Solidarity

Solidarity

Volume 42, Numbers 3-4, Fall/Winter 2014
Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw addressed “the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” in a law journal article that brought the term intersectionality into feminist discourse. Crenshaw—among others, including Patricia Collins Hill and bell hooks—argued that dynamics of privilege and subordination rarely depend on “a single categorical axis.” They saw any movement that fails to recognize multiple registers of social identity as fragmentary, reinforcing marginality rather than fostering what Crenshaw called “unifying activity.”

Crenshaw and others built on a discourse that was already in development. For example, the Combahee River Collective’s 1978 “A Black Feminist Statement” clearly stated that “the most profound and most potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression,” but also insisted upon the necessity to “address a whole range of oppressions.” In doing so, they recognized the complexity of both individual and social identity formations—and the possibility of solidarity across identity axes and coalition-building in political work.