What is intersectional feminism? A look at the term you may be hearing a lot

Alia E. Dastagir | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Protesters flood Washington for women's march Hundreds of thousands of people from around the United States flood Washington, DC, on Saturday for a massive rights march in defiance of America's hardline new president, Donald Trump. Video provided by AFP

"Intersectional feminism" is much more than the latest feminist buzzword. It is a decades-old term many feminists use to explain how the feminist movement can be more diverse and inclusive.

If feminism is advocating for women's rights and equality between the sexes, intersectional feminism is the understanding of how women's overlapping identities — including race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation — impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination.

A white woman is penalized by her gender but has the advantage of race. A black woman is disadvantaged by her gender and her race. A Latina lesbian experiences discrimination because of her ethnicity, her gender and her sexual orientation.

Intersectionality has received increased attention in part due to how the Women's March on Washington came together. The rally, which began organically on Facebook, was initially criticized for failing to include any women of color as organizers. Now its leaders include Tamika Mallory, an African-American civil rights activist and former director of the National Action Network; Linda Sarsour, a Muslim who heads the Arab American Association of New York; and Carmen Perez, a Latina activist who directs Harry Belafonte’s Gathering for Justice. The march's policy platform is called "Unity Principles," which include the belief that "gender justice is racial justice is economic justice."

"This has been a conversation about feminism for years, but what we're witnessing now is a literacy, newer generations are coming to feminism and starting to understand how intersectionality fits within their feminism and how it can widen their view in a sense of how we think about advocating and shaping policy," said Syreeta McFadden, professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City and a writer on racial discrimination and African-American culture.

The concept was given a name in 1989, when Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia and a leading thinker on race theory, wrote a seminal paper on the topic.

Today, the term makes some people uncomfortable in part because it suggests that white women recognize their privilege and examine the ways in which that privilege can make other women invisible within the feminist movement.

If you don't know the difference between white feminism vs. intersectional feminism then you're probably a white feminist. — Kenia (@Keniaacc) January 17, 2017

"White women do not want to jeopardize their power or their interests, so now they need to ask what they will do differently to help other women," said Ruth Enid Zambrana, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland and the interim director of the university's U.S. Latino Studies Initiative.

Intersectional feminism means not focusing solely on breaking the glass ceiling in corporate America, for instance, but in raising the minimum wage, as nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the U.S. are women, according to the National Women's Law Center.

"I'm a bit over how the mainstream narrative flattens the feminist movement to try to make it into the Sheryl Sandberg-identity of feminism," McFadden said. "Not to say that she didn't have ideas that were helpful and on point, but there is a class conversation that gets lost."

Intersectionality also means broadening the conversation around reproductive rights.

"Some intersectional feminists have been critical of framing reproductive justice claims in terms of a feminist demand for 'choice,' since choice discourse presumes that all women have the economic means to afford an abortion if they so choose," said Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at UCLA. "Moreover, privileging attention to abortion rights over other reproductive justice issues — such as forced sterilization — can be seen to elevate a middle-class white women’ agenda over other issues that are equally if not more important to poor women and women of color."

In the current political climate, some say the time is right to embrace intersectionality.

Wishlist for the bookish diversity discussion in 2017:

- Stop comparing marginalizations

- Intersectionality

- LISTEN TO WOC — Mari (@mynameismarines) January 17, 2017

"Intersectional feminism is especially important right now as we face a situation in which many women are confronting multiple forms of vulnerability," Williams said. "In times like this, there is a real danger that feminism itself can function in an exclusionary manner by marginalizing less powerful and less privileged women and allies — the very people who most need feminism today."

Here's how feminist scholars explain the meaning of intersectionality in their own words:

Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at UCLA

"Intersectional feminism is a form of feminism that stands for the rights and empowerment of all women, taking seriously the fact of differences among women, including different identities based on radicalization, sexuality, economic status, nationality, religion, and language. Intersectional feminism attends to the ways in which claims made in the name of women as a class can function to silence or marginalize some women by universalizing the claims of relatively privileged women."

Nancy J. Hirschmann, director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania

"Intersectional feminism is the idea that 'gender' or 'women' doesn’t just refer to a single unified concept: all women have a race, whether white, black, Asian, Latina, etc. as well as a class, ethnicity, religion, etc., and their experiences as 'women' differ because of those other differences. The different aspects of our identity intersect — white women’s experiences 'as women' is partly defined by their race, just like black women’s experiences are, it’s just that it’s easier for white women to ignore their race. So if 'feminism' is supposed to represent 'women' it has to attend to those differences."

Ruth Enid Zambrana, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland

"There isn't just one 'feminism. There are 'feminisims.'"

"Intersectionalism is crucial. How do we begin to disentangle 'women' from 'African American women' from 'Puerto Rican' women from 'Mexican American women' from 'international women'?"

"White women need to recognize that gender isn't a single category. There is a need to acknowledge underrepresented women and domestic groups that have different histories and are at a tremendous disadvantage."

Alia Dastagir writes about media and culture for USA TODAY. You can follow her on Twitter @alia_e.