Talking about intersectionality. Interview with Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (original) (raw)

2016, SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO

Copyright © FrancoAngeli N.B: Copia ad uso personale. È vietata la riproduzione (totale o parziale) dell'opera con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata e la sua messa a disposizione di terzi, sia in forma gratuita sia a pagamento. 12 nation cases, respectively. I was keen to find some way of framing the contradictory and compounded nature of this dilemma. Intersectionality became the name for that prism. The 1989 article entitled Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex in Anti-discrimination Law: A Black Feminist Critique [henceforward Demarginalizing, editors' note] featured traffic intersections-among other metaphors-as a way of conceptualizing the interactive dimensions of racism and sexism in the context of employment that some courts rendered legally inconsequential. These interactive dimensions created material conditions that were typically overlooked by judges and advocates alike. Plaintiffs like Emma DeGraffenreid has challenged employment regimes that stratified the workforce in terms of race and gender, but only by combining two causes of action could the plaintiffs prevail. Their arguments were repudiated based on the questionable assertion that Congress had not intended for Black women to combine race and gender claims. The particular risks of being subject to both dynamics were marginalized by courts. These dynamics were also apparent within dominant conceptions of antiracism and feminism. The circumstances that drove the lawsuits discussed in Demarginalizing, courts' repudiation of Black women's claims altogether, constituted the condition that intersectionality sought to disrupt. Beyond the specific doctrinal problems that I hoped to address with intersectionality were the institutional and social dimensions of race and gender discourses that shaped that the temporal context. I have written elsewhere that intersectionality was a lived reality before it became a word, but that lived reality refers not only to the dynamics of race and gender that prompted these Black women to seek legal redress. More broadly, the institutional context that gave rise to the metaphor shaped my intellectual repertoire during a sharply discordant period in the political and legal culture in the United States. The metaphor served not only to frame the vulnerability of Black women to discrimination and erasure, but also mapped the ways that Black women were marginalized within several discursive projects. Each of these discourses-antiracism, feminism, and critical legal perspectives on lawgenerated distinctive ways of capturing social disempowerment. Each was in some way lacking in terms of their engagement with Black women as legal subjects, yet at the same time, when articulated together, they helped to sustain a prisms that could address the particular questions that Demarginalizing addressed. My intellectual foundation was in Africana Studies-a field of Black Studies that foregrounded the structural dimensions of racial power. This emphasis was in tension with the singular focus on individual-level preju-Copyright © FrancoAngeli N.B: Copia ad uso personale. È vietata la riproduzione (totale o parziale) dell'opera con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata e la sua messa a disposizione di terzi, sia in forma gratuita sia a pagamento. Copyright © FrancoAngeli N.B: Copia ad uso personale. È vietata la riproduzione (totale o parziale) dell'opera con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata e la sua messa a disposizione di terzi, sia in forma gratuita sia a pagamento.