Identity, Oppression, and Power

Abstract

Feminisms and Intersectionality Theory I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole. —Morales (1990, p. 50) In her poem, Aurora Levins Morales, a feminist poet, challenges our thinking about women's human experience as multiple, shifting, and layered across time. She touches on multiple identities of women in terms of race, color, age, social class, ethnicity, culture, his-tory, geographic location, language, and migrant status. She challenges us to view women as multidimensional, yet uniquely whole. In our teaching and research, we have used intersec-tionality theory in traditional and nontraditional ways to analyze and understand women's multiple identities and the challenges that women face. In the traditional sense, intersec-tionality theory avoids essentializing a single analytical category of identity by attending to other interlocking categories. In a nontraditional way, intersectionality enables us to stretch our thinking about gender and feminism to include the impact of context and to pay atten-tion to interlocking oppressions and privileges across various contexts. In this editorial, we provide two case examples from our research—one with Black–White biracial adoptees in White families and the other with Afghan refugee women—to illustrate the challenges that Morales posed and how we use intersectionality to analyze and understand women as mul-tidimensional, yet uniquely whole. Intersectionality Theories of intersectionality emerged from the writings of women of color during the 1960s and 1970s. Intersectionality has also been used as a tool for gender and economic justice (Symington, 2004). In recognizing the limitations of theorizing gender as a unified collective transcending race and class, intersectionality calls on scholars to be more inclu-sive of a broader group of women in their analysis of gender and definitions of what is fem-inist. In fact, intersectionality goes further to recognize that for many women of color, their feminist efforts are simultaneously embedded and woven into their efforts against racism, classism, and other threats to their access to equal opportunities and social justice. These efforts, past and present, frequently position men as allies. Now typically referred to within second-and, more recently, third-wave feminisms, intersectionality proposes that gender cannot be used as a single analytic frame without also exploring how issues of race, migra-tion status, history, and social class, in particular, come to bear on one's experience as a woman. Consequently, scholars and theorists who endorse this theory must attend to myr-iad overlapping and mutually reinforcing oppressions that many women face in addition to gender. It is no longer acceptable to produce analyses that are embedded solely within an essentialist or universal collective experience as " woman. " Scholars, such as Baca Zinn and