The term intersectionality is often attributed to legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Patricia Hill Collins defines intersectionality as "the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities." (2015, 2). In "Intersectionality: The many layers of an individual" Robert P. Mitchell describes intersectionality as the ingredients in a cake: "Take the eggs, milk, flour, and other ingredients, blend them together and bake, and the final product is the cake. In people, the ingredients are the characteristics they use to identify themselves — male, female, black, white, Muslim, Christian, Bostonian, etc. Like eggs, flour, milk, and sugar intersect to make a cake, those are some of the intersecting ingredients that might make up a person" (2016). People can have several intersecting identities, such as race/ethinicty, disability, class, gender, and sexuality. This section attempts to provide resources for some of those intersecting identities.
Collins, P H. (2015). “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.
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: 139–67.
Mitchell, R. P. (2016). "Intersectionality: The many layers of an individual." The Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/10/intersectionality-the-many-layers-of-an-individual/
