SOCI 210: Sociological perspectives

Intersectionality

  1. Administrative
  2. Intersectionality

Administrative

Worksheet turn-in

  • Starting with this worksheet (due tomorrow), please submit your work in two places on MyCourses
  • 1: Submit as usual in the peer feedback section
    Content > Discussion worksheets > SOCI 210 Worksheet X
  • 2: Submit to MyCourses assignments tab
    Assignments > Work sheet X
  • The deadline is 11:59pm (23h59) for both submissions

TA feedback

  • Feedback and scores from the TAs will be available for about half of the groups for each worksheet on the MyCourses submission
  • Feedback will mostly be in-line on the document itself
  • Initials of the evaluator under the MyCourses comment
    CB (Calla Brugmans; she/her)
    EB (Emma Brion; they/them)

Intersec­tionality

Black and white photo. Small group of Black women stand on a small platform. One holds a megaphone to her mouth. Another holds a sign by her feet that reads 'NOT ANOTHER BLACK WOMAN KILLED!

Barbara Smith with the Combahee River Collective in 1979

Intersectionality

A screenshot of a website with dropdown menus for ethnicity, ethnicity sub-category, and race. The ethnicity sub-category menu is open and lists many ethnicities.

Social categories

  • Race, gender, disability, ethnicity, sexuality …
  • Central to sociological research
  • Used to explain differences in outcomes, role expectations, etc.
  • Key explanations of inequality and discrimination

Often studied separately

  • Social categories usually studies as separate topics.
  • E.g. “Sociology of race and ethnicity”

Intersectionality

  • Intersectional sociology maintains that studying social categories (like race, disability, class, gender, sexuality, …) separately impedes our understanding of those categories

Intersectionality

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976)

  • Term “intersectionality” coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain the outcome of a workplace discrimination lawsuit at General Motors filed by Black women employees (among other legal cases)
    Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics." u. Chi. Legal f. (1989): 139.
  • GM had many Black men working in their factories, and many white women working in their offices, so the court found no evidence of racial or gender discrimination
Black and white photo. A Black man in an auto factory lowers an engine into a car. Black and white photo. A white woman sits in front of a large typewriter in an office.

Intersectionality

Social categories are not independent

  • “Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another.”
    Collins, Patricia Hill. “It’s All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (August 1998): 62–82.
  • The experiences of, e.g., Black women is not just the experiences of being Black “plus” the experience of being a women

Intersectional analyses

  • Look at the way that multiple, overlapping social categories affect a social outcome
  • E.g. how can the intersection of gender, race, and class help us explain why Black women are 360% more likely to die during pregnancy than whitewomen in the United States?
    https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/pregnancy-mortality-surveillance-system.htm
  • E.g. “The intersectional/interlocking nature of racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism compound the vulnerabilities faced by Aboriginal
    women in Canada.”
    Gilchrist, Kristen. 2010. “‘Newsworthy’ Victims?” Feminist Media Studies 10 (4): 373–90.
Screenshot of a Vox article. title: What Serena William's scary childbirth story says about medical treatment of black women. Featerus a photo of Serena Williams.

Image credit

Black and white photo. Small group of Black women stand on a small platform. One holds a megaphone to her mouth. Another holds a sign by her feet that reads 'NOT ANOTHER BLACK WOMAN KILLED!

Barbara Smith at a 1979 rally. Photo by Ellen Shub, via The New Yorker

A screenshot of a website with dropdown menus for ethnicity, ethnicity sub-category, and race. The ethnicity sub-category menu is open and lists many ethnicities.

Image from teachingstrategies.my.site.com

Black and white photo. A Black man in an auto factory lowers an engine into a car.

Bettmann/Corbis via The New York Times

Black and white photo. A white woman sits in front of a large typewriter in an office.

FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images via CNN

Screenshot of a Vox article. title: What Serena William's scary childbirth story says about medical treatment of black women. Featerus a photo of Serena Williams.

Screenshot from Vox

Williams: history of pulmonary embolisms, reported symptoms directly after childbirth and reported that she needed a CT scan and meds. Nurses first tried to dismiss as confusion from the medication, then tried an ultrasound of her legs before she insisted on getting the CT scan.