Introduction
Intersectionality theory provides a critical lens with which to examine the nexus between social identity, social structure, and individual experience. Social categories such as race, gender, age, and class are interlocked and influence one another. Race, gender, age, and class do not exist in isolation, nor happen one at a time. Macro-structural and micro-individual experiences happen simultaneously and are inseparable. It describes multiple intersecting social groups occupying a range of positions. Put another way, the theory of intersectionality suggests that race, gender, age, and class operate as mutually constructed concepts that cannot be understood in isolation. These categories are better thought of as complex entwined phenomena and need to be studied as intersecting categories. The term intersectionality describes the ways in which multiple social categories such as gender, race, and class interact and produce complex constellations of privilege and discrimination. Intersectionality builds on feminist movements and critical race theory's historical and situated conceptions of identity and power. Most current intersectionality theorists examine the intersection of gender and race or Black women. The scope of intersectionality has been expanded to include temporal dimensions. A small group of scholars investigated intersections with class and sexuality. Several academics expanded the framework to include research on transgender women and intercategorical discrimination in the LGBTQI+ community. Intersectional scholars touch on methodological questions and the possibilities and limitations implicit in a focus on multiple identities.
Race, Gender, Age, and Class
This part offers different frameworks. The first subsection gives the definition of race and its significance as a single category. The second subsection reviews the categorical definitions of gender and age, allowing more room for the definition of class, providing the subcategories of low-level, middle-level, and high-level class. The third subsection emphasizes the intersecting nature of the four categories, highlighting the difficulties emerging from this intersecting process. In these categories, persistent inequities and patterns of social hierarchy are maintained and reproduced. This section is followed by a part showing the intersectionality of these categories in the United States and Western Europe, revealing increased interest in racial/ethnic, gender, and other forms of diversity.
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The four primary systems of race, gender, age, and class have been conceptualized and investigated within various theoretical frameworks and from various perspectives, some of the most influential of which we want to introduce now. According to theoretical frameworks, race is defined as the result of a separately meaningful ethnic identity. Critics argue that the concept of race is equivalent to a myth and hold that the category of race obscures the real significance leading to actual injustice. Gender, age, and class are all defined as a categorical process, yielding a discrete identity or status, meaning the significance of gender and racial identity does not emanate from the existence of gender and racial identities, but that the existence of functions to support the theoretical priority of gender, age, and class while they are so methodologically significant that race must be included alongside gender, age, and class. Feminist theory, men's theorizing, and child feminist analysis believe that gender is inherently relevant and not optional in the sense that gender increases these levels of duration, engendering, and receipt of care. Race and ethnicity are also of central importance since they intersect with other social divisions, such as gender, social class, and sexuality to produce different subject positions. And so it is rethinking race and women, questioning why we are not talking about people.
Intersectionality in Various Contexts
In various fields, several scholars gather and use empirical data that apply intersectionality theory to different contexts and populations. In the field of education, there has been work on the experience of intersecting inequalities in the educational system, and findings have been reported from students from ethnic minorities in England. In the field of health, intersecting inequalities have been used as part of the methodology to develop and analyze a series of focus groups and one-on-one interviews of adults with long-term neurological conditions, including people from Black and minority ethnic groups. In the field of work and employment, there has been discussion on the methodological and epistemological implications of doing research into multiple discrimination, as well as illustrating the extent of double or triple disadvantage in the field of employment.
While in the practice of social work, there has been inclusion of a section called "A method to analyze race, class, and gender in studies of women" in a textbook for bachelor students. In the field of ageing, there has been research on older Irish people living in Britain and on older Irish people in Ireland, as well as from the low-income communities of South Inner City Dublin. A variety of qualitative research methods such as grounded theory, case studies, interviews, focus groups, and the analysis of secondary databases and quantitative data have been used. In these papers, it has been emphasized how being an older person intersects at the structural level and the experiential level with such social locations as being ethnic and gendered.
Policy Implications and Interventions
Policies must work to recognize how people’s lived experiences are inextricably connected to these multi-dimensional identities. These are not mutually exclusive categories. How could policies look different if they started from the position of these being multi-dimensional? The belief that policies can be designed to impact only 'working-age' people, or only should have influence over 'welfare benefits, disability or education' often rests on the flawed assumption that these demographics or social institutions are not also relational. Life, of course, doesn’t work that way. However, our policies work in silos: we have departments and even, increasingly, charities that appear to work in parallel. We have researchers and academics who worry about 'their' issue or 'their' population, and rarely do these meet or overlap. Intersectionality challenges us, every step of the way, to think again, act again.
Researchers suggest that social policies to address the needs of Black and Brown communities in Britain are 'largely fixated with age as a marker of the "problem gang member" or criminal, a concept which includes stereotypes of Black youths as inherently delinquent.' The Prevent strategy has come under international scrutiny as it focuses on addressing extremism, placing communities under increased surveillance and scrutiny. Existing multi-agency strategies to address offending through early intervention and education have had very mixed success. Interventions to 'rescue' 'gang-affiliated' young people are one-off interventions with little evidence of long-term success. Few evidence-based interventions are in place to divert young women away from violence. Local organizations are working to address the root causes of criminality among young women through mentoring, education and awareness. In Australia, an initiative specifically works with, and for, criminalized and imprisoned women and LGBTQI+ people. They have a range of unified support packages designed to dissect and address the range of complex issues upstream of, and during, imprisonment. These initiatives work at the intersection of multiple axes of identity, specifically focusing on addressing the tensions caused by different needs in responses. Both are exemplary organizations who work at the intersection of issues of gender, race, poverty and class.
Future Directions
This special issue opens with a call to revisit intersectionality and assess the uptake of these ideas and their particular historical trajectory and geopolitical implementation. In doing so, these papers identify some important new and emerging questions or sectors of analysis that would be deserving of future time and attention in order to help researchers take an innovative, intersectional inquiry to greater heights. Moving beyond descriptive representation and extending research on diverse articulations of the experience of injustice and violence, these papers provide a critical decolonial agenda for the future of intersectional research along these intersecting forms of difference. Attention is drawn to the potential in engaging with intersections of technology, channels of migration and belonging, and emerging questions around environmental and climate justice.
Thus, critical questions can be posed for the future of intersectionality, and various propositions are put forward. These include possibilities for collaboration, discussion, and community building in researching migrant and refugeehood at the margins, including with computers and new information communication and appliance technologies. Exciting upheavals in the role of our planet both necessitate and facilitate a reconstruction of what we understand by 'gender' and 'gender relations,' and bring to the fore the need for serious scientific and theoretical attention to intersectionality and its pressing future expressions. We will not make changes through the use of repeated methodologies, applying established tools and vetting new models for combating structural violence through the gaze of the most powerful. Instead, less violent methodologies, less violent models, and the repetition of the need to act and to plan from the vantage point of those most affected become more and more urgent.
Let’s find a way to start our projects and outcomes from this basis – 'ears pricked' – listen first, and maybe even then this act will not 'produce' research or even knowledge, let alone enlightenment, but at least it will be fairer and less violent. Finally, why not try to gather the views and input of the vulnerable and marginalized into tangible policies and advocacy endeavors, linking practice with activism and social service, providing input with practical application for sustainable livelihoods and societal harmony – this is the research imperative.
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