypothetical plaintiff is a Black woman. When she sues, the court tells her that she has no claim: the employer hired Black workers, so there was no race discrimination, and the employer hired women, so there was no sex discrimination. Her experience of discrimination—an experience that neither Black men nor white women shared—is invisible to the law. This is not just a hypothetical. Something very much like it happened in a real case, and that case prompted the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to coin a term that has since traveled from a law review article to nearly every corner of the humanities and social sciences: “intersectionality.”

This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon provides an introduction to intersectionality for law students, especially first-year law students, with an interest in legal theory. We will begin where the concept began—with a problem in antidiscrimination doctrine—and then work outward: to Crenshaw’s development of the concept, to its role in critical race theory and feminist legal theory, to its remarkable migration from law into philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines, and finally back to the law, where the doctrinal problem that started it all remains only partially resolved. Along the way, we will encounter some important critiques and complications. As always, the Lexicon aims to introduce the basic ideas. There are deep questions about intersectionality that you can explore via the readings in the bibliography.

The DeGraffenreid Problem

The real case that inspired the hypothetical is DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, decided by a federal district court in 1976. Five Black women sued General Motors, challenging a seniority system that operated to their distinctive disadvantage. Before 1964, General Motors simply did not hire Black women. The Black women hired after 1970 lacked seniority, and when recession-driven layoffs came, the “last hired, first fired” rule swept them out. The plaintiffs argued that this amounted to discrimination against Black women as such. The court refused to see the claim. Because General Motors had hired women—white women—there was no sex discrimination. And the plaintiffs’ race discrimination claim, the court reasoned, should be consolidated with another race discrimination case brought by Black men. The court worried that recognizing a distinct claim for Black women would create a “new classification of ‘black women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male,” opening a Pandora’s box of compound claims. The plaintiffs fell through the cracks: their claim was not quite race discrimination, not quite sex discrimination, and the law had no category for what it actually was.

Thirteen years later, Kimberlé Crenshaw made DeGraffenreid the centerpiece of her article, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989. Crenshaw’s diagnosis was that antidiscrimination law operated on a “single-axis framework.” The law could see race discrimination, and it could see sex discrimination, but it analyzed each axis separately—and it implicitly took the most privileged members of each group as the paradigm. The paradigm victim of race discrimination was a Black man; the paradigm victim of sex discrimination was a white woman. Black women could state a claim only insofar as their experience matched one of these paradigms. Where their experience was the product of racism and sexism operating together, the single-axis framework rendered it invisible. To capture the problem, Crenshaw offered a now-famous metaphor: discrimination is like traffic in an intersection. If a Black woman is harmed standing in the intersection, her injury may result from cars traveling in either direction—or from both at once. Demanding that she prove which single direction the traffic came from is precisely what the law did in DeGraffenreid, and precisely what her situation made impossible.

Crenshaw examined two other cases in Demarginalizing that revealed the same structural problem from different angles. In Moore v. Hughes Helicopters, a court refused to let a Black woman represent a class of all women in a sex discrimination suit, reasoning that she had claimed discrimination only as a Black woman and so could not speak for women generally—a ruling that treated white women’s experience as the standard for “sex discrimination” while treating Black women’s experience as something narrower and more particular. And in Payne v. Travenol, Black women plaintiffs were permitted to sue but the remedy was limited in ways that excluded Black men. Taken together, the cases showed that Black women were sometimes too different to represent the broader group and sometimes not different enough to have a claim of their own.

Crenshaw’s deeper point was that this was not a set of judicial mistakes that better lawyering could fix. The problem was built into the conceptual architecture of antidiscrimination law itself—and, as she went on to argue, into the political movements that shaped it, with feminism organized around the experiences of white women and antiracism organized around the experiences of Black men. Fixing the problem would require rethinking the categories, not just relitigating the cases.

Crenshaw’s Concept: Structural, Political, and Representational Intersectionality

Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality” in Demarginalizing, but she developed the concept most fully in a second article, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. The second article shifted the setting from employment discrimination to violence against women—battering and rape—and asked how the experiences of women of color were shaped by the interaction of race and gender. In the course of that inquiry, Crenshaw distinguished three forms of intersectionality, and the distinctions have structured discussion of the concept ever since: (1) structural intersectionality, (2) political intersectionality, and (3) representational intersectionality. We will consider each in turn.

Structural intersectionality refers to the way in which the social location of women of color—their position at the intersection of race, gender, and often class—makes their actual experience of subordination qualitatively different from the experience of those who face only one form of subordination. Crenshaw’s examples in Mapping the Margins came from her fieldwork on domestic violence. A battered woman who is poor, unemployed, and responsible for children faces obstacles to escaping an abusive relationship that a woman with economic resources does not. A battered immigrant woman whose lawful residence depends on remaining married to her abuser—as it did under the immigration law of the time, which required couples to stay married for two years before a spouse could obtain permanent status—may be trapped in ways that citizenship would prevent. A woman who does not speak English may find that the local shelter cannot accommodate her. The point of these examples is that the burdens intersect: race, gender, class, and immigration status are not separate difficulties added one on top of another, but interacting dimensions of a single predicament. Interventions designed for the paradigm case—say, a shelter system built around the needs of English-speaking women with some economic independence—will systematically fail those at the intersection, even when no one intends any such failure.

Political intersectionality refers to a different problem: women of color are situated within at least two political movements—feminism and antiracism—that pursue agendas which frequently diverge and sometimes conflict. Each movement, Crenshaw argued, has tended to frame its agenda around the experiences of its most privileged members, so that feminist advocacy often presupposes the situation of white women and antiracist advocacy often presupposes the situation of Black men. The result is that women of color are asked to split their political energies and, worse, sometimes find that a gain for one movement comes at their expense. Crenshaw’s example from the domestic violence context is instructive. Antiracist advocates, concerned that statistics on domestic violence in minority communities would reinforce stereotypes of Black men as violent, sometimes resisted efforts to publicize the problem—a strategy that protected the community’s image at the cost of rendering the suffering of Black women invisible. Feminist advocates, for their part, sometimes emphasized that domestic violence crosses all racial and class lines—a strategy that made the issue politically salient for white audiences at the cost of obscuring the distinctive barriers facing women of color. In both cases, the interests of women of color were subordinated to a political agenda organized around someone else’s paradigm.

Representational intersectionality concerns the cultural construction of women of color—the way they are depicted in popular culture and the way debates about those depictions unfold. Crenshaw’s principal example in Mapping the Margins was the obscenity prosecution of the rap group 2 Live Crew, whose lyrics were sexually explicit and degrading to Black women. The public controversy quickly organized itself into a familiar binary: critics of the prosecution defended the group’s music as Black cultural expression unfairly targeted by a racially selective obscenity prosecution, while supporters of the prosecution condemned the lyrics as misogyny. Crenshaw’s point was that both sides erased Black women. The antiracist defense asked Black women to overlook the degrading imagery in the name of racial solidarity; the feminist critique proceeded as though the racial politics of the prosecution—why this group, and not equally explicit white performers?—were beside the point. Neither frame could hold both dimensions in view at once. Representational intersectionality thus mirrors, at the level of culture and discourse, the same single-axis logic that structural and political intersectionality identify in social arrangements and political movements.

Intersectionality in Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory

Intersectionality did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. Crenshaw was one of the founding figures of critical race theory, the movement in American legal scholarship that emerged in the late 1980s from a working group of scholars including Crenshaw, Derrick Bell’s students and successors, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams, and others. Critical race theory took as its starting point the persistence of racial subordination after the formal victories of the civil rights era, and it turned a critical eye on the legal concepts—colorblindness, intent, formal equality—that seemed to explain why the law could declare discrimination illegal while leaving racial hierarchy substantially intact. Intersectionality fit naturally within this project: it was a demonstration, worked out in doctrinal detail, that facially neutral legal categories could systematically disadvantage a subordinated group. But intersectionality also functioned as an internal critique. By insisting that the paradigm subject of antiracist advocacy was a Black man, Crenshaw was challenging her own movement to confront the ways its agenda reproduced the marginalization it opposed.

The relationship to feminist legal theory ran along parallel lines. Feminist legal scholars had long debated whether equality for women was best pursued through formal equal treatment or through doctrines responsive to women’s distinctive circumstances—the “sameness/difference” debate. Intersectionality cut into this debate at an angle, by asking a prior question: which women? Angela Harris’s article, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, published in the Stanford Law Review in 1990, gave the challenge its canonical form. Harris argued that leading feminist theorists—her principal examples were Catharine MacKinnon and Robin West—had built their accounts on “gender essentialism”: the assumption that there is a unitary experience of womanhood that can be described independently of race, class, and other dimensions of identity. The essential woman, Harris argued, turned out to look suspiciously like a white, middle-class woman, and the experiences of Black women were treated as that paradigm plus an added increment of racial disadvantage—precisely the additive logic that DeGraffenreid had enacted in doctrine. The anti-essentialist critique and intersectionality are thus two faces of the same insight: one directed at legal categories, the other at feminist theory itself.

Within legal theory, intersectionality also connects to a deeper debate about the point of antidiscrimination law. On one view—often called the anti-classification principle—the law’s aim is to prevent the government and employers from sorting people by suspect categories such as race and sex. On a rival view—the anti-subordination principle—the law’s aim is to dismantle social hierarchies that subordinate some groups to others. Intersectionality sits far more comfortably with the second view. If the wrong of discrimination were simply classification, the single-axis framework might seem adequate: just ask whether race or sex was used. But if the wrong is subordination, then the law must attend to how subordination actually operates in the world—and Crenshaw’s central claim was that it operates along intersecting axes, producing distinctive burdens for those situated at the intersections. It is no accident that intersectionality emerged from scholarly movements committed to the anti-subordination view, or that skeptics of anti-subordination approaches tend also to be skeptics of intersectionality. The relationship between anti-subordination and intersectionality is discussed below when we examine critiques of intersectionality.

From Law to Philosophy and Beyond

Few concepts in the history of legal scholarship have traveled as far as intersectionality. A term coined in a law review article in 1989 is now a standard part of the vocabulary of sociology, political science, psychology, history, public health, and philosophy—and, beyond the academy, of political discourse itself. But the traffic did not flow in only one direction. Crenshaw named the concept, but she did not invent the underlying idea, and she has never claimed otherwise. The idea has a long genealogy in Black feminist thought. Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech to the Akron women’s convention posed the question—“Ain’t I a woman?”—that the single-axis framework could not answer. Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892) analyzed the distinctive position of Black women a century before the term existed. In 1969, Frances Beal described the “double jeopardy” of being Black and female; in 1977, the Combahee River Collective’s statement described “interlocking” systems of oppression; and in 1988, Deborah King wrote of “multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness.” Crenshaw’s contribution was to give this tradition a name, a set of doctrinal illustrations, and an analytical structure that proved extraordinarily portable.

The first major development outside law came in social theory. Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, published in 1990—one year after Demarginalizing—offered a systematic account of Black women’s social position and the knowledge that position generates. Collins introduced the “matrix of domination”: the idea that race, class, gender, and sexuality are not separate systems of oppression but a single interlocking structure, organized through intersecting axes and experienced differently depending on where in the matrix a person is located. Where Crenshaw’s intersection metaphor pictured discrete axes crossing at a point, Collins’s matrix pictured an overall social structure in which the axes are mutually constructing—race is always already gendered, gender always already racialized. Collins also emphasized the epistemic dimension: those situated at particular locations in the matrix have distinctive standpoints, forms of knowledge that are unavailable, or at least not readily available, from more privileged locations. Readers who have encountered the Lexicon entry on Epistemic Injustice will recognize the affinity: both literatures insist that social position shapes what can be known and whose knowledge is credited. In later work, Collins has argued that intersectionality should be understood as a full-fledged critical social theory, with implications for sociology, epistemology, and political thought.

As intersectionality spread across the social sciences, a second wave of scholarship turned reflexive, asking what the concept is and how research should use it. Leslie McCall’s article, The Complexity of Intersectionality, published in Signs in 2005, became the standard reference for methodology. McCall distinguished three approaches to the study of intersecting categories: anticategorical approaches, which deconstruct the categories themselves; intracategorical approaches, which focus on particular neglected intersections (Black women in DeGraffenreid, for example); and intercategorical approaches, which provisionally accept the categories and study how inequality varies across the full set of intersecting groups. Jennifer Nash’s Re-thinking Intersectionality (2008) pressed a set of internal questions that remain live: whether intersectionality is a theory of marginalized subjects in particular or of identity in general, whether Black women had been asked to serve as the concept’s perpetual exemplars, and whether the framework attends adequately to the ways privilege and subordination can coexist in a single life. And in 2013, Sumi Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall together took stock of what had by then become “intersectionality studies,” making an important framing move: intersectionality, they argued, is best understood not as a fixed theory of identity but as an “analytic sensibility”—a way of asking questions about how categories interact—whose value is shown by the work it enables rather than by a canonical definition.

The most recent development is the arrival of intersectionality in analytic philosophy. For many years, feminist philosophers observed that mainstream philosophy had largely ignored the concept, but that has changed. One strand of this work is metaphysical. Sara Bernstein’s article, The Metaphysics of Intersectionality, published in Philosophical Studies in 2020, asks what intersectionality claims actually assert about social categories. Is the category “Black woman” merely the conjunction of two prior categories, Black and woman? Or is the intersectional category explanatorily prior—a unified social position whose features cannot be recovered from the constituent categories taken separately? Bernstein defends a version of the priority view, drawing on the tools of contemporary metaphysics, and her article has generated responses and refinements, including Holly Lawford-Smith and Kate Phelan’s The Metaphysics of Intersectionality Revisited (2022) and work by Marta Jorba and Maria Rodó-de-Zárate treating intersectional experience as emergent. A second strand is methodological: Liam Kofi Bright, Daniel Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson have shown that core intersectionality claims can be formulated precisely within the framework of causal modeling, connecting the concept to the philosophy of science. A third strand, associated with Ann Garry, proposes that intersectionality is best understood not as a substantive theory at all but as a “framework checker”—a test that any adequate account of oppression or social identity must pass. The philosophical debates are young, but their existence confirms the trajectory this section has traced: a concept forged to solve a problem in Title VII doctrine is now doing work in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.

Intersectionality in Antidiscrimination Doctrine

What became of the doctrinal problem that started it all? The answer is: partial progress. Even before Demarginalizing appeared, the Fifth Circuit in Jefferies v. Harris County Community Action Ass’n (1980) rejected the DeGraffenreid approach and held that Title VII protects Black women as a distinct class, reasoning that discrimination “on the basis of sex” includes discrimination against a subclass of women defined by race—the doctrinal cousin of the “sex-plus” cases, in which courts recognized claims by women disadvantaged by sex plus some additional characteristic, such as having young children. Most courts have since followed Jefferies, and the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Lam v. University of Hawai’i (1994) is the standout treatment: reversing summary judgment against an Asian American woman law professor, the court explained that where two bases of discrimination exist, they cannot be “neatly reduced to distinct components,” and that the attempt to analyze her claim as race discrimination plus sex discrimination in sequence was itself the error. But recognition has limits. Courts continue to struggle with compound claims—some worry, echoing DeGraffenreid, about a proliferation of subclasses; class certification for intersectionally defined groups remains awkward; and plaintiffs asserting multiple bases of discrimination sometimes fare worse in practice than plaintiffs asserting one. The single-axis framework has been officially disavowed but not fully dislodged.

Critiques and Complications

The most persistent analytical objection to intersectionality is the proliferation problem, sometimes called the problem of infinite regress. If Black women constitute a distinct category, why not Black lesbian women, or Black disabled lesbian women, or any of the indefinitely many groups generated by combining race, sex, class, sexual orientation, disability, religion, age, and immigration status? Each addition seems as principled as the last, but the endpoint of the progression is a category of one—each individual as the unique intersection of all of her attributes—at which point the framework seems to dissolve group-based analysis altogether. The worry takes different forms in different domains. In doctrine, it is the DeGraffenreid court’s fear of an unmanageable multiplication of protected subclasses. In political theory, it is the concern—pressed by the philosopher Naomi Zack, among others—that intersectionality fragments feminism into ever-smaller constituencies and thereby undermines the possibility of common cause. Defenders of intersectionality have responses. Alison Bailey has answered Zack directly, arguing that the fragmentation worry oversimplifies the solidarities that intersectional analysis makes possible. And the Cho-Crenshaw-McCall reframing of intersectionality as an analytic sensibility rather than a taxonomy of groups is another: the point is not to enumerate categories but to ask, in any given inquiry, whether the categories in use are concealing anyone. And on this reading the regress never gets started, because intersectional analysis is always anchored to a particular problem—a seniority system, a shelter’s intake policies—rather than to the abstract project of completing the list of groups.

A second family of objections comes from critics of the broader theoretical projects in which intersectionality is embedded. Recall the connection drawn above between intersectionality and the anti-subordination account of antidiscrimination law. For theorists committed to the rival anti-classification view, that connection is precisely the problem. On the anti-classification view, the law’s commitment is to the individual: each person is entitled to be treated without regard to race or sex, and the moral unit of antidiscrimination law is the individual person, not the social group. From this perspective, intersectionality compounds what was already objectionable in group-based thinking—it multiplies the group categories through which law and policy are asked to see people, entrenching rather than transcending the salience of race and sex. Related objections have figured in public and political debate: that intersectionality functions as a ranking of groups by relative disadvantage, or that it sorts individuals into categories of privilege and oppression in ways that are themselves essentializing. Defenders reply that these objections mistake the concept for some of its popularizations—that intersectionality, properly understood, is a claim about how discrimination operates, not a moral ranking of persons—and that the individualist objection simply restates the anti-classification premise that intersectionality’s proponents reject. At this point, the dispute over intersectionality becomes a dispute about the deepest questions in equality theory, and those questions are beyond the scope of this entry.

Conclusion

Intersectionality began as a lawyer’s diagnosis of a doctrinal failure: antidiscrimination law could not see plaintiffs whose injuries arose from the interaction of race and sex. Four decades later, it is one of the most influential concepts ever to emerge from legal scholarship—a fixture of critical race theory and feminist legal theory, a research paradigm across the social sciences, and, most recently, a topic in analytic metaphysics and the philosophy of science. The concept’s travels have not settled the questions it raises. Courts still struggle with compound discrimination claims; theorists still debate whether intersectionality is a theory, a heuristic, or a sensibility; and the concept remains entangled in larger disputes about the aims of equality law. But whatever position one ultimately takes, the core insight is now hard to unsee: systems of subordination interact, and frameworks built to address them one at a time will miss the people caught at the intersections. I hope this entry has given you a sense of the concept, its origins, and its trajectory. As always, the Lexicon provides an introduction—the bibliography that follows will take you deeper.

Related Lexicon Entries

Bibliography

Alison Bailey, On Intersectionality, Empathy and Feminist Solidarity: A Reply to Naomi Zack, 19 Journal for Peace and Justice Studies 14 (2009).

Frances M. Beal, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (1969), reprinted in 8 Meridians 166 (2008).

Sara Bernstein, The Metaphysics of Intersectionality, 177 Philosophical Studies 321 (2020).

Liam Kofi Bright, Daniel Malinsky & Morgan Thompson, Causally Interpreting Intersectionality Theory, 83 Philosophy of Science 60 (2016).

Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (2016).

Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw & Leslie McCall, Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis, 38 Signs 785 (2013).

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990).

Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019).

Patricia Hill Collins & Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (2d ed. 2020).

Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement (1977).

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892).

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum 139.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, 43 Stanford Law Review 1241 (1991).

Ann Garry, Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender, 26 Hypatia 826 (2011).

Angela P. Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 Stanford Law Review 581 (1990).

Deborah K. King, Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology, 14 Signs 42 (1988).

Holly Lawford-Smith & Kate Phelan, The Metaphysics of Intersectionality Revisited, 30 Journal of Political Philosophy 166 (2022).

Leslie McCall, The Complexity of Intersectionality, 30 Signs 1771 (2005).

Jennifer C. Nash, Re-thinking Intersectionality, 89 Feminist Review 1 (2008).

Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (2019).

Naomi Zack, Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality (2005).

This entry was first published on July 24, 2026.

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