Intersectional Feminism: What It Means and Why It Matters Right Now

This UN Women explainer introduces intersectionality through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework and the experiences of activists in Brazil and Guatemala. The current article, dated June 2025, connects racial discrimination, Indigenous women’s opportunities and climate vulnerability. Its starting point is that inequality cannot always be understood by examining one category at a time.

Who gets to define the problem?

Valdecir Nascimento’s insistence on Black women’s leadership makes representation a question of authority. Being mentioned in a policy document is different from deciding what the policy should address. Sonia Maribel Sontay Herrera’s account of language and employment barriers likewise shows why a general promise of opportunity may leave particular exclusions intact. Anne Heloise Barbosa connects the vulnerability of Brazil’s favelas to environmental injustice.

These examples invite a different way of reading a claim that a programme serves women. Which women can actually use it? Does participation assume a particular language, location, income or amount of free time? If those conditions are treated as neutral, a formally inclusive programme can remain inaccessible to the people facing its greatest costs.

More than a list of identities

Intersectionality is useful when it changes the explanation of a problem. Adding more groups to a sentence is insufficient if the proposed response remains the same. An intervention might address gender discrimination at work while leaving the language requirements or transport arrangements that exclude some women untouched. The relevant question is how these arrangements operate together.

Climate justice makes that reasoning especially tangible. An environmental hazard does not determine everyone’s exposure on its own; housing, infrastructure and political influence shape who can avoid danger and recover afterward. The article connects this issue to feminist organizing without making climate the only subject of intersectionality.

For readers evaluating campaigns or public services, a practical question follows: whose account could change the plan, rather than merely illustrate it? It encourages attention to decision-making, resources and accountability. It also cautions against treating any one spokesperson as representative of everyone assigned to a category. An intersectional approach has to remain open to disagreement within groups as well as inequality between them.