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Published online: 10 November 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the impact of overlapping social identities and associated discrimination, is a crucial concept for understanding the micro- and macro-level social dynamics of our times. While this is the most compact definition of the term, a true understanding of its meaning and impact requires a more thorough analysis of people’s lived experience and the ways it is internalized. Intersectionality is not about a hierarchy of suffering involving greater harm to those with more marginalized identities, but rather an experience of identity and movement through the world that is something larger than the sum of its parts, the idea being that, for example, the experience of subjugation of a Black trans woman is fundamentally different from that of a Black cis man because of the experience the convergence of identities creates, including (but not limited to) availability or lack of safe spaces for authentic self-expression. Crenshaw also states, crucially, that “intersectionality is more about what is does rather than what it is” (1989). Thinking about intersectionality in this way makes it harder to grasp as a concept, but expands considerably on what it illustrates about power dynamics and the reification of a social order that oppresses some much more (and differently) from others.
This concept seems especially relevant to relational psychoanalysis, which is also interested in the idea of relationships amounting to more than the sum of their parts. Jessica Benjamin has written about the “relational third” (2004), a concept referring to a potential space between analyst and patient in which a sense of connectedness and sameness coexist, and also indicating that relationships are not simply made up of two halves coming together, each person representing one half of the whole, but rather personalities that inte