The analytical framework that treats different axes of social position — gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, nationality, and more — as mutually constituting rather than independent. The term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in a pair of 1989 and 1991 essays that began from a concrete legal puzzle: Black women plaintiffs in employment discrimination suits were repeatedly losing cases in which the harm they suffered was real but not legible as either pure race discrimination (a defense could point to hired Black men) or pure sex discrimination (a defense could point to hired white women). The courts could not see the harm because their categories were single-axis.
Crenshaw's concept gave this invisibility a name and extended it. Positions at the intersection of multiple marginalizations are not simply the sum of their parts; they have their own specific character, produce distinctive forms of harm, and generate distinctive political and theoretical standpoints. Much of the concept's power lies in its methodological refusal: do not ask whether race or gender or class is "most fundamental"; ask how, in a particular case, they co-produce the outcomes in question.
The concept's intellectual roots go back at least to the Black feminist tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries — Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" (1851) is often cited as an early statement — and to the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), which argued for "the major systems of oppression" as "interlocking." Contemporary use has expanded far beyond its originating context, sometimes to the discomfort of its founders: Crenshaw has periodically had to remind readers that it is a specific analytical framework, not a general slogan for inclusivity, and that stripped of its structural content it loses most of its explanatory purchase.