Intersectional FeminismPapers

This paper explores how to translate intersectional feminist theory into practical gender analytical frameworks (GAF) for development interventions, warning against turning intersectionality into a simple instrument stripped of its theoretical and methodological nuances.

A narrative study of Ni Una Menos as more than a protest against femicide: a plural political practice seeking to transform precarious life, relationships, knowledge, and solidarity.

This philosophical examination argues that intersectional feminism functions as a strong version of non-ideal theory, focusing on the multiply oppressed to understand how intersecting structures of oppression work and generate strategies for dismantling them. Through analyzing Asian American women's experiences navigating identity and power, the paper reveals three characteristic types of identity-power relationships: manifestation of oppression through identity construction, reproduction of oppression, and creation of resistance and solidarity through identity reconstruction.

Sarala Emmanuel and Shreen Saroor document how disabled women in eastern Sri Lanka encounter gender norms, inaccessible services and gaps in violence response, and how collective experience is translated into rights advocacy.

Nguyen, Gonick and Bui examine how disabled girls in Vietnam use phone-made short films to represent violence and exclusion, and ask whether participatory images can shift who gets to narrate research.

A groundbreaking 2018 FAccT study revealing severe bias in commercial facial recognition systems against darker-skinned women, with error rates up to 34.7% compared to just 0.8% for lighter-skinned males.

Loretta J. Ross frames reproductive justice as Black feminist movement praxis: three linked rights, material conditions, and the risks of separating reproductive choice from race and power.

Luna and Luker review reproductive justice through law and society scholarship, showing how the framework reshapes research on reproductive rights, health, intersectionality, movements, and state power.

Greta Gaard revisits ecofeminism’s contested history, distinguishing necessary critiques of gender essentialism from the wholesale dismissal of a tradition that linked gender, race, class, colonialism, species and environmental justice.

Zakiya Luna analyzes how women of color organizations pushed US reproductive rights organizing from individual choice and legal rights toward an intersectional reproductive justice framework.

Ann Phoenix’s reply to Sylvia Walby reframes a debate about feminist knowledge around a political question: how can collective claims cross difference without flattening it?

In this 1998 EPW essay, Sharmila Rege asks how Dalit women's situated experience can become collective feminist knowledge without turning identity into either silence or an unquestionable credential.

A groundbreaking 1997 Hypatia paper that first systematically explored intersections between ecofeminism and queer theory, arguing inclusive environmental ethics must account for diversity of species, gender, and sexuality.

Gopal Guru’s 1995 EPW essay links Dalit women’s autonomous organizing to caste-shaped knowledge, gendered exclusion within Dalit politics, and the conditions of feminist solidarity.

This groundbreaking 1991 article systematically articulates intersectionality theory, analyzing how race, gender, and other identity dimensions interact to shape the unique experiences of violence faced by women of color. Crenshaw critiques how anti-discrimination law and feminist movements fail to adequately address multiply-marginalized groups, calling for more inclusive frameworks of social justice.

This chapter from Collins’ seminal book *Black Feminist Thought* analyzes the controlling images of Black womanhood in U.S. culture - such as the mammy, matriarch, welfare queen, and jezebel - and how these stereotypes function to justify intersecting systems of race, gender, and class oppression. Collins argues that these images are ideological tools used to regulate Black women’s labor, sexuality, and social roles.

Crenshaw's groundbreaking 1989 paper that introduced the 'intersectionality' framework, revealing how Black women are marginalized in antidiscrimination law and feminist movements.

This influential essay critiques exclusionary practices within the feminist movement, arguing that using the tools and methods of oppressive systems to fight oppression is doomed to fail. Lorde calls for recognizing and embracing difference as a source of strength, emphasizing that true liberation requires creating entirely new frameworks rather than seeking reform within existing power structures.