Peculiar Benefits Of Intersectionality Essay

Intersectionality is “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage” (Dictionary.com). Throughout this course so far, we’ve read various essays from a number of authors, each offering different viewpoints of intersectionality experienced by various groups of people and using that in order to get their points across. Of course, you cannot have an analytical discussion without having relevant evidence to back up your arguments. In order for their essays to be considered reliable, they had to obtain their information from heterogeneous sources, which built up their arguments and furthered their points. I’ve chosen a few …show more content…
Unlike the other authors, Gay has chosen to write her essay using her own personal experiences and opinions rather than using outside resources. She informs us of the privileges she’s had throughout her life, “I’m a woman, a person of color, and the child of immigrants, but I also grew up middle class and then upper middle class” (Gay, 16). Her piece poses the questions, what is privilege? Do we all have it? It is a bad thing? Can we have privilege while also being marginalized? Giving the piece a personal touch really aided in answering these questions because it drives people to think about their own forms of privilege, understand it better and finally recognize it. Within this essay, Gay uses gender, race and class as major categories of analysis, with each category used to support different forms of privilege. There is a realization that we can have privilege in one sense, like being white, but then lack it in another, like being in a