Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ears must have been burning with alarming regularity and intensity over the last couple of years. We meet in one of the dining rooms of her hotel in central London, her base while she’s on a whistlestop lecture tour. Two days before our meeting she spoke at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and later this evening, she will speak at the London School of Economics. Her subject is intersectionality and feminism. In recent times, intersectionality theory – the study of how different power structures interact in the lives of minorities, specifically black women, a theory she named in the 1980s – has enjoyed a resurgence in popular and academic feminism. Her name and her work has become an introductory point for feminists of all stripes.
Of course, she says, the concept of intersectionality is not exactly new. “So many of the antecedents to it are as old as Anna Julia Cooper, and Maria Stewart in the 19th century in the US, all the way through Angela Davis and Deborah King,” she says. “In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender, or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race. So this is in continuity with that.”
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