intersectionality

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a theoretical framework, coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, for understanding how different aspects of a person's social and political identities — such as gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality — interact and overlap to create compounding systems of discrimination and privilege; intersectionality argues that these social categories are not independent variables but mutually constituting systems that cannot be fully understood in isolation; the concept is widely used in feminist theory, critical race studies, and social policy analysis