About This Case Study

Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 to name a precise problem in antidiscrimination law: the way single-axis frameworks, which treat race and sex as separate, leave Black women with no recognized category in which to make a claim. For two decades the term remained a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it traveled — into activism, into journalism, into everyday speech, and finally into partisan politics, where by the late 2010s it had become, in the words of one observer, among the most hated words in American conservatism. This case study traces that journey from scholarship to slogan.

The exercise pairs Crenshaw's original formulation of intersectionality with Jane Coaston's reported essay "The Intersectionality Wars," which documents how the term acquired its contested public life and interviews Crenshaw about what has become of her concept. You will set the concept at its origin against the meanings it has taken on in circulation, and you will map the distance between the two. The analytical move is not to defend intersectionality or to attack it, but to study how an analytical concept becomes a political keyword — what survives the journey, what is distorted, and why a particular distortion takes hold.

Before You Begin

Pre-reading is required:

• Jane Coaston. "The Intersectionality Wars." Vox, May 2019. (vox.com)
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins" (the unit's Key Scholarship reading) — and, if available, her earlier "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" (chicagounbound.uchicago.edu) — at least the sections defining intersectionality (or your notes on them)
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group

While reading, keep these prompts in mind:

• How does Crenshaw herself define intersectionality, in her own scholarship and in her interview with Coaston?
• How do the conservative critics Coaston quotes define it? What do they say it is?
• Where do those two definitions touch the same thing, and where do they describe entirely different objects?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Concept at Its Origin (8–10 minutes)

Working from Crenshaw's scholarship, write the concept of intersectionality in your own words — not a dictionary definition, but the problem the concept was built to solve. Anchor your account in specifics:

• The case of Emma DeGraffenreid and the other plaintiffs in DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, whose discrimination claim was dismissed because the court treated race discrimination and sex discrimination as separate channels — and found that, because the employer hired both Black men and white women, neither channel applied to the Black women who were excluded.
• The three forms Crenshaw distinguishes in "Mapping the Margins": structural intersectionality (how being positioned at the intersection of race and gender shapes experience), political intersectionality (how single-axis movements can each marginalize those at the intersection), and representational intersectionality (how cultural images of women of color are produced and contested).

Close the phase by writing a single sentence: At its origin, intersectionality is a way of seeing __________.

For groups: each member produces their own definition in this phase. Do not share yet.

Phase 2: The Concept in Circulation (10–12 minutes)

Now turn to Coaston's essay, which catalogs what intersectionality came to mean as it left the academy. Working from the article, make two lists.

List one — the critics' intersectionality. Note the specific characterizations Coaston reports from conservative commentators: that intersectionality is "the new caste system," that it grants "special treatment" on the basis of group membership, that it amounts to a "conspiracy theory of victimization," that it ranks people by how many oppressed groups they belong to. Record the phrasing as precisely as you can; the wording carries the argument.

List two — the popular intersectionality. Note how the term is used more broadly and approvingly — as a shorthand for attending to overlapping identities, for coalition across difference, for the recognition that no single category captures a person's experience. Where does this everyday usage stay close to Crenshaw's concept, and where does it loosen into something more general?

For groups: assign list one to some members and list two to others. Reconvene after eight minutes to compare.

Phase 3: Mapping the Distance (8–10 minutes)

Set the concept at its origin (Phase 1) beside the concept in circulation (Phase 2), and map the distance between them. Work through three questions in your notes:

• What survives. Which features of Crenshaw's original concept are preserved in the circulating versions — even the hostile ones? (The critics, for instance, do register that intersectionality is about more than one identity at once.)
• What is inverted. Where does a circulating version reverse the original? Crenshaw's concept names a mechanism by which multiply-subordinated people become invisible — to courts, to movements, to cultural representation. The caricature recasts it as a hierarchy that makes those same people privileged, awarded standing for their oppression. Trace how the one becomes the other.
• Why this distortion. Why did this particular reading take hold rather than some other? What about the political moment, or about the concept itself, made it available to be read this way?

For groups: divide a sheet or shared document into columns — Survives, Inverts — and fill them in collaboratively, then spend the last few minutes on the third question together.

Phase 4: Why the Concept Traveled (5–7 minutes)

Step back from the mapping. In her interview with Coaston, Crenshaw offers her own diagnosis of what happened to her concept — describing intersectionality as a lens for seeing how forms of inequality compound, and reflecting on why that lens became a target. Hold her diagnosis against your own map from Phase 3, and consider what the episode reveals more generally: what makes an analytical concept travel out of the academy, and what makes it vulnerable to inversion once it does?

Complete this thought in one or two sentences:

Intersectionality became a political flashpoint because __________. What the "intersectionality wars" reveal about how concepts move from scholarship to slogan is __________.

For groups: each member offers their sentence in turn; the group notes whether the diagnoses cluster around the concept itself, the political moment, or the media that carried it.

Closing Reflection

In a few sentences, articulate where you have arrived. The aim is not to render a verdict on intersectionality but to say what the gap between its origin and its circulation has shown you.

The distance between intersectionality as Crenshaw defined it and "intersectionality" as it now circulates is, at its core, a distance between __________ and __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the four phases in order, writing brief notes at each step. The origin definition from Phase 1 and the distance-map from Phase 3 are the central artifacts; keep them for reference when answering Question 2 (on Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins") and Question 5 (on the NYU Keywords cluster and the LDF FAQ) in the unit's Questions for Reflection.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is individual; Phase 2 works well distributed across members; Phase 3 benefits from collaborative map-building; Phase 4 works as full-group discussion. If group time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• Return to Questions 2 and 5 in the unit's Questions for Reflection. Question 2 asks you to apply Crenshaw's concept to a specific case of overlapping subordination; the origin definition from Phase 1 is the tool for that. Question 5 asks you to identify a way a concept's public meaning has diverged from its scholarly meaning; the distance-map from Phase 3 is exactly that analysis applied to intersectionality.
• To extend the exercise, Jennifer C. Nash's Black Feminism Reimagined (the unit's Further Readings) examines a different "intersectionality war" — the contest over the concept within the academy, where it is at once celebrated and policed. Reading Nash alongside Coaston shows that the term is contested in more than one arena at once.
• The unit's NYU Press Keywords Now: Critical Race Theory cluster makes a parallel argument about a neighboring term. If you also complete the CRT Forward case study, comparing how "intersectionality" and "critical race theory" each traveled from scholarship to slogan reveals whether the two concepts were distorted in the same way or in different ways.