What Is Intersectionality?

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Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American researcher and professor of law, following the trail of Black American feminists, introduced in the late 1980s to her scientific work the concept of intersectionality, then she described the intersection of the race category and gender, and defined multiple discrimination. Intersectionality is now understood as an approach analyzing ways in which social and cultural categories intersect, overlap, interlock and strengthen. At the center of the intersectional analysis there are links between gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, class, nationality, etc. Crenshaw described a situation in which people belong to many minority groups simultaneously and experience in this connection specific, multiplied …show more content…

Each of the minority identities that become example for discrimination can overlap with another and result in a specific discrimination experience. For example: at the same time a person of Roma origin (ethnicity) may be a woman (gender), who may be a lesbian (sexual orientation), who may be disabled (fitness), who may be older (age) who can live in the countryside (place of residence), which may be poor (material status). Individuals can experience the marginalizing effects of intersections separately (example a woman with disability), but also one person can meet all these conditions at the same time. If the unequal treatment involves belonging to more than one group, we are talking about the general category of multiple …show more content…

We distinguish different types within it: 1. Multiple discrimination in a narrow sense - a situation in which one person is discriminated because of belonging to different groups, but experiences this discrimination separately at different times. For example, an employee with a physical disability as a woman is not preferred by her employer as a candidate for promotion (discrimination based on sex), and at another moment the employer does not care that the professional team meeting to which the person belongs should have taken place to which this employee can get (discrimination based on disability). In the legal context, this type of discrimination based on more than one premise is perceived as "ordinary" discrimination, because both types of discrimination are happening at different times. These situations are treated separately, on the basis of existing provisions, treating each case of discrimination separately and the premise underlying it. Different grounds for discrimination "add" to each other in one situation. In a specific case, e.g. when an employer is looking for a person up to 30 years of age, without an

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