A lesson on intersectionality
Two patients over the span of three months made me understand intersectionality like never before. Intersectionality is a way of understanding the world where people are seen as having multiple overlapping identities and seeing each of these separately gives an incomplete picture. For example, gender, caste, socioeconomic status are intersecting identities that people live with. Therefore while trying to understand gender based violence, looking at gender as an isolated identity would do injustice to understanding the phenomenon, as gender intersects with caste and class to complicate gender based violence. Dalit women living in poverty experience gender based violence of a worse order than upper class dominant caste women. A poor Dalit woman’s experience of gender based violence is not just the sum of Poverty + Caste + Gender, but there are interacting effects that she experiences that are beyond the sum total of these effects. Though I had a theoretical grasp of this through reading ...