I should have made it more explicit in the original post but Crenshaw’s primary locus of analysis is Black American women. As a legal scholar, she was writing from the standpoint of how legal redresses against discrimination may (sometimes) work for white women or Black men, but don’t usually work for Black women because they treat the categories “Black” and “woman” as inherently separable and discrete. She lists multiple examples that are pertinent to Black American women and their oppression (misogynoir) specifically. She does however also list other examples that are relevant to other women of color and immigrant women, such as explaining why carceral feminism is detrimental rather than beneficial for immigrant women (who could be abused by their husbands because of misogyny and then brutalized and arrested by cops for their citizenship status, race, or ethnicity). Of course I as a South Asian woman am not at all the predominant focus of the attendant social analysis in the intersectional framework, and that’s important to keep in mind. I wrote this post as a quick reflection on a movie review I saw about how including disabled women in a movie is “intersectional”, and I was frustrated with how that review missed the point, so I jotted down this note. Anyway, I should’ve been more explicit about that in the original post, so do keep this in mind!
Also, please take the time to read at least the first few pages of the paper Crenshaw constructs this epistemic and analytical framework in: “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. If you don’t have access to JSTOR, let me know and I can find another copy/link for you!