While many credit Kimberlé Crenshaw with coining the term intersectionality. Crenshaw articulated that the term and underlying theory were heavily influenced by writing that noted the intersectionality of institutional misogyny and racism written by scholars of color and activist decades before the term intersectionality was coined. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

- The coining of Intersectionality Theory by Kimberlé Crenshaw
- Earlier pre-coining works in Intersectionality Theory
- Criticisms of Intersectionality Theory and Responses
- Contemporary Intersectionality Theory frameworks

History of of the coining of Intersectionality Theory and foundational works

Strand, L. (2017). Charting Relations between Intersectionality Theory and the Neurodiversity Paradigm. Disability Studies Quarterly, 2017 (2017).

Charting Relations between Intersectionality Theory and the Neurodiversity Paradigm

Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Coining of Intersectionality Theory

- "Ain't I A Woman?" by Sojourner Truth
- Dialogues in Second-Wave Feminist spaces about rights-based claims that emerged out of discrimination against Black women on account of both their race and gender.
- France Beale's essay "Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female" 
- Patricia Hill Collin's term the "matrix of domination" which articulates how systems are structured to support and enhance power differentials. 
Deborah King noted how oppressions aren't additive, from this work she proposed the descriptor "multiple jeopardy" to note how for multiply marginalized people there is both several simultaneous oppressions and a multiplicative relationships between those relationships. 

Examples of Intersectionality Theory works Pre-Coining

Criticisms can normally be grouped into two larger concerns either (1) the difficulty of applying the concept to research methods, and (2) the difficulty of negotiating - being able to calculate or properly capture - the multiplicative nature of identities.

Leah Warner in a 2008 article articulates that intersectionality theory is not a usable research method because of the trickiness involved in quantitative research with including multiple dimensions of social identities in research methods.

There is a fear by some that due to the difficulty negotiate the multiplicative nature of identities if we break down every identity we end up dissolving groups and looking at people just as individuals.

Criticisms of Intersectionality Theory 

Rather than seeing intersectionality as a tool used to divide groups that were previously cohesive due to shared societal oppression, Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason did a study that demonstrated how intersectionality in activist spaces can be used as a tool of coalition-building by creating alliances between disparate identity groups. 

There is a claim that intersectionality theory does not consider individuals lived experiences of intersecting identities. Yet, intersectionality foregrounds the ways identities intersect within individuals and can help individuals make sense of their lived experience at the intersection of identities in a system that gives meaning to those identities. At a societal level intersectionality works to make visible systems of hierarchy and oppression. 

Responses to Criticisms of Intersectionality Theory 

- Frameworks that recognize the impact of geographic, historic, and sociocultural moments on identities due to the influence of cultural interactions both reinforcing and troubling identity demarcations.
- Acknowledging that identity categories have variation within them.
- Intersectionality more cotemporally brings to light the power of activism and scholarly work within and across identity categories.
- Contemporary Intersectionality Theory is more concerned with questions of power and inequities and notes these questions are essential to the political work the theory was designed to do. 
- Wendy Smooth's five tenets of contemporary intersectionality theory.

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