"Intersectionality" is one of those terms that has become both everywhere and nowhere. It circulates widely in public discourse, often drained of its original political urgency. But when returned to theory, intersectionality regains its edge: not just as a tool for inclusion, but as a way to rethink how power, identity, and social structures actually function. Here are three distinct perspectives that enrich our understanding of this concept.
1. Kimberlé Crenshaw: The Legal-Structural Origin
Intersectionality begins not as theory for theory's sake, but from the brutal specifics of legal neglect. In the late 1980s, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to explain how Black women were excluded from both feminist anti-discrimination law (which assumed the subject was white) and race-based protections (which assumed the subject was male). Her foundational insight was simple but profound: systems of oppression are not merely additive; they are co-constitutive.
Crenshaw illustrated this with the metaphor of a traffic intersection: where multiple roads (race, gender, class) converge, the point of impact is unique. A Black woman might be hit from any or all directions, but legal frameworks weren't designed to recognize this convergence. This remains a critical intervention in feminist and legal theory, foregrounding lived experience while demanding structural change.
2. Patricia Hill Collins: The Matrix of Domination
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins expands the conversation by introducing the idea of a "matrix of domination." For Collins, intersectionality isn't just about individual identities or experiences; it's about how these identities are embedded within larger systems of knowledge and control.
Rather than ranking oppressions, Collins asks us to consider how race, gender, sexuality, and class interlock in context-specific ways. For example, the experience of a Black lesbian in the academy is shaped not only by her identity but by how institutional norms are racialized, gendered, and heteronormative. Power is exercised through what counts as knowledge, whose voices are legitimized, and what is rendered invisible.
Her work invites a shift from thinking about identity as a fixed essence to understanding it as a location within a shifting web of power relations.
3. Deleuze and Guattari (via Jasbir Puar): Intersectionality as Assemblage
In a provocative turn, queer theorist Jasbir Puar critiques traditional intersectionality for relying too much on fixed categories. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage, she proposes that identities are not stable nodes at the crossroads of oppression, but dynamic and contingent formations.
Assemblage theory resists the temptation to map oppression through a checklist of traits. Instead, it suggests that race, gender, and sexuality are not discrete lines of force but emergent properties of complex networks—biopolitical, affective, geopolitical. In this view, intersectionality becomes less about the additive logic of identities and more about tracing how bodies, norms, and technologies co-produce each other in specific contexts.
Puar’s critique doesn't reject intersectionality but stretches it. It challenges us to see power not just in institutions but in atmospheres; not just in exclusion but in modulation and control.
Why These Tensions Matter
Each of these perspectives offers something different: Crenshaw insists on legal recognition, Collins on epistemic justice, and Puar on ontological fluidity. The tensions between them aren’t problems to be solved, but productive sites for thinking more deeply. Intersectionality isn't just about who we are; it's about how we live in systems that are uneven, overlapping, and always in motion.
