Try Wonders for freeHow the literature is organised
The concept comes from law. Crenshaw (1991) argued that feminist and antiracist discourses had each proceeded as though their concerns occupied mutually exclusive terrains, so that the violence many women of colour experience — she focuses on battering and rape — fell outside both; the problem with identity politics, she wrote, is not that it fails to transcend difference but that it conflates or ignores differences within groups. The idea then spread widely: Bauer et al. (2021) found quantitative applications published across disciplines, most often psychology, sociology and the medical and life sciences.
The next tier of listed papers asks what intersectionality is and how to use it. Yuval-Davis (2006) compares additive with mutually constitutive models and the analytical levels at which social divisions operate. Hancock (2007) reads research across political science subfields to set empirical standards, distinguishing intersectional from "additive" analysis. Davis (2008) argues that the concept's alleged weaknesses, its ambiguity and open-endedness, were the secrets of its success. Nash (2008) names four tensions: no defined intersectional methodology, the use of Black women as the quintessential intersectional subject, the vague definition, and the question of empirical validity. Cho, Crenshaw and McCall (2013) propose a field organised around three sets of practices rather than a single definition.
McCall (2005) is the methodological reference point. As Bauer et al. (2021) summarise her typology, intracategorical approaches focus on the complexity of experience within a particular intersection, intercategorical approaches on heterogeneity across a range of intersections, and anticategorical approaches critique rigid social categorisation itself. In psychology, Cole (2009) proposed three questions researchers should ask — who is included in this category, what role does inequality play, and where are there similarities — and Bowleg (2008) set out the difficulties of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality research in a paper whose title begins "When Black + Lesbian + Woman ≠ Black Lesbian Woman". Bowleg (2012) then made the case for public health, describing intersecting categories at the micro level as reflecting interlocking systems of privilege and oppression at the macro level.
A practical note: searching with the word intersectional returns many unrelated papers about road intersections and metabolic pathways, because databases stem the word. Use intersectionality in searches.
Main debates
Is intersectionality about identities or about structures of power? Cho, Crenshaw and McCall (2013) put the emphasis on the social dynamics and relations that constitute subjects, rather than on the categories themselves as the starting point of inquiry, and group the field's arguments into applications, debates about scope and content, and political interventions. Nash (2008) presses on the vague definition and on the empirical validity of the framework, while Davis (2008) treats that same vagueness as the reason it spread.
Can statistics represent it at all? Bauer et al. (2021) report that their review supported concerns among intersectionality scholars that core theoretical tenets are often lost or misinterpreted when the framework is bridged into quantitative methodology, and Guan et al. (2021) identify methods that appear to be at odds with its key tenets. Homan, Brown and King (2021) take a different route, measuring structural racism, structural sexism and income inequality at US state level and modelling them jointly; they found these structures do not strongly covary, and were most consistently associated with poor health for Black women.
Where recent work is heading
Most of the recent reviews listed here are in health: systematic reviews of quantitative practice (Bauer et al., 2021; Harari and Lee, 2021; Guan et al., 2021), cancer care (Kelly-Brown et al., 2022), critical autism studies (Mallipeddi and VanDaalen, 2022), and Ghasemi et al. (2021), who screened 1,601 studies for intersectional health interventions and found only four that met their criteria — thin evidence, as they say, that the framework has yet been operationalised in intervention design. Other well-cited recent work covers inequalities in science careers (Kozlowski et al., 2022), climate justice in cities (Amorim-Maia et al., 2022), researcher positionality in education (Boveda and Annamma, 2023), digital inequality under COVID-19 (Zheng and Walsham, 2021) and sociological theory on categories (Monk, 2022), whose "infracategorical" model argues for disaggregating difference below the level of state categories.