Intersectionality

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Intersectionality examines how various social identities (e.g., race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, etc.) interact and create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

Intersectionality helps highlight these overlapping forms of discrimination and their cumulative impact. For example, a working-class woman of color may experience racism, sexism, and exploitation as a proletarian simultaneously, each influencing and exacerbating the others.

Sowing division along various social lines creates pockets of economically and politically vulnerable workers that the Capitalists can exploit to a much greater degree. The relative oppression of certain groups also help to depress wages and worsen working conditions for the entire workforce, due to competition in the labour market, and a decreased unity to organize for worker protections.

Intersectionality as a concept emerged from liberal academia, which follows an "anything but Communism" approach to analyzing society; Marxist-Leninist theory, while much older, has always recognized and developed analyses of interlocking oppressions. The difference is that Marxism-Leninism recognizes that class struggle is the basis of all oppressions. Therefore, some people dismiss the term as a liberal co-optation that evacuates the class analysis, or as merely redundant.

Origin

Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a framework for understanding how different social categories, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, intersect to create unique experiences of discrimination and privilege