Intersectionality
By exploring the theories that underpin our participants’ experiences, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how these frameworks apply in practical settings.
Summary
- Our identities are multifaceted and multi-layered, and inform our position in society.
- This position affects our life opportunities and how we are treated by systems like healthcare. It depends on diversity factors such as: gender, ethnicity, age, disability, and socio-economic status.
- Discrimination and unfair treatment may occur across several diversity factors, not just one.
- We should be aware of how different aspects of a person’s identity influence the way they are treated.
According to intersectionality theory, our identities are multifaceted and multi-layered. We are all positioned differently in the social world with its hierarchies of power and privilege. This positioning highly influences our chances in life and the way we are treated by different social systems (such as the healthcare system). Our intersectional position depends on how we are located among several axes of difference, such as sex/gender, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability, or socio-economic status.
Problems of discrimination and oppression may occur along several axes of diversity, not just one. This theory explains how it matters a great deal whether one is a white, young middleclass woman, or a black, older working class one; whether one is an Asian, old, yet wealthy man or a black, young, poor woman; whether one is a black, disabled, highly educated heterosexual or a white, LGBTQI+, able-bodied person with little education etc.
What we learn from this is that we should be conscious of the effects of multiple facets of people’s identities on how we treat them. Are we likely to take an older white person more seriously in their description of health issues than an older Black or Asian person? What happens to matters of credibility if differences in class or gender are inserted into those identities? Or extreme old age – for example is one less likely to be taken seriously if one is in one’s nineties as compared to one’s seventies? How does this affect the treatment plans we offer to them? Which stereotypes do we – unconsciously – hold that may impact how we listen to what our patients tell us?
Further reading
- Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 1989, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140: 139–67.
- Ferrer, I., Grenier, A., Brotman, S., & Koehn, S. (2017). Understanding the experiences of racialized older people through an intersectional life course perspective. Journal of Aging Studies, 41, 10–17.