Intersectionality as Method: A Note

Author(s): Catharine A. MacKinnon

Source: Signs, Vol. 38, No. 4, Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory
(Summer 2013), pp. 1019-1030
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Catharine A. MacKinnon

Intersectionality as Method: A Note

“P eople are willing to think about many things. What people refuse
to do, or are not permitted to do, or resist doing, is to change the
way they think,” Andrea Dworkin wrote in Woman Hating in 1974
ð1974, 202Þ. Method concerns the way one thinks, not what one thinks
about, although they can be related.1 Talking about thinking about the way
one thinks is complicated, in that one is doing what one is talking about
doing at the same time one is talking about doing it. But as, for example,
Marxist theory has class as its subject and employs dialectical materialism as
its method, intersectionality both notices and contends with the realities of
multiple inequalities as it thinks about “the interaction of ” those inequal-
ities in a way that captures the distinctive dynamics at their multidimen-
sional interface ðCrenshaw 1989, 140; see also Smith 1991Þ.2 Resisting

The splendid assistance of Lisa Cardyn with the references is acknowledged with immense
gratitude.
1
With apologies to readers who do not need this footnote, “method” in philosophy refers to
means of producing valid knowing. Blackwell ’s describes it as “a combination of rules, assump-
tions, procedures, and examples determining the scope and limits of a subject and establishing
acceptable ways of working within those limits to achieve truth. The question of philosophical
method is itself a matter for philosophy and constitutes a major example of the reflective nature
of the subject. Philosophers disagree about the appropriate philosophical method” ðBunnin and
Yu 2004, 430Þ. My own disagreement extends to the use of the term “truth” in this description,
although I do not mean to imply that there is no such thing as reality and, hence, no more and
less accurate reflections of it. Examples of various methods, roughly speaking, include those of
René Descartes ðdoubtÞ, John Stuart Mill ðinductionÞ, analytical philosophy ðlanguageÞ, phe-
nomenology, and science. See also Angeles ð1981, 170 –72Þ, and Blackburn ð1994, 241– 42Þ.
The parts on method in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State ðMacKinnon 1989Þ were framed
and written in 1972–73. The manuscript was widely circulated, including in academic circles,
and first published a decade later in MacKinnon ð1982Þ. This was the original discussion of
feminist method, written when nothing on the subject existed, on the view that this new phi-
losophy deserved, even as it already embodied, its own method.
2
Obviously, this sentence, and intersectionality itself, are not limited to race and sex. Any
assumption that any specific inequality not mentioned is thereby overlooked, denied, ex-
cluded, or minimized is mistaken. At the same time, the grandiose claim that the discussion
here automatically applies in the same form to every existing inequality in interaction with all
others, without attention to their concrete particulars, violates intersectional method. To be
pinned between purportedly denying the crucial relevance of everything not expressly claimed,
on the one hand, and pilloried as totalizing for the extent to which an analysis is claimed as more
widely applicable, on the other, is to be silenced.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2013, vol. 38, no. 4]
© 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 by Catharine A. MacKinnon. All rights reserved.

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1020 y MacKinnon

dissociation—the trance state of much academic theorizing—intersection-

ality begins in the concrete experience of race and sex together in the lives
of real people, “with Black women as the starting point” ðCrenshaw 1989,
140Þ.
Intersectionality as method in the sense focused here does not simply
add variables. It adopts a distinctive stance, emanates from a specific angle
of vision, and, most crucially, embodies a particular dynamic approach to
the underlying laws of motion of the reality it traces and traps while remain-
ing grounded in the experiences of classes of people within hierarchical
relations “where systems of race, gender, and class domination converge,”
criticizing a rigidly top-down social and political order from the perspec-
tive of the bottom up ðCrenshaw 1991b, 1246Þ.3 Imbued with consistent
and potent observations of reality, contending in all its complexity with so-
cial realities that are understood to be definitively there as well as in con-
stant flux—without falling prey to the illusion that these realities can be
presumed to be fluidly reversible or reinterpreted out of existence—inter-
sectionality as theory, on my reading, has no true postmodern practitioners.4
On the simpler level of what it thinks about, intersectionality focuses
awareness on people and experiences—hence, on social forces and dynam-
ics—that, in monocular vision, are overlooked. Intersectionality fills out the
Venn diagrams at points of overlap where convergence has been neglected,
training its sights where vectors of inequality intersect at crossroads that
have previously been at best sped through. This reveals women of color at
the center of overlapping systems of subordination in a way that moves
them from the margins of single-axis politics that has often set priorities for
opposing inequality as if they did not exist. On this level, it addresses “the
combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on
the basis of sex” ðCrenshaw 1989, 149Þ. As a categorical corrective, inter-
sectionality, as is well known, adds the specificity of sex and gender to race
and ethnicity, and racial and ethnic specificity to sex and gender. As a recent
court put it, sex and race can “fuse inextricably” so that “made flesh in a
person, they indivisibly intermingle.”5 Categories that had been uniform and
few become modulated and variegated as well as many. Resulting analysis

3
See, e.g., Crenshaw ð1989, 1991bÞ, Matsuda ð1991Þ, McCall ð2005Þ, Phoenix and Patty-
nama ð2006Þ, Berger and Guidroz ð2009Þ, and Grabham et al. ð2009Þ. For a recent critique of
the concept, see Delgado ð2011Þ.
4
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw explains why in “Mapping the Margins” ð1991b, 1296–97Þ.
For my analysis of postmodernism, including some distinction from poststructuralism, see Mac-
Kinnon ð2006bÞ.
5
Jeffers v. Thompson, 264 F. Supp. 2d 314, 326 ðD. Md. 2003Þ.

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 S I G N S Summer 2013 y 1021

of the neglect of Black women by the law of rape and the content of rap
lyrics ðsee Crenshaw 1991aÞ provides especially illuminating examples.6 No
longer missed are the structural, political, and representational realities of
women of color ðCrenshaw 1991bÞ. Even if some people cannot seem to
think more than one thought at a time, almost anyone can add.
The case of Dafro Jefferies7 exemplifies the intersectional fix that even
a superficial grasp of multiple categories can contribute. There, an African
American woman claimed discrimination against her as an African Ameri-
can woman in a workplace that did not discriminate against all Black people
or all women. All the Blacks were men, all the women were white, but Dafro
Jefferies was brave.8 Instead of denying the discrimination against her, see-
ing only categories of race or sex with invariant internal content, privileg-
ing the white experience of sex and the male experience of race and thereby
precluding Ms. Jefferies’s experience of discrimination from legal recogni-
tion, a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the combined
ground of race-and-sex discrimination to which Ms. Jefferies claimed she
was subjected must be recognized as a legal claim under Title VII.9
Then a footnote had a nervous breakdown, stating that the judge ðwho
wrote the majority opinionÞ did not know how to proceed doctrinally, specif-
ically with whom to compare a person characterized by a combined ground,
and where, short of individual uniqueness, the subdividing of group cate-
gories stops.10 The court worried about where the fix would end but did
not ask where the problem started, failing to inquire into the method that
created race and sex as two static categories based on the most relatively
privileged occupants of each classification in the first place. It failed to ex-
amine its own assumptions, far less to consider whether shutting Dafro

6
Crenshaw’s discussion of the devaluation of Black women who are raped is a crucial
contribution to analysis of the subject; see Crenshaw ð1991b, 1265–82Þ. Prior to its recent
excavation by Danielle McGuire ð2010Þ, Black women’s long history of antirape activism had
been largely ignored.
7
Jefferies v. Harris County Community Action Association, 615 F.2d 1025 ð5th Cir. 1980Þ.
8
Of course, this adapts the locution of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men,
but Some of Us Are Brave ðHull, Scott, and Smith 1982Þ.
9
Jefferies, 615 F.2d at 1034 ð“Recognition of black females as a distinct protected sub-
group for purposes of the prima facie case and proof of pretext is the only way to identify and
remedy discrimination directed toward black females. Therefore, we hold that when a Ti-
tle VII plaintiff alleges that an employer discriminates against black females, the fact that
black males and white females are not subject to discrimination is irrelevant and must not
form any part of the basis for a finding that the employer did not discriminate against the
black female plaintiff ”Þ.
10
Ibid., at 1034 n. 7.

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1022 y MacKinnon

Jefferies out doubly as neither Black nor a woman because she was both
revealed anything more systematic in discrimination law’s methodology
that needed to be confronted. Instead, the problem of someone not fit-
ting into either of two boxes was solved by creating a third box: African
American women. As to anything farther or deeper, the court was lost.11
The legal record in the United States since, in the absence of Supreme
Court instruction, has oscillated between truly getting it12—one court even
grasped the substance of intersectional discrimination against an African
American man, perceiving the ways in which the racism directed against
him was stereotypically gendered13—and truly missing it.14 Law is replete
with missed intersectional opportunities. One vivid instance of the one-
or-the-other approach is the case brought by Sandra Lovelace, in which
she, as a Maliseet woman, complained that Canadian law considered her
no longer a member of her nation, hence unable to live on the Tobique
Reserve, because she had married out. Without ruling on her claim of
sex discrimination, the UN Human Rights Committee found that Can-
ada violated her right to enjoy her culture and use her language.15 The

11
Many courts before and since have been even more at a loss, a development competently
traced in Areheart ð2006Þ.
12
See Lam v. Univ. of Haw., 40 F.3d 1551 ð9th Cir. 1994Þ ðoverturning district court’s
finding of summary judgment against Vietnamese female plaintiff on grounds that “the attempt
to bisect a person’s identity at the intersection of race and gender often distorts or ignores the
particular nature of their experiences”Þ; Hicks v. Gates Rubber Co., 833 F.2d 1406 ð10th Cir.
1987Þ ðpermitting consideration of evidence of both racial and sexual hostility in claim of
hostile work environment sexual harassment by African American womanÞ. See also Jeffers v.
Thompson, 264 F. Supp. at 325 ðfinding African American females a “composite class” where
prima facie case was established, however race-and-gender discrimination not proven even as
racial discrimination and age discrimination were separately shownÞ.
13
Kimble v. Wisconsin Dep’t of Workforce Dev., 690 F. Supp. 2d 765 ðE.D. Wis. 2010Þ
ðrecognizing combined race-and-gender discrimination but wrongly terming it “race plus”Þ.
14
See DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, 413 F. Supp. 142 ðE.D. Mo. 1976Þ ðrejecting at-
tempt by African American women plaintiffs “to create a new ‘super-remedy’” for discrimi-
nation based both on race and sexÞ; Judge v. Marsh, 649 F. Supp. 770 ðD.D.C. 1986Þ ðseeking to
contain the “many-headed Hydra” purportedly unleashed by the Jefferies approach by limiting
its applicability to “employment decisions based on one protected, immutable trait or fundamen-
tal right, which are directed against individuals sharing a second” such supposed traitÞ; Lewis v.
Bloomsburg Mills, Inc., 773 F.2d 561 ð4th Cir. 1985Þ ðrefusing to certify class of African Amer-
icans with woman as representative, construing African American women as “special victims” of
more general racial animusÞ; Moore v. Hughes Helicopters, Inc., 708 F.2d 475 ð9th Cir. 1983Þ
ðupholding lower court decision declining to certify African American woman as class represen-
tative in sex discrimination claimÞ.
15
Lovelace v. Canada, Communication No. 24/1977, U.N. Doc. Supp. No. 40 ðA/36/40Þ
at 166 ð1981Þ.

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 S I G N S Summer 2013 y 1023

Committee, in a somewhat intersectional but curious reference, later cited

the case in its statement of principles on sex equality16 as an instance of
the equal rights of women under the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights.17 But culture was mentioned at this point only as an unac-
ceptable justification for sex discrimination. The principle that culture can-
not shield sex discrimination, while internationally embraced, does not rec-
ognize a woman’s right to her culture in the intersectional sense. And the
role of Ms. Lovelace’s divorce in the original decision18 was almost as if
she became a member of her own nation only when she could no longer
be seen as part of her former husband’s19—hardly a sex equality approach.
On each side, the lack of intersectionality remained.
When intersectionality becomes a method, by contrast, it aims at the
moving substantive reality “where systems of race, gender, and class dis-
crimination converge,” not one or another or even all static abstract clas-
sifications ðCrenshaw 1991b, 1246Þ. The name of the problem addressed
is white supremacy and male dominance, or white male dominance, not
race and sex classifications, targeting the forces that create the outcomes, not
just their static products. This approach exposes to critical light “the dom-
inant framework of discrimination” ðCrenshaw 1989, 152Þ. Standard le-
gal classifications are imagined to be the same within, different without, fol-
lowing Aristotle ðsee MacKinnon 2007, 4–5 and passimÞ. They impose
comparative statics. The conventional framework fails to recognize the
dynamics of status and the power hierarchies that create them, reifying sex
and race not only along a single axis but also as compartments that ignore
the social forces of power that rank and define them relationally within and
without. In this respect, conventional discrimination analysis mirrors the
power relations that form hierarchies that define inequalities rather than
challenging and equalizing them. No question about it, categories and ste-
reotypes and classifications are authentic instruments of inequality. And
they are static and hard to move. But they are the ossified outcomes of the
dynamic intersection of multiple hierarchies, not the dynamic that creates
them. They are there, but they are not the reason they are there.
Intersectionality, in other words, is animated by a method in the sense
of an operative approach to law, society, and their symbiotic relation, by a

16
U.N. Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 28: Equality of rights be-
tween men and women, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.10, March 29, 2000.
17
Ibid., ¶ 32.
18
Ibid., ¶ 17.
19
The equivalent US domestic case, in which the same rule was imposed by the Indian
nation itself, raises a raft of additional issues. See Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49
ð1978Þ. My views are discussed in MacKinnon ð1987Þ and MacKinnon ð2012Þ.

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1024 y MacKinnon

distinctive way into reality that captures not just the static outcomes of
the problem it brings into view but its dynamics and lines of force as well.
It is this that makes it transformative. Moved by the energy of the syner-
gistic interaction of the variables whose relations it exposes, intersectional-
ity pursues an analysis that “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism”
ðCrenshaw 1989, 140Þ. When this is missed, intersectional analysis of the
simplistic sort as exemplified by the Jefferies case can create a third box yet
cannot solve the problem. As intersectional work has shown since its in-
ception, social hierarchy creates the experiences that produce the catego-
ries that intersect. Substantively, white males dominate. Domination-and-
subordination is the relational dynamic that animates this structure.20 It is
this substantive grasp of forces that critical theories—when they are criti-
cal—are critical of, criticizing the “uncritical and disturbing acceptance of
dominant ways of thinking about discrimination” ðCrenshaw 1989, 150Þ.
Its firm grip on the way hierarchy works as a process in motion explains
why this theory is not abstract, unlike the conventional equality theory of
which it is critical. It is inherently substantive21—hence, crucially, it does
not flip. “Intersectional subordination” is a one-way ratchet, even as the
analysis of it informs understanding of the status locations at both the top
and the bottom of the hierarchies involved ðCrenshaw 1991b, 1249Þ. But
top and bottom are not fungible, as the classifications of race and sex are
constructed to be, which explains why intersectional method could reveal
the white male intersectional reality behind many challenges to affirmative
action that had never before been seen or questioned as such.22 Imagining
that inequalities are equal as a method for analyzing that inequality can
only deny what needs to be changed. Providing an alternative to the Aris-
totelian approach in discrimination law has made intersectionality a method
for fitting law to reality, rather than reality to law.
A primitive articulation of these insights in legal terms can be found
toward the end of the Supreme Court brief in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vin-
son, the case that first established the law of sexual harassment in 1986:
All too often, it is Black women like Ms. Vinson who have been spe-
cifically victimized by the invidious stereotype of being scandalous and
lewd women, perhaps targeting them to would-be perpetrators.½n18

20
This awareness is manifest throughout Crenshaw’s definitive works on the subject,
among them Crenshaw ð1989Þ and Crenshaw ð1991bÞ.
21
For further discussion of the meaning of “substance” in equality law, contrasted with
abstraction, see MacKinnon ð2011Þ.
22
See Crenshaw ð1989, 142 n. 12Þ. The critics of affirmative action have recently also some-
times used white women for this purpose; see Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 ð2003Þ.

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 S I G N S Summer 2013 y 1025

This is not to say that this is a case of race discrimination, but rather
that minority race aggravates one’s vulnerability as a woman by re-
ducing one’s options and undermining one’s credibility and social
worth. In the context of such beliefs, beliefs which animate this
case, a picture can be painted which destroys the victim’s ability to
complain of sexual violation, such that sex acts can be inflicted upon
her and nothing will be done about it.
½n18 See generally Continental Can v. Minnesota, 297 N.W.2d 241,
246 ðMinn. 1980Þ ðdefendant in sexual harassment case “wished
slavery days would return so that he could sexually train ½plaintiff 
and she would be his bitch.”Þ “Follow me sometimes and see if I lie.
I can be coming from eight hours on an assembly line or fourteen
hours in Mrs. Halsey’s kitchen. I can be all filled up that day with
three hundred years of rage so that my eyes are flashing and my flesh
is trembling—and the white boys in the streets, they look at me and
think of sex. They look at me and that’s all they think. . . . Baby you
could be Jesus in drag—but if you’re brown they’re sure you’re
selling!” L. Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black ð1969Þ at 98.
Ms. Vinson’s predicament suggests that while such a view may be
most prevalent among white men, it is not confined to them alone.
Reasons are suggested in W. Jordan, White Over Black: American At-
titudes toward the Negro, 1550 –1812 ð1968Þ at 150.23
In other words, Mechelle Vinson being at the bottom of the group women,
distinctively sexualized for denigration based on being Black and a woman
both, if equality law doesn’t work for her, it doesn’t work.24
It was Kimberlé Crenshaw’s brilliant theorizing, with later contribu-
tions by others ðsee de Merich 2008Þ, that subsequently did the work that
made it possible to claim the racist dimensions of such sexual abuse ex-
plicitly in doctrine.25 Without the intersectional insight animating Vinson,
Title VII could have worked for some white women and nobody else, but
if it worked for Mechelle, it could work for everyone. In fact, when she
won, all women won. Thinking in this way is not thinking about race as a

23
Brief of Respondent Mechelle Vinson, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57
ð1986Þ ðNo. 84–1979Þ, 67–69. Patricia Barry and I were cocounsel to Ms. Vinson in the
Supreme Court. I wrote the brief.
24
Ibid. That Ms. Vinson was sexually harassed by an African American man did not nec-
essarily deprive her abuse of racial dimensions.
25
Racial features of sexual harassment were observed from the beginning; see MacKinnon
ð1979, 30–31, 51, 53–54, 176–77Þ. Since that time, numerous scholars have productively
examined facets of the problem; see, e.g., Cho ð1997Þ, Davis ð2004Þ, and Hernández ð2006Þ.

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1026 y MacKinnon

variable or even as an identity but as a dynamic position in a real-world

hierarchical rank ordering that, when comprehended and upended, ignites
and transforms the sex-based concept. This is one reason why intersection-
ality is intrinsically demarginalizing and explains why Crenshaw would end
her pathbreaking demarginalization article, invoking Paula Giddings, with
“when they enter, we all enter” ðCrenshaw 1989, 167; see also Giddings
1994Þ. It also reveals the simple falsity of the standard post-Enlightenment
opposition between particularity and universality not only in exposing that
particularity is universal but in making a universally applicable change—
including for men26—through embracing, not through obscuring or deny-
ing or eliding, particularity.
Surfacing sex in a legal analysis previously based on race or ethnicity
that never noticed it can have the same effect. Intersectional method is visi-
ble in the theory of genocidal rape pioneered in Kadic v. Karadžic´,27 a the-
ory now recognized internationally.28 Conventionally, the crime of geno-
cide has prohibited the intentional destruction of a racial, ethnic, national,
or religious group as such. Not only is sex not a recognized legal basis for
genocide; sex-based attacks on women of specific ethnicities, races, reli-
gions, or nationalities had not previously been seen as a way genocide can
be carried out. If rape as a tool of genocide had been overlooked by those
who would stop or redress its atrocities, it has not been missed by those
who engaged in them, any more than the sexual dimensions of lynching
were overlooked by the Klan ðCardyn 2002Þ.
What happened when my Bosnian clients spoke out about being raped
in the genocide perpetrated against them was not simply that rape of
women or men was recognized in law as the weapon of genocide that it
is in life, although that did happen. What happened was that the destruc-

26
See Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, 523 U.S. 75 ð1998Þ.
27
Kadic v. Karadžić, 70 F.3d 232 ð2d Cir. 1995Þ. To avoid confusion, this approach is to
be distinguished from the concept of gynocide, in which women are destroyed because of
their sex, as first stated by Mary Daly ð1973, 194Þ and subsequently developed by Andrea
Dworkin, as the “systematic crippling, raping and/or killing of women by men, . . . the word
that designates the relentless violence perpetrated by the gender class men against the gender
class women” ð1976, 16Þ, to which there is as yet no precise legal equivalent. The closest
would be if the Genocide Convention recognized sex and gender as grounds for destruction
of peoples as such, recognizing women as a people. The concept of gender-based persecution,
a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ðlast
amended January 2002Þ, 17 July 1998, A/CONF. 183/9, Article 7 ð1Þ ðhÞ, embodies a close
concept as well. Gynocide could readily combine with intersectional insights, but its analysis
was not explicitly intersectional when originally written.
28
See Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-96–4-T, Judgment ðSept. 2, 1998Þ, §7.8;
Prosecutor v. Al Bashir, Case No. ICC-02/05–01/09, Second Arrest Warrant ðJuly 12, 2010Þ.

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 S I G N S Summer 2013 y 1027

tion of the women of an ethnic community through rape was recognized as

destroying their community as such. Genocide was not marginalized; in-
stead, women were made central in its more capacious frame. Those in
genocides who had been marginalized—sexual abuse with impunity deval-
uing them here as elsewhere ðsee Crenshaw 1991b, 1271Þ—were placed at
the center of the crime of crimes, simultaneously, even miraculously, mak-
ing allegations of its existence in this instance credible. In the absence of
this intersectional way of thinking, the rape of African American women
has often not been seen as the assault on the Black community that it is
ð1273Þ, nor have the specifically gendered dimensions of the lynching of
Black men generally been grasped. In the Kadic case, the Bosnian Muslim
people as such were seen as violated because Bosnian Muslim women ðand
some menÞ were raped. Their collectivity was legally seen as subjected to a
genocide, to its willed destruction as a people as such, because the women
of that community were understood to have been sexually violated as mem-
bers of it.
The point here is not that they were not seen as being violated as
women. Actually, they were, and knew they were, although international
criminal and humanitarian law did not yet recognize it. What changed
through this practice of intersectional method was the understanding of
genocide itself: mass rape can be what a genocide in progress looks like.
This insight, which included their awareness of the perpetrators’ exploita-
tion of the age and disabilities of some of them, came directly from the
survivors. The fact that this genocide was in part conducted through gen-
der crimes did not mean that the acts were not also ethnically and nation-
ally and religiously destructive. It meant that they were.29 And it was ex-
posing the gender-based crime that, in this instance, substantiated and
made credible the claim of genocide.30
A violation that had been seen as just something men do to women all
the time,31 even trivialized as surplus repression, was in this case recon-
figured by law as the weapon of genocide its perpetrators knew it to be and
29
This issue is discussed further in MacKinnon ð2006aÞ.
30
Some Muslim men were also sexually assaulted by Serbian forces, further supporting
the claim of genocide and revealing the potential of an intersectional approach. The Inter-
national Court of Justice—wrongly, in my view and in that of the survivors—determined
that the conflict was not a genocide except for the attack at Srebrenica. The court regarded
the evidence of intent to destroy a people as such to be inadequate. See Concerning Appli-
cation of Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide ðBosnia and
Herzegovina v. Serbia and MontenegroÞ, Judgment, 2007 I.C.J. 43 ðFeb. 26Þ.
31
As I wrote of sexual atrocities while litigating Kadic, “Whether in war or in what is
called peacetime, at home or abroad, in private or in public, by our side or the other side,
man’s inhumanity to woman is ignored” ðMacKinnon 1993, 60Þ.

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1028 y MacKinnon

deployed it as. When its intersectional reality was surfaced and believed, a
vast underworld of violated women who had been unnamed and unspoken
moved into the legal center. Again, the target of this realization is not the
subjectivity of the victims in the psychological sense; it is the reality of
their status. It is not their identity that is problematic or problematized
but the consequences of how they are socially identified and hence treated.
If the Jefferies case had thought intersectionally, it would have compared the
plaintiff ’s treatment with that of white men, moving her to the center. But
more to the point of method, if Title VII had thought intersectionally, it
would never have been in the doctrinal quandary the Jefferies case found
itself facing in the first place, where it remains largely mired.32 Discrimina-
tion against a person consigned to the bottom of two fused hierarchies
would have made Ms. Jefferies the first and foremost and most evident case
in discrimination law, not an afterthought to it in “a location that resists
telling” ðCrenshaw 1991b, 1242Þ.
Lucidly, Crenshaw distinguishes thinking intersectionally from think-
ing about intersecting categories when she points out that “Black women
sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s ex-
periences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men.
Yet often they experience double discrimination—the combined effects of
practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex.
And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women—not the
sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women” ðCrenshaw 1989,
149Þ. This clarification of the eternally crucial yet deceptively simple term
“as” in discrimination law does not end with Black women. That the lo-
cation of departure and return for the analysis is on the ground, with the
experience of a specific group, this group in particular, and not in universal
generalizations or in classifications or abstractions in the clouds, even ones
as potentially potent as race and sex, is the point. Thus capturing the syn-
ergistic relation between inequalities as grounded in the lived experience
of hierarchy is changing not only what people think about inequality but
the way they think.

University of Michigan Law School

and
Harvard Law School ðlong-term visitorÞ

32
Best et al. ð2011Þ document empirically that women disadvantaged by both sex and
race discrimination, as well as those who make intersectional claims, tend to fare less well in
courts than those who were discriminated against on a single basis or those who claim one
ground of discrimination alone.

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 S I G N S Summer 2013 y 1029

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