Intersectionality recognizes that identities like race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability intersect and overlap. In the 1960s-70s, social movements focused on single identities, but women of color experienced multiple, intersecting forms of oppression. Intersectionality emerged to address how gender intersects with other identities and how women of different races experience gendered oppression uniquely. It provides a framework for understanding complex, overlapping systems of social injustice.

1. +
Gender Sexuality
Class Race
Intersectional Theory:
Identities and Social
Justice
Introduction to Ethnic Studies
October 10th, 2012

2. +
Intersectionality is a theoretical
approach that recognizes the
dynamics, relationships and
connections between different
categories of identity, such as race,
class, gender, sexuality and ability.

3. +  Social Movements of the 1960s and
1970s
 Identity Politics
Emergence of
 Single factor identity
Intersectionality
 Eliminate De Facto Discrimination

4. +
The Feminist Movement
Experiences of White, MC, Experiences of WC Women of
Women Color
1. History of Forced Labor
1. Right to Work
2. Controlled Reproduction
2. Right to Not have Children
3. Violence Inside and Outside
3. Stop Violence Against Women Community
4. Racialized Stereotypes of
4. The ‘Essential’ Woman Womanhood

5. +
Civil Rights Movement
 Race as central category
 Agenda was determined by men and reflected such position
 Women were placed in ‘traditional’ roles
 Sexism and sexual harassment in the movement

6. +
Gay Rights Movement
 White Gay Men as the central category
 Fought anti-sodomy laws, gay as consumption culture
 Queer vs. Gay vs. Two-Spirit
 Homophobia as a cultural aspect of communities of color

7. +
Historical Example:
Dividing Labor by Race
 Bacon’s Rebellion
 Post Civil-War- Populist Party tries to unite poor Blacks and
Whites, Wealthy whites introduce segregation laws to break up
the party.
 Myth of ‘them’ taking ‘our’ jobs

8. +
The Whitewashing of the Gay
Community

9. +
Contemporary Examples:
The Labor Market
Racialized Divisions of Labor
placed people of color in
undesirable positions that
Race served the white population.
Domestic
workers,
cleaners,
behind the
scenes labor
The gender division of labor
Gender channels women into doing
reproductive labor (childcare,
cleaning, service-sector)

10. +
Contemporary Examples:
Gay Marriage

11. Assumes a ‘normative’ family structure
+ 
(They are just like us)
 Middle class status allows homosexual
couples to participate in wedding
consumer culture
Contemporary
Examples:
 Social Justice= Assimilating into the
Gay Marriage system
 Race, Class impact a person’s
relationship with state institutions.

12. +

13. +
Practice: The Exotification of
Women

14. +
Apply: What does Intersectionality
Look Like in Your Life?
 Write down some of the identity characteristics of your own life
(race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation etc. )
 Do certain ones define you in certain situations? When? Are
that some that matter more to other people? To you?
 What privileges and penalties do those characteristics hold?