Intersectionality: Introduction

Intersectionality has been taken up uncritically in contemporary scholarship via an additive model where disability is merely added to other categories of difference, with an emphasis on a limiting essentialized understanding of identity. In this introductory chapter, we carefully delineate our understanding of intersectionality as a conceptual framework before we apply this understanding to critical disability studies. Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s classic essay, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color, we argue that deploying an intersectional framework foregrounds the epistemic erasure of disability by other discourses of social difference and the epistemic labor of disability when it is constitutive of other categories of difference. In the final section of this chapter we showcase contemporary scholarship on intersectionality and disability.