UW Curriculum Transformation Project

Teaching Intersectionality

Women of color pioneered work on analyzing the intersection of race, gender, class and other factors in women's lives, describing the interconnectedness in both framing identity and analyzing power relations. The framing of margin/center in the work of bell hooks, the "outsider within" in Patricia Hill Collins, and the "border" or "mestiza" consciousness in Gloria Anzaldua and other Chicana theorists are all manifestations of intersectionality.

Intersectional analysis now stands at the forefront of contemporary theory and practice in feminist cultural studies, critical race studies, racial/ethnic studies, and multiculturalism. As Dill, Nettles and Weber point out (2001), the systematic study of intersectionality is "flexible enough to consider large-scale, historically constructed and hierarchical power systems and the politics of personal interactions, including meanings and representations in the experience of individuals (p. 4)."

Legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, in "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," distinguishes structural intersectionality, in which the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender make experiences of rape, domestic violence and remedial reform qualitatively different form that of white women, and political intersectionality, in which antisexist and anti-racist rhetoric operate in tandem to marginalize the issue of violence against women. Philomena Essed develops intersectionality as a tool to identify intertwined gender, gace, ethnic, gender, economic and educational factors in shaping specific expressions of everyday injustices. Intersectional analysis, and particularly Crenshaw's and Essed's work, has become influential as a policy framework in the arena of international women's rights. For example, various bodies and entities within the UN have to a certain extent recognized the intersectionality of discrimination in women’s lives, that women do not experience discrimination and other forms of human rights violations solely on the grounds of gender, but also age, disability, health status, race, ethnicity, caste, class, national origin and sexual orientation. See Working Group on Women and Human Rights, Background Briefing on Intersectionality.

Bibliography

Jean Ait Belkhir has created a comprehensive bibliography on intersectionality as a cognitive framework for multicultural education, women's studies, racial/ethnic studies, social class studies and within in the disciplines.

Projects

Teaching Intersectionality Project, University of Washington

Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, University of Maryland College Park
Directed by Bonnie Thornton Dill and funded by the Ford Foundation, this project funds research projects on intersectionality and maintains a web site of resources.

Sample Syllabi

Essays:

Chandra C. Lewis-Qualls: “To learn that knowing was not enough”: Analysis of intersectionality in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. http://users.ev1.net/~aquila/chandra/audrelorde.html