RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Critical Race Theory; Identity Politics; Whiteness Studies
Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, critical legal scholars, such as Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda and Alan Freeman, began publishing work that developed the discourse around race, power and law. Together, they advanced the idea that the law, rather than being a neutral system based on objective principles, operated to reinforce established social hierarchies (Cobb, 2021).
In 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw contributed a concept that became one of the best-known elements of critical race theory. The idea was expressed in a 1989 article, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.’ Her central argument concerned the notion of ‘intersectionality’. As Miriyam Aouargh (2019: 16) explains, when Crenshaw initially coined the term, it was in response to a court case against discrimination in which the judge had rejected a plea based on the plaintiff being black and female. He argued that she should make a choice: to pursue the case either against racism or against sexism. In his opinion, it could not be both. The notion of intersectionality was a way to accommodate the reality that any one (legal) person has multiple (social) identities that cause overlapping oppressions. In this sense, intersectionality, understood as an interface, brings to attention the ways in which people who belong to more than one marginalised community can be overlooked by anti-discrimination law. In many ways, this was a distillation of the kinds of problems that critical race theory addressed (Cobb, 2021).
Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) define the importance of intersectionality in the following terms:
“Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves.”
Intersectionality and Identity-Based Politics
The notion of intersectionality came to be associated with identity-based politics. The process of recognising that which was formerly perceived as isolated and individual as social and systemic is one that characterised the identity politics of African Americans, other people of colour, gays and lesbians and other marginalised groups. For these groups, Crenshaw (1991) argues, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community and intellectual development.
Design and Intersectionality
The concern for design practices in relation to intersectionality and identity-based politics is the extent to which certain affordances are offered for particular identities or subject positions over others, perhaps through the design of avatars by means of which social subjects are addressed and drawn into particular design worlds, whether material or digital. Does the design hierarchise social identities, for example, in presenting intersections among homosexuality, race, cultural renewal and self-formation, or exclude particular social identities? How is the design implicated in, for example, the production of whiteness and masculinity? Does the design seek to generate or acknowledge new intersections?
References
Aouragh, M. (2019) “White privilege” and shortcuts to anti-racism, Race and Class, 61(2), pp. 3–26. doi: 10.1177/0306396819874629.
Cobb, J. (2021) ‘The Man Behind Critical Race Theory’, The New Yorker, (13 September). Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory? (Accessed: 8 August 2022).
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, 1, pp. 139–167. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 (Accessed: 10 August 2022).
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299.
Hill Collins, P. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
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