02 // Core Frameworks
Five ways of seeing,
in conversation and in conflict.
These are not five chapters of one argument. They overlap, they sharpen each other, and at points they push against each other. Most pairs do both at once. Click a concept to read it. Hover the lines to see how the pair actually relates.
Crenshaw · Hill Collins · hooks · Truth
Intersectionality
Identities don't add up. They intersect.
"A Black woman is not a Black person + a woman. She is something the law and the movement both kept failing to see."
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality names how race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and nation overlap to shape experience. It is not a checklist of identities but a structural claim: systems of power interlock, and analyses that isolate one axis will misdiagnose the harm. Sojourner Truth's 1851 question -- "Ain't I a woman?" -- is the older form of this argument. bell hooks's writing on class extends it: feminism that ignores poverty mistakes one woman's struggle for everyone's.
How it relates to the others
- mostly alignedBoth insist knowledge is shaped by social location, and that location is plural.Standpoint can slide into 'one marginal voice speaks for the margin'; intersectionality refuses that shortcut.
- mostly alignedReproductive justice IS intersectionality applied to the body and the state.Some intersectional analyses still center the courts; RJ insists the analytic frame must start with parenting and survival, not just rights.
- both at onceBoth refuse a single, universal 'woman.'Intersectionality, exported globally, can flatten difference into a Western analytic of identity categories.