Kimberlé Crenshaw is an African American civil rights activist and one of the leading scholars of critical race theory and black feminist legal theory. Her work on intersectionality has had a huge impact on how we understand the layers of oppression people face based on their social identities, which is why we’ve chosen to feature her as part of our Sexological Shift series.
You can also read about Shere Hite, Virginia Johnsonand June Dobbs Buttswhich are some of the other key “hidden figures” in sexology highlighted earlier in this series.
Education and Career
Crenshaw has spent over 30 years as an activist and scholar “Identify Key Issues Perpetuating Inequality,” particularly in relation to how the law reflects and maintains these inequalities between groups. He first received a BA from Cornell University, followed by a JD from Harvard Law School and an LLM from the University of Wisconsin.
In 1991, Crenshaw was a member of the legal team for Anita Hill during her case against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. This experience illuminated how treating race and gender as separate identity categories erases the distinct experience of Black women, demonstrating the importance of an intersectional approach to social identity.
Crenshaw is currently Professor of Law at Columbia University, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the co-founder and executive director of The African American Policy Forumand is his host Intersectionality matters! podcast.
Cross section
Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in a 1989 article in the University of Chicago Legal Forum entitled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender: A Black Feminist Critique of Antisegregation Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” [1]. In this article, Crenshaw uses three different case studies of legal proceedings to demonstrate how the court’s treatment of racial and sexual identities as separate domains of discrimination ignores the multidimensional experience of black women, who experience an interconnected axis of oppression due to the unique subjectivity their position. . Crenshaw explains:
With black women as the starting point, this it becomes more obvious how dominant our notions of discrimination presuppose to think about submission as a disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to I suggest further that this the single axis frame erases black women The conceptualizing, recognizing, and redressing race and gender discrimination by limiting research to The experiences of its otherwise privileged members The club. In but words, in cases of racial discrimination, discrimination it tends to to be viewed in terms of sexual or class-privileged Blacks; in cases of gender discrimination, The focus is on women with racial and class privilege. (p. 140).
In this article, Crenshaw provides a vital example for sex researchers that demonstrates the necessity of intersectionality. the obfuscation of black women’s experiences during feminist discourses on rape; She explains how rape came to be seen as a tool of male dominance over white femininity, a discourse that “tends to overshadow the use of rape as a weapon of racial terror” (p. 158). To this end, Crenshaw continues:
When black women were raped by white men, they were raped not as women in general, but as black women in particular: Their femininity made them sexually vulnerable to racist domination, while their black status effectively denied them any protection. This white male power was reinforced by a justice system in which successfully convicting a white man of raping a black woman was almost unthinkable. (pp. 158-159).
This quote makes clear the importance of applying intersectionality to sexuality research, particularly among scholars who study sexual and/or gender-based violence, as well as those who study the legal ramifications of sexual activities.
Intersectionality is further developed by Crenshaw in an article titled “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. [2] Here, she applies intersectionality more broadly to “the various ways that race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color” (p. 1244).
Implications for Sex Research
The impact of intersectionality on the way sexologists have understood sex research is profound. Before Crenshaw introduced the concept, identity categories such as race, sex, and gender were all treated separately. However, as Crenshaw explains, separating these categories ignores the specific experiences of people who have intersectional identities. For example, the experiences of black lesbian women are inherently different from white lesbians, despite the fact that the two groups share the identities of “lesbian” and “women.” Intersectionality, then, allows sex researchers to be more precise when studying people from marginalized groups, so as not to ignore vital aspects of their identity.
Although it is difficult to quantify the impact that Crenshaw had on the field of sexuality research, the search for “intersectionality” among the articles published in Journal of Sex Research, for example, returns over 260 results. Some of the research published using her intersectionality framework includes:
It is clear that Crenshaw’s work is vital not only to the fields of critical race theory and black feminist legal studies, but also to research on sex. However, there is still plenty of research on sex with room to grow when it comes to studying intersections of oppression and marginalization. You can follow Crenshaw and watch her work Instagram, Twitterand AAPF website.
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Image credit: Collage made with Canva,
Images are sourced from Columbia Law School and UCLA Newsroom
bibliographical references
[1] Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender: A Black Feminist Critique of Antisegregation Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
[2] Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
