Intersectionality

Roth J. Intersectionality. In: Kaltmeier O, Raab J, Foley MS, Nash A, Rinke S, Rufer M, eds. The Routledge Handbook of the History and the Society of the Americas. London: Routledge; 2019.The paradigm of intersectionality serves to describe and analyze the ways in which socially constructed categories of differences interact to create social hierarchy. Going back to the demands and theoretical productions by feminists, activists of color, and feminist activists from the so-called Global South, intersectionality has become a widespread concept in feminist and gender studies in Europe and the United States, ultimately in the social sciences in general. The term “intersectionality” was coined by the US-African American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw for a concrete juridical context in 1989, in which the combined disadvantage of being both black and female was at the center of legal dispute. Both researchers and activists in Latin America are engaged in the interrelations of different axes of stratification and inequalities, mostly class and race. Most importantly, to make an intersectionality approach productive for the Americas, one must take the diverse contexts into account, as well as avoid the North/South and subjects/objects of knowledge divide