I NTERSECTIONAL F EMINISM : Making Room for Empowered Women of Color in Media and Feminism Thought By Monica Cruz

African-American lawyer and scholar Kemberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 in her piece, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Policies.” She describes how our society’s many methods of oppression work together to further marginalize women of color, arguing against the idea that race and gender are mutually exclusive instruments of oppression. “Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another,” (Crenshaw 8). – Non-white women face “double-discrimination” based upon both their sex and their race