ABSTRACT
Intersectionality is a ‘bottom-up’ concept in that it has arisen from observation and analysis of everyday practices and social positioning, rather than being introduced ‘top-down’ from any one discipline or theorist. The oft-cited 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River black lesbian collective, for example, was crafted from the experiences of black women (including their own) in relation to black men and white women. It was inductive in being grounded in, and generated from, their analyses of those experiences and political resistance to the silencing and invisibility that could arise from their gendered, racialised positioning. While the concept was named as a result of observations in the discipline of law (Crenshaw 1989, this volume), its utility for understanding the complexity of the everyday has led to its being adopted and adapted in many disciplines. This transdisciplinary accessibility also partly results because the concept caught ‘something in the air’ (Lutz 2009) by naming and foregrounding a perspective that had long constituted a site of political contestation over (de)racialisation of the category woman and the invisibility of lesbians and working class women in early ‘second wave’ feminist work (Lykke 2005).
