Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Introduction

Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, published the article in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989. She analyses employment discrimination cases such as DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), in which Black women showed that the company had hired no Black women before 1964 but lost, because the court would examine race discrimination and sex discrimination only separately – and GM had hired both white women and Black men. Using the image of a traffic intersection, Crenshaw shows how a single-axis framework erases those who stand where several forms of discrimination cross, and extends this critique to feminist theory and antiracist politics. The term spread far beyond legal scholarship.

Connections

Builds on

• A Voice from the South1892 · Anna Julia Cooper
• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism1981 · bell hooks

Taken up in

• Mapping the Margins1991 · Kimberlé Crenshaw

More works by Kimberlé Crenshaw

• 1991Mapping the Margins