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Intersecting inequalities influence how we age, through dimensions such as income and health.
-*ABSTRACT Intersectionality challenges scholars and practitioners to go beyond gender in their thinking on women and aging. The authors show how intersecting inequalities influence old-age experiences through such dimensions as income and health. We then apply this understanding to critique "successful aging," arguing that this dictate ignores the cumulative impacts of advantages and disadvantages over the life course and old age itself. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of intersectionality for research and practice in relation to on old age. | key words: intersectionality, disparities, intersecting inequalities, race, class
n her exploration of social justice, Nancy Fraser (2008) argues that "participatory parity" critical, "overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction" (Fraser, 2008). While second-wave feminists focused on the barriers that result from gender inequalities, critiques by women of color made clear that women and men are not homogenous groups, and that other, equally important statuses, such as race and class, can shape people's experiences and abilities to participate and achieve.
These critiques underpin the foundational work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), who coined intersectionality to explain the interplay of inequalities that could exclude groups from single-inequality analysis. Sitting at the intersections of race and gender, black women were too black to be female, and too female to be black, in terms of their standing in court. They experience racism and sexism in ways not reducible to one or the other.
Applying this concept of intersectionality to violence against women of color and immigrants, Crenshaw (1991) pointed to the obstacles they face in obtaining services designed to serve battered women presumed only to suffer from gender inequality. She argued, "Shelters serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often converge in these women's lives, hindering their ability to create alternatives to the abusive relationships that brought them to shelters in the first place."
Crenshaw demonstrated that race, class, nation, and gender inequalities all are tied into the experiences of battered women of color, and thus interventions...