I assure you that intersectionality has usefulness beyond academia. I see it operate in my personal life (I’m queer, black, and a woman). But more to the point in this thread, I use it at work. I work at a technology company. It’s a concept I introduced to some of my teams in the course of my work. The word itself was new to some people, but the concept was easily understandable to most, and I must say that it has definitely changed the way people think about the products we make and who they are for and how we make them. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve been asked to write primers and guides for it so teams can use it more effectively when doing our work. I’ve been asked to speak about it in various places to various corners of my company.
One of the reasons I love where I work.
hite straight men can be poor (#5, #15, #18, #27), or first-generation college students (#3), or bullied (#12, #23), or disabled (#20, #21, #22, #28), or stereotyped (#24), or from a single-parent household (#31), or have a history of substance abuse and mental illness, in their family (#30, #33). There are ones I left off, too. And some of the ones are not identity related at all - one simply asks if you are happy with how your identities are portrayed by the media. In my experience, almost no one steps up for that one. Almost everyone steps back for “If you ever tried to change your appearance, mannerisms, or behavior to fit in more, take one step back.”
I’ve done these exercises several times and everybody takes several steps forward and back. The whole point of them is to show that EVERYONE has privileges and disadvantages. I might be queer and black and a woman, but I’m also able-bodied, cisgender, was raised Christian, speak English as my first language, am upper-middle-class (now, at least), college-educated, etc. Intersectionality is simply the not-so-radical idea that people are complex beings with many identities, and that these identities are not discrete parts but integrated and tell a full story together. In fact, it is intersectionality that helps us understand that just because a person is a white straight man doesn’t automatically mean he’s privileged.