The (Mis)use of Intersectionality in Student Affairs: A (Revised) Call to Practitioners & Researchers
**I first wrote this post after attending the 2nd National Symposium on LGBTQ Research in Higher Education in October 2017. Moving much of my public writing to Medium inspired me to come back to some of my more popular posts and revise them. Recently, I got to see Kimberlé Crenshaw speak as the opening keynote at the 2020 ACPA Convention in Nashville, TN. Both her talk and my learning about intersectionality since inform updates to this post.
To me, it feels like the term intersectionality shows up everywhere in our (higher education/student affairs) field. One sees the term in scholarly articles, academic talks, discussions in staff meetings, and advertisements for programs. Intersectionality is a part of the everyday vernacular of our field. In some ways, it has not only a buzzword quality but also a word that must be used to signal one’s core competence about anything related to diversity, equity, and justice in our work. As one columnist wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, intersectionality has “migrated from women’s-studies journals and conference keynotes into everyday conversation, turning what was once highbrow discourse into hashtag chatter” (para. 1). Though one does not need to read hundreds of articles to understand intersectionality as a concept, student affairs and higher education practitioners and researchers alike continue to misuse intersectionality as a concept in our field; this must stop.
While Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989; 1991) coined the term intersectionality in her often-cited essays, the concept of intersectionality can be traced to a host of Black Feminist scholars. These scholars include, but are not limited to, the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, Deborah King, Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Beal.
Before I go further, let me be clear: I am not the first person to think or write about this. This has been addressed in higher education research articles (e.g., Harris & Patton, 2019), news articles (e.g., The Chronicle of Higher Education), book chapters (e.g., Pitcher, Secrist, & Camacho, 2016) books (Mitchell, Simmons, & Greyerbiehl, 2014), and by Crenshaw herself. What I seek to do in this post is to add to that conversation in discussing intersectionality briefly and contrast it from the concepts it is often confused with, such as “multiple identities” and “intersections of identities.” If you have the capacity, go read Crenshaw’s original articles (1989; 1991), check out her TED Talk (2016), and/or her Women of the World festival keynote (2016). I also offer full references at the end of this post.
WHAT INTERSECTIONALITY IS
…to only see intersectionality as being about identity is to ignore its historical and disciplinary origins and intent and thereby miss the mark of its full analytic power.
- Jones (2014) in Intersectionality & Higher Education: Theory, Research, & Praxis (p. xii)
“Who people are” can never be understood apart from “the way things work,” despite the insistence of this scholarship that these two categories are distinct.
-Nash (2019) in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (p. 75)
To better understand inequality, Crenshaw (1989; 1991) offered intersectionality as a prism to name the “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism” (p. 1243–1244). For Crenshaw, understanding Black women’s experiences from an analysis of racism exclusively ignores the ways sexism affects their experiences and vice-versa. In her work, Crenshaw specifically named how these intersecting patterns limit meaningful analysis of the ways Black women are marginalized by both sexism and racism. In other words, intersectionality as a method attempts to understand the ways different systems of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, heterosexism) enact a particular form of marginalization that separate analyses of each system do not account for on their own. Crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality also continues to evolve and yet simultaneously remains dedicated to its core conception, as seen in her reflection in The Washington Post.
Crenshaw offers two metaphors to help individuals think through the concept of intersectionality. The first metaphor is the one most are familiar with:
“Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 149)
Here, Crenshaw (1989) drew attention to the ways Black women can be left susceptible to similar kinds of discrimination as their white woman and Black man counterparts; sometimes, they share these experiences of discrimination with each of those two groups. At the same time, they experience both sets of discrimination which have combined, unique effects on Black women, in this example.
The second metaphor, often the more ignored one in the intersectionality scholarship (Nash, 2019), asks the reader to…
“Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked–feet standing on shoulders–with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside. In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that ‘but for’ the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room. A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who-due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below-are in the position to crawl through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch.” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 151–152)
Crenshaw (1989) pointed out the ways that discrimination law fails to protect Black women as individuals with multiple marginalized identities. Traditional discrimination law requires one to say that but for their race or but for their sex to claim redress under discrimination law. It is precisely because of compounding experiences of marginalization that Black women cannot separate out their experiences of race-gender to either gender or race; instead, the simultaneity of discrimination prevents them from claiming both injuries simultaneously in the legal system.
Both metaphors, as well as Crenshaw and others’ work, help us as researchers and practitioners name the way systems of power and oppression shape the experiences of those with multiple, marginalized social identities and the ways “oppressive systems overlap and differentially impact people based on their social location” (Duran & Jones, 2020, p. 282)
WHAT INTERSECTIONALITY IS NOT
First, intersectionality is not a math equation. It is not a rubric. It is not an additive concept. What do I mean by this? In trainings I facilitated, I have seen students and student affairs educators talk about the Big 8 Social Identities–age, culture, dis/ability, gender, race, religion/spirituality, sexuality, and social class–and assign the ways those identities give power in a +1 or -1 format. For instance, someone who is White (+1), is middle-aged (+1), Christian (+1), a cisgender (+1) man (+1), with generalized anxiety (-1), who is queer (-1), and poor (-1) has a Privilege Score of +5. Talking about privilege, power, and oppression becomes a plus or minus concept. Everyone begins to size one another up and discuss who has “uber” privilege points and who does not. And yet, this is not how oppression, let alone intersectionality, works. Black women do not experience -2 points because of race and gender. There is a compounding nature to the ways these interconnected experiences produce a unique effect on Black women’s experiences that racism or sexism alone cannot explain because of their unitary conceptualization (see Bowleg, 2008).
Second, intersectionality is not the same thing as naming and recognizing different, multiple social identities. We all have multiple social identities. As Jones and Abes (2013) pointed out, “this claim becomes reductionist if the analysis does not include connecting individuals to groups; groups to society; and individuals, groups, and society — all in connection to structures of power” (p. 141). Often, individuals conflate intersectionality with multiple identities because of intersectionality’s attention to the ways, for example, Black women are multiply marginalized by compounding oppression. Crenshaw (1993) even noted that intersectionality is not offered “as some new, totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender…My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (p. 1244–1245). Crenshaw, like others, never intended intersectionality to be a theory of identity. Instead, intersectionality is a way of conceptualizing how systems overlap to shape the experiences of those with multiple marginalized social identities in ways that singular analysis fails to explain.
Third, people use the term “intersectionality” interchangeably with “intersections of identity.” I often hear people say, “we need to pay attention to the intersectionality of identities.” This utterance is reflective of the ways intersectionality’s original definition and meaning has been co-opted and shifted. In this understanding, intersectionality is reduced to meaning “let’s look at the whole of a person’s identities and how they come together.” This is an important thing to do in our work as educators; I’m not arguing it is not. What I am asserting is that this is not intersectionality; it was never intended for analysis of individuals separate from the contexts in which they exist that determine one’s livelihood and life chances. We can pay attention to particular intersections of identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality, when centering queer people of color or use an intersectional framework to understand their unique experiences with oppression.
IMPLICATIONS
If we do not get intersectionality right in our field, we will reify a narrative that individuals must adapt to oppressive systems rather than having an informed approach to addressing the ways these systems affect students’ experiences within and outside of the container of higher education. When we approach intersectionality as we currently do in scholarship and practice, we reify that racism and sexism and cissexism are all distinct with no connections between them. We also privilege discussions of those with only one minoritized and marginalized identity; those who are marginalized from multiple social positions do not see themselves in our conversations, research, or programs. This avoidance of using intersectionality correctly also allows those who hold both minoritized and privileged identities to see themselves as being able to avoid discussions of their privilege.
Many who have been educated in higher education and student affairs graduate preparation programs will point to the brilliant work of the Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity (Jones & McEwen, 2000) and the Reconceptualized Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity (Abes, Jones, & McEwen, 2007) as examples of intersectionality. And yet, those researchers discussed those models as ways to understand how identities intersect; they are not models of intersectionality. Indeed, the authors of those models even name that they were not exactly applying the tenets of intersectionality until later (Jones & Abes, 2013). The Intersectional Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity is presented later and grounded in intersectionality theory, with a more explicit nature of macro analysis (Jones & Abes, 2013). These models challenge us to do our work intersectionally, to do our work in ways that we tease out and interrogate the ways interlocking systems of oppression affect individuals of different social positions differently depending on the ways they’ve been rendered by said systems. These models help us begin to think about how we honor the full complexity of each other and our students, reminding us that we must look to the ways systems which shape these identities and the ways they intersect with one another.
“Intersectionality brings into focus how structures themselves create vulnerabilities for particular groups of people” (Crenshaw, 2020 ACPA Convention Keynote). Intersectionality can serve as prism to do transformative work in our field. Intersectionality reminds us top-down and checklist forms of social justice work where we try to tackle one -ism at a time in our education programs or reform efforts always leave people behind. Let’s get intersectionality right and start envisioning a higher education (and a broader society) where we continue to name and dismantle these intersecting systems that affect our (students’) lives.
REFERENCES
Abes, E. S., Jones, S. R., & McEwen, M. K. (2007). Reconceptualizing the model of multiple dimensions of identity: The role of meaning-making capacity in the construction of multiple identities. Journal of College Student Development, 48(1), 1–22.
Bowleg, L. (2008). When Black + lesbian + woman ≠ Black lesbian woman: The methodological challenges of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality research. Sex Roles, 59(5–6), 312–325.
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, 140, 139–167.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241–1299.
Duran, A., & Jones, S. R. (2020). Complicating identity exploration: An intersectional grounded theory centering queer students of color at historically white institutions. Journal of College Student Development, 61(3), 281–298.
Harris, J. C., & Patton, L. D. (2019). Un/doing intersectionality through higher education research. The Journal of Higher Education, 90(3), 347–372.
Jones, S. R., & Abes, E. S. (2013). Identity development of college students: Advancing frameworks for multiple dimensions of identity. Jossey-Bass.
Jones, S. R., & McEwen, M. K. (2000). A conceptual model of multiple dimensions of identity. Journal of College Student Development, 41(4), 405–414.
Mitchell, D., Simmons, C. Y., & Greyerbiehl, L. A. (Eds.) (2014). Intersectionality & higher education: Theory, research, & praxis. Peter Lang.
Nash, J. C. (2019). Black Feminism reimagined: After intersectionality. Duke University Press.
Pitcher, E. N., Secrist, S. M., & Camacho, T. P. (2016). (Re)fractioning singularity. In N. M. Rodriguez, W. J. Martino, J. C. Ingrey, & E. Brockenbrough (Eds.), Critical concepts in queer studies and education: An international guide for the twenty-first century (pp. 329–339). Palgrave Macmillan.
Originally published at http://www.itsalexcl.com on October 15, 2017. Updated on March 30, 2020.
