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Abstract

Engaging with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, the authors (re)turn to its genesis in critical race theory (CRT) and specifically, its forms of structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality. Discussing each form in relation to contemporary issues in sport that Black women and women of Color navigate, they argue that Crenshaw’s intersectionality provides additional compelling layers of engagement with existing intersectional scholarship and scholarship about activism in sport, invites structural and discursive change through intersectional policies and practice, and promotes coalition building toward intersectional racial justice in sport.

Keywords

intersectionality structural intersectionality political intersectionality representational intersectionality Kimberlé Crenshaw critical race theory sport research

Introduction

Scholars in myriad disciplines have established well the significance of intersectional work in critical race theory (CRT) (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991, 2018; Matsuda, 1987, 1991), disability studies (Annamma et al., 2013; Liasidou, 2013), education (Anders & DeVita, 2014; Connor, 2007; Haynes et al., 2020; Pérez Huber, 2010), gender and women’s studies (hooks, 1992; MacKinnon, 2013), political science (Berger, 2004), qualitative methodologies (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2022; Merchant & Willis, 2001), quantitative research (Covarrubias, 2019), sociology (Collins, 1991), and women’s human rights (Raj, 2002; Wing, 1997). As such, we do not open this article with an argument that intersectional work has been undertheorized, for it has not. Rather our purpose here is to detail engagement with the concepts and logics of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991, 2018, 2019, 2021) structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality, in particular, which has been limited across intersectional work in sport research (Fisher & Anders, 2010; Hylton, 2010; Simien, 2019).

Although sport scholars have produced compelling work on race and gender, their intersectional dimensions, and discriminatory impact (Abney & Dorothy Richey, 1991; Borland & Bruening, 2010; Bruening, 2004, 2005; Carter & Hart, 2010; Carter-Francique & Richardson, 2016; Cooky et al., 2010; Haynes et al., 2020; LaVoi et al., 2019; Simien et al., 2019; Withycombe, 2011) and have addressed historical and contemporary activism in sport led by Black athletes and athletes of Color (Agyemang et al., 2020; Hawkins, 2016; Simien, 2019; Williams, 2022), we think Crenshaw’s (1991, 2019) particular concepts of structural, political, and representational intersectionality provide new ways to frame, design, and analyze myriad issues across structures, politics, and representation in sport and offer compelling, additional layers of engagement with existing intersectional scholarship and scholarship about activism in sport. In addition, the pairing of Crenshaw’s ideas about expansive equality—that is more than just procedural equality—with her ideas about intersectionality gives us a set of logics and analytics to apply in equity and justice work in sport.

This set of ideas first conceptualized in the 1980s neoconservative backlash against the limited gains of civil rights in the preceding decades included Crenshaw’s (1988, 2019) arguments against “colorblindness” and ideas of race neutrality. As early as the 1970s, right-wing think tanks began deploying “colorblindness” as a strategy to undercut the recent gains in civil rights law. Crenshaw warned that such retrenchment always accompanied advancement toward racial and social justice. With her cautions in mind, we also share this piece as a way to look back in order to look forward. Although a myth, the rhetoric of “colorblindness” has become pervasive, and ideas of race neutrality and restrictive views of equality now dominate the courts, affecting access to higher education, in particular, for historically targeted Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations. Many argue we are in another cycle of backlash and retrenchment (Brysk, 2022; Conway, 2022; Liptak, 2023; L. L. Martin, 2022).

Specifically, Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991, 2018) work invites structural and discursive change through intersectional policies and practice where discrimination and oppression exist, in this case, spaces of sport. Her work also promotes coalition building toward intersectional racial justice. Her forms of intersectionality provide explanatory power of race and racism and ways structures re/produce subordinated locations of intersectional identities.

Hylton (2009, 2010) argued that CRT not only provides analyses of how race and racism function in sport but also advances specific concepts and analytics to examine the impact of, and not just description of, racist discrimination and oppression in order to confront racism and create antiracist practices, policies, and institutions. Our turn toward Crenshaw’s concepts of intersectionality is similar. As we detail in sections that follow, Crenshaw’s explicit commitments to coalition building across equity and justice work are present across her forms of intersectionality, and she invites us to design and practice applied and praxis-oriented research toward equity and justice.

Black women and women of Color¹ have long understood and led this work, addressing intersectional experiences of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia and leading collective work against settler colonialism and “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 1992, p. 22; see for example, Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Davis, 1981; hooks, 1984, 1992; Hurston, 1942; Lorde, 1984; Matsuda, 1987, 1991; Trask, 1990, 1993). Among them is Crenshaw who first coined the term “intersectionality” over 30 years ago. While sport scholars do cite Crenshaw, direct engagement with structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality often is not present. Predominantly, representations of her work have been what Crenshaw (2021–present) called “identarian.” Her work has been conflated with other intersectional work that also centers Black women’s experiences. For example, researchers have cited together Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and Collins (1991) to signify the experiences of racism and sexism Black women endure without noting differences in their approaches and forms of theorizing. Crenshaw herself has noted the varied ways scholars have engaged her work. Some read her work through CRT, while others engage her ideas with interests primarily focused on identity.

It always strikes me, and I always have a sense of people who have encountered intersectionality without having gone first through Critical Race Theory, because they see it simply as identarian. They don’t see the structure in it. And they don’t see that contradiction is what I am actually trying to interrogate. (Crenshaw, 2021–present)

Coming to Crenshaw through identarian work and feminist theory obscures the critical onto-epistemological positions and critical theory which informed her work on intersectionality (Carbado, 2019; Crenshaw, 2002; Crenshaw et al., 2019). Crenshaw explained, “Intersectionality was always about structures and how structures apprehended identities in ways that created different forms of discrimination” (Crenshaw, 2021–present). Her critiques of the role of the courts and the production of contradictory logics in them keep the power of structure centered in her work. Intersectionality is

the vulnerability of actually being targeted and experiencing discrimination on the basis of race and gender, and, then, this is the most important part, the law replicates and doubles down on that injury by saying, your injury is one that the law is incapable of acknowledging and recognizing. (Crenshaw, 2021–present)

In this way, we think Crenshaw’s concepts of intersectionality are particularly useful for sport researchers. The complexity of intersectional identities and experiences is always connected to structures. Those structures include laws, institutions and organizations, and policies, rhetoric, and discourse. Research settings across elite, professional, collegiate, and recreational organizations offer countless opportunities for engagement with her work.

In addition, recent sport scholarship on the intersectional identities and experiences of Black women and women of Color has continued to address the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate between standpoint positions (predominantly essentialist) and postmodern/poststructural-feminist orientations (anti-essentialist) (Devonport et al., 2019; M. Martin, 2015; McDowell & Carter-Francique, 2017). Such tensions, long since resolved in the late 20th century by feminist theorists like Moi (1999) (see also de Beauvoir, 1953), seem to continue in sport research. Like Crenshaw, Moi (1999) argued that the purpose of feminism was to fight for equality and justice. Moi critiqued feminist theory that stymied an understanding of women as both discursively and socially constructed and as physical bodies gendered girls and women. She invited feminists to remember commitments to social justice, offering, “No feminist I know is incapable of understanding what it means to say that the Taliban are depriving Afghan women of their most elementary human rights just because they are women” (8). Crenshaw’s (1988, 1991, 2019a) work in CRT emphasizes both the social construction of race and gender and the consequences of racism and sexism. The point here is that as research continues to address the targeting of intersectional identities and how Black women and girls and women and girls of Color resist such targeting, both essentialist and anti-essentialist feminists can fight for equity and justice.

In sport studies, Walker and Melton (2015) have argued for further complexity in intersectional work, and we suggest a turn toward forms of Crenshaw’s intersectionality that connects identity and experience to structures and that advances praxis-oriented intersectional racial justice. Knoppers (2015) has called for more connections in research across sociology of sport and sport management as well, and for us, Crenshaw’s work creates opportunities to bridge research across sport fields. The strengths of Crenshaw’s work are many, and in this article, we strive to note connections among them. We address the intellectual and political location of her work as critical (from critical theory and critical legal studies [CLS]), her expansive view of equality, and detail her concepts of intersectionality and their applicability to everyday contexts in sport, including her explicit call for coalition building for equity and justice.

Our aim here is fourfold. First, detailing Crenshaw’s analytics allows us to explore her ideas of equality and work around identity and structure, work that is not only identarian. Her concepts of intersectionality encourage designing, theorizing, and applying research in ways that keep everyday experiences always connected with structure, which for Crenshaw (1988, 1991, 2018, 2021) is institutions, organizations, and so on, and discourse. Second, for those in sport who study and research and/or who are actively engaged in strategic planning, policy development, and action plans, Crenshaw’s intersectionality provides a framework and compelling analytics in addressing support and resources. Third, in our turn toward Crenshaw’s work, we address broadly recognizable everyday conditions and exemplars in formal and informal sport settings with the hopes of underscoring the accessibility, applicability, and versatility of her concepts of intersectionality. Our aim is to emphasize the explanatory power of structural, political, and representational intersectionality in our everyday consumption of sport and our production of sport research. Finally, foregrounding the praxis of Crenshaw’s intersectionality, including the explicit call for coalition building in her political intersectionality, we celebrate the activism by Black leaders and leaders of Color in sport and advance the ideas of coalition building across sport contexts as well as in research questions and design. For Crenshaw, coalition work toward intersectional racial equity and justice is present across her work, and in 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum (AAPF). The AAPF serves to advance intersectional racial justice and indivisible human rights in work with academics, activists, and policy makers. Among its initiatives AAPF leads the Say Her Name campaign and Truth Be Told campaign and provides resources, workshops, and the Intersectionality Matters! podcast for communities and educators.

Crenshaw’s (2018, 2019) work remains focused on the subordinated locations Black women and women of Color too often occupy and their navigation of discrimination and disempowerment. With this in mind, we offer our exploratory engagement of Crenshaw’s concepts in everyday sport settings. We describe and then examine all three forms Crenshaw’s intersectionality. Our aim is to open additional conceptual and analytical possibilities in intersectional work in sport. As we start, we note that the discussion and analytical points we make through our engagement with specific examples are meant to remain particular to each context. We engage with them as iterative illustrations of what might be possible with Crenshaw’s work, not as forms of systematized analysis. Our choices reflect our desire to share the details of Crenshaw’s ideas and to do so in accessible ways through familiar examples in sport, citing preceding research along the way.

In the next section we provide with a brief overview of CLS, Crenshaw’s ideas about expansive views of equality, and some of the origins of what became CRT. We follow the overview with a detailed description of Crenshaw’s work on structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality. We then conceptualize Crenshaw’s work across contemporary, everyday contexts of sport, offering possibilities of its explanatory power and praxis-oriented call for coalition building.

Critical Legal Studies, Crenshaw’s Expansive Views of Equality, and Critical Race Theory

In the late 1970s, in the United States, civil rights activists and lawyers witnessed the growth of a conservative judiciary and its deleterious effects on what had been already limited victories in the 1960s. In affirmative action cases and anti-discrimination cases, the neoconservative strategy of “colorblindness,” created in Right-wing think tanks, began to proliferate legal proceedings and policies (Crenshaw, 1988). The courts were providing redress for only the most blatant racial harm (Crenshaw, 1988; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). In predominantly white law schools, a group of predominantly white scholars had established CLS to examine the role of the law and inequity in social structures and institutions, arguing that neither the law nor legal education was neutral or apolitical. They critiqued the role of the legal system in reproducing inequities and “mainstream legal ideology for its tendency to portray American society as basically fair, and thereby legitimat[ing] the oppressive policies that have been directed toward racial minorities” (Crenshaw, 1988, p. 1356). In 1977, they convened their first conference (Crenshaw, 2002). Among the CLS scholars were some law students and professors who analyzed race and oppression and their relationship to law. Others, however, positioned race as an object of study, theorizing it as an abstraction rather than as an embodied experience real in its consequence for Black colleagues and colleagues of Color (Crenshaw, 1989; Dalton, 1995). One of the few Black women at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s, Crenshaw, along with Mari Matsuda and other law students and some law professors, caucused at CLS conferences and developed critical analyses of race in substantive legal areas² (Crenshaw, 2002).

Along with other race crits, Crenshaw (1988) emphasized the significance of structure in creating and reproducing subordinated locations both through institutions—the law—and through rhetoric and discourse. She addressed the myth of race neutrality and the myth of equal opportunity and argued for expansive views of equality. In her analyses of anti-discrimination law, Crenshaw delineated the critical differences in strategies—rhetorical and material—that legal professionals adopted. Crenshaw’s work on expansive views of equality³ (1988) coincided with her work on intersectionality (1989, 1991) and we share here her arguments on equality as they pertain to examples represented in the following sections and Crenshaw’s explicit call for critical race praxis and coalition building in political intersectionality and to praxis in structural and representational intersectionality.

Expansive views of equality emphasize not only equality of access and opportunity but also equality of result. Proponents of expansive views seek to eradicate the effects of racial oppression. In contrast, those who adopt restrictive views of equality emphasize procedural compliance with laws of access and equal opportunity and work to narrow the scope of anti-discrimination law to individual violations of practice. That is to say, a company can state that it is an equal opportunity employer and be in compliance with the law in doing so without employing any Black people or people of Color. Those who advance restrictive views of equality also pivot away from arguments that the courts have a role to play in redressing harms of racism in what is now the United States. Crenshaw advocated for expansive views and argued that too broadly “society has embraced the rhetoric of equal opportunity without fulfilling its promise” (p. 1347); formal equality or procedural compliance has not altered racial hierarchies in institutions, organizations, the economy, or discourse.

By the late 1980s, race crits–informed by work from Black feminists, FemCrits (scholars engaged in feminist legal theory), critical theory, and CLS–developed a parallel framework to FemCrit’s analyses of the “law’s relationship to gender” (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 1360). Crenshaw (2002) and her fellow colleagues asked, “what is law’s relationship to race?” and settled on “Critical Race Theory.” “Critical” signified the political and intellectual location, “race” reflected the substantive focus on “defining and elaborating on the lived reality of race” (p. 1361), and “theory” aspired to a coherent account of race and the law. Neither a unified theory nor a determinate set of ideas, CRT reflected dozens of theoretical concepts and analytics and continues to grow.⁴

Across the 1990s, as CRT continued to develop, legal scholars addressed and debated intersectionality and Title IX in law journals (Evans, 1998; Yarborough, 1996); however, intersectionality and other concepts from CRT did not gain momentum in sport research until the early 2000s (Donner, 2006; Hylton 2009, 2010; Withycombe, 2011). Since then, scholars in sport research have offered important and compelling work with theoretical concepts and analytics from CRT, particularly Derrick Bell’s (1980, 1992) concept of interest convergence (e.g., see Donner, 2006; Hawkins, 2016) and counterstorytelling (Baker-Lewton et al., 2017; Cooper & Hawkins, 2014). Work in sport research also has included critical race praxis (Williams, 2022), what early CRT scholars called, coalition and movement building (Crenshaw, 1988; Lawrence, 1992; Matsuda, 1987, 1991).

Adopting the commitment to critical race praxis that CRT scholars share, Williams (2022) outlined five waves of activism among Black athletes and analyzed the most recent for its dialogic dimensions. He argued the powerful histories of Black leadership by athletes provided the traction the fifth wave has been able to create. Williams described how historic Black leadership by athletes, called The Heritage (Byrant, 2019 as cited in Williams, 2002), experienced gains during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement and also retrenchment from the Right following civil rights legislation and President Barack Obama’s election. Williams argued that the fifth wave began the moment National Basketball Association (NBA) teams, the Milwaukee Bucks and Orlando Magic, refused to take the court in the playoffs in August 2020 as protest to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The athletes stopped play until concrete and material changes were made. For example, players negotiated with the NBA to use some arenas as polling locations, to support the Black Lives Matter movement, and to establish a social justice coalition. Although most of Williams’s examples are Black male leadership, he noted, too, the racial and social justice work of Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) earlier in 2020. Here, we add that the WNBA dedicated their 2020–2021 season to Breonna Taylor, an unarmed African American woman whom police killed on March 13, 2020 in their reckless raid of her apartment. The WNBA partnered with Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of the AAPF, to support the “Say Her Name” campaign. Players wore uniforms that displayed Breonna Taylor’s name “to seek justice for the women and girls who have been the forgotten victims of police brutality and racial violence” (“WNBA announces”, 2020). Below we address further the activism of the WNBA and leadership Black sportswomen and sportswomen of Color provide.

In the next section, we detail with excerpts from her original arguments Crenshaw’s concepts of intersectionality and emphasize the praxis in her work. What follows then are explorations and analytical discussions of each concept in relation to everyday examples in sport.

Structural Intersectionality, Political Intersectionality, and Representational Intersectionality

In the early 21st century, nongovernmental organizations and international bodies advocating for girl’s and women’s human rights reconceptualized their programs of action based on Crenshaw’s ideas. The World Conference Against Racism and Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Other Related Intolerance (WCAR) voted to integrate Crenshaw’s intersectionality into recommendations and evaluations for programs of action on girl’s and women’s human rights that addressed issues of access, direct aid, interventions, resources, and support (Raj, 2002). In concrete ways, Crenshaw’s work has directed access and resources for Black girls and women and girls and women of Color in practicable ways.

Crenshaw (1989, 1991) is well known for her emphasis on the intersections of race and gender. What sometimes is missed are the other intersections she addressed: culture, language, residency status/documentation, economic status, heterosexism, and homophobia (and later cisheterosexism and transphobia). She analyzed experiences of Black women and women of Color and the ways structures produced axes of multiple subordinated locations.

In this section, we provide a brief overview of Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality developed from her analysis of anti-discrimination cases and then detail her subsequent work on structural, political, and representational intersectionality. We excerpt Crenshaw’s work in some detail so that readers who are interested in intersectionality can easily identify places for further reading and engage her original work rather than secondary sources.

In the late 1980s, Crenshaw introduced intersectionality in her analysis of the ways the courts denied arguments of discrimination that Black women experienced as raced and gendered. The courts, turning to experiences of white women or Black men as standards, left intersectional discriminatory experiences unacknowledged and unrecognized, reproducing the injury of discrimination. Crenshaw’s intersectionality reflects the limits of the courts and structural reproduction of discrimination. In this way, intersectionality was not only identarian but also the experience of discrimination at intersections of race and gender that the courts systemically reproduced (Crenshaw, 1989, 2021).

Examining anti-discrimination cases, Crenshaw documented the ways the courts allowed only single-axis identity arguments from Black women plaintiffs, requiring arguments either of gender discrimination or race discrimination but not of both. Historically, precedents reflected white women’s experiences as the standard frame or Black men’s experiences as the standard frame, which limited the evidence Black women could present. Crenshaw explained that “Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups” (p. 143). Emphasizing the contrast between a single-axis analysis and the embodied experiences of intersectionality by Black women, and the role of the courts in reproducing single-axis arguments and misalignment of standards, Crenshaw (1989) argued that the court’s interpretations distort and erase the experiences of Black women, and in turn limit conceptualizations and understandings of discriminatory impact.

In her subsequent work, Crenshaw (1991, 2019) conceptualized structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality to challenge single-axis analyses and expand opportunities for antiracist work and feminist work. She believed that intersectionality was one way to recognize differences in experience and still organize politically to influence change toward equality and justice. Crenshaw urged critical scholars to engage in analyses and discourse that empower Black women and women of Color; to interrogate how structure locates, targets, and subordinates intersectional identities; and to coalition build across antiracist and feminist justice work.

Below we detail with examples from Crenshaw’s (1991) work her conceptions of structural, political, and representational intersectionality. First, as a starting place, we introduce their definitions. Structural intersectionality signifies the ways that structures re/produce subordinated locations and how the experiences of Black women and women of Color in such locations are qualitatively different from Black men and white women. Political intersectionality reflects the location of Black women and women of Color in “at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas” (p. 1252) and includes an explicit call for coalition building across political agendas for which Crenshaw advocated. Representational intersectionality refers to the “cultural construction of women of color” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1245), challenging the historic and contemporary targeting of Black women and women of Color in discourse and image, and critiquing the ways Black women and women of Color are marginalized in resistance work against racist-sexist-misogynistic representation.

Structural, political, and representational intersectionality each function as an analytic and may be used together or separately. Qualitative researchers interested in etic, deductive approaches can construct specific protocols for coding and analyses from Crenshaw’s structural intersectionality and/or political intersectionality and/or representational intersectionality. In other iterations, researchers may choose abductive approaches. For example, researchers might adopt an emic, inductive approach to frame their design but include among their research questions a specific concept-driven query informed by one or more of the analytics. In addition, for sport researchers interested in equity and justice in sport, Crenshaw’s praxis-oriented intersectionality offers ways to design and theorize participatory, collaborative, and collective work. Crenshaw’s political intersectionality and decades-long call for coalition building offers ways to expand already existing scholarship in activism and sport, intersectional identities and sport, and race and sport media, and so on (Corr et al., 2023; LaVoi et al., 2019; Myers, 2022; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2010; Williams, 2022), and initiate new studies.

In the next section, we detail Crenshaw’s forms of intersectionality. The forms are followed by our engagement with each form in recent sport contexts that Black women and women of Color have navigated.

Structural Intersectionality

Structural intersectionality reflects locations of Black women and women of Color at the intersections of forms of power that systemically disempower, disenfranchise, discriminate, and oppress. Crenshaw (1991) addressed the ways Black women and women of Color experience racism and sexism as well as culture, classism and the conditions of class, English-dominant communication routes and institutions, heterosexism, homophobia, and other targeted identities and subordinated locations, including patriarchal family structures. Structural intersectionality also signals the qualitative differences Black women and women of Color experience in contrast to men of Color and white women. As an analytical tool, structural intersectionality provides one way to identify resources that need to be created and inequities that need redress (Raj, 2002). Analyses of structural intersectionality invite attention to the ways institutional practices are deployed and the ways resources and services are distributed.

Specifically, Crenshaw (1991) examined domestic violence shelters arguing that access to a safe place, employment, available and affordable housing, official documents, resources, and court advocacy were all contingent on intersectional locations. Access to the physical locations of the courts or to shelters requires physically exiting existing living conditions and accessing public transportation in the absence of private transportation. Crenshaw noted an exit itself as often contingent on familial and community culture, for example, some patriarchal cultures foreclosing any opportunity to access services and support. In contexts where being outside the home depends on the permission of a patriarch, leaving without permission can be unsafe and life threatening. Use of English-speaking court advocates and shelter support required English (or a translator). Filing court documents not only required English but also in many cases filing required residency status. For survivors who made it to a shelter, transitions to permanent housing were dependent on the need for direct assistance. The process of moving from a shelter to a new permanent residence was expedited for survivors with enough economic capital to move without any direct assistance from a shelter. Accessing shelters and the resources they provided was exponentially more difficult for survivors without access to transportation, and/or whose primary language was not English, and/or immigration status,⁵ and/or experienced economic insecurity. Crenshaw’s point in addressing support, services, and advocacy through domestic violence shelters was to underscore the needs shelters meet and to invite our attention to how structure even in forms of support, services, and advocacy creates particular intersectional subordinated locations. In this case, those intersections affect if and how a woman gains access to safety.

We share the specificity of Crenshaw’s exemplar to emphasize as she did the intersections not only of race and gender, but also geography, culture, language, economic status, immigration, and residency status in relation to access and resources. Crenshaw’s work has invited us to think about sport structures, including those designed to support and provide resources (e.g., in higher education), from an intersectional analysis.

Political Intersectionality

Crenshaw (1991) argued that dominant antiracist discourse fails to conceptualize the experience of gender for Black women and women of Color, and that feminism fails to conceptualize the experience of race for Black women and women of Color. Black women and women of Color do not experience racism in all the same ways that Black men and men of Color do, nor do they experience sexism in the same ways white women do. Often, platforms for antiracist politics ignore Black women’s and women of Color’ experiences with patriarchy, and platforms for feminist politics ignore their experiences with racism.

The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. These mutual elisions present a particularly difficult political dilemma for women of color. (p. 1252)

Crenshaw (1991) demonstrated these omissions and existential tensions in her examination of the perpetration of domestic violence and rape against Black women and women of Color. She noted how the animation of racial stereotypes often accompanied discourse when violence against women in Black communities was confronted. She argued that reluctance to acknowledge domestic violence erases the experiences of Black women and women of Color: “Domestic violence is unlikely to be addressed as a serious issue” (p. 1257) when it is not acknowledged, and when it is not acknowledged, “it is unlikely that women of color will share equally in the distribution of resources and concern” (p. 1260). Simultaneously, she explained, often the frame of appeal in dominant narratives aimed at eradicating violence against women is directed at white elites.

In addition, Crenshaw noted that survivor testimonies by white women position violence as that which ought to have happened someplace else, reproducing racial stereotypes and inviting the legislation of deservedness in discourse and policy decision-making regarding resources and support. Systemic intersectional disempowerment occurs in both the exclusion of Black women and women of Color as survivors of domestic violence and in representations that tokenize or objectify their experiences. Crenshaw underscored the importance of Black women’s stories and the need for cultural shifts to occur so that their stories are heard and valued.

The work between Crenshaw and the AAPF and WNBA foregrounds and amplifies the stories of Black women and women of Color in ways she described 30 years ago. The Say Her Name campaign, created by the AAPF and supported by the WNBA (“WNBA announces”, 2020), is a powerful contemporary example of coalition building. Below, we detail some of the activism of the WNBA.

Representational Intersectionality

Representational intersectionality is a conceptual and analytical frame that addresses the production of racist-misogynistic-sexist cultural constructions of Black women and women of Color in discourse and image and the marginalization of Black women and women of Color in racial justice work and feminist work (Crenshaw, 1991). Representational intersectionality includes “both the way in which these images are produced through a confluence of prevalent narratives of race and gender, as well as a recognition of how contemporary critiques of racist and sexist representation marginalize women of color” (p. 1283). Crenshaw demonstrated how racism and sexism are mutually reinforcing in the subordination they produce in the example of the arrest of 2 Live Crew for obscenity during a performance. She argued that prosecutions of rap artists for obscenity failed to protect Black women, who are the targets of the discrimination. The antisexist response was grounded in the condemnation of 2 Live Crew as a Black male group and reproduced historic, white supremacist discourse of Black male sexuality that obscured “the fact that the objects of these violent sexual images are Black women” (p. 1291). Crenshaw noted that in the Black rapist/white victim dyad, the actual experiences of Black women become irrelevant. Among responses to the arrest, antisexist positions reproduced racist, violent discourses of Black men. The antiracist response defended the misogyny of 2 Live Crew. Crenshaw argued that both defenses failed Black women.

Underscoring both the importance of collective opposition to racist discourse and practices, and the strengths of an empowered Black feminist sensibility, Crenshaw described terms of unity that would help eradicate the marginalization of Black women in antiracist work and in feminist work. Echoing political intersectionality, one of the challenges of Crenshaw invites us to take up is coalition building across antiracist work and feminist work, where each addresses intersectional violence and discriminatory impact.

Racial justice in sport needs to confront sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, and homophobia, and feminist work in sport needs to address racism. (Cisgender privilege and transphobia need to be addressed as well.) For Crenshaw (1991), the discrete emphasis on one or the other has “relegated the identity of women of Color to a location that resists telling” (p. 1242). As an analytic, representational intersectionality allows sport researchers–particularly those interested in sport and the media–to identify the intersections and intersectional experiences of racist and sexist hierarchies and discriminatory impact, to center Black women’s and women of Color’ experiences, to promote inclusive and affirming representations of Black women and women of Color, and to emphasize work across commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice.

In the next section, we engage in the exploration of Crenshaw’s ideas in everyday sport contexts. What follows is not a systematized empirical analysis but rather particular elaborations using Crenshaw’s intersectionality. We invite you as the reader to consider the particularities of each example as an exploratory form of engagement with her work and consider possible connections to your own work.

Black Girls Climb: Structural, Political, and Representational Intersectionality

Structural intersectionality manifests in systems of convention as well as in formal institutions like higher education and in organizations like the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). In this first exemplar, we have chosen a recreational setting that allowed us to explore the analytic potential of Crenshaw’s work in sport. For Black women and women of Color who are rock climbers, reaching some of the best routes means traveling to and being in places that they would otherwise avoid. Describing Black Girls Climb (BGC), a group committed to emotionally and physically safe climbing for women of Color and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning [or queer]) people of Color, Kandula (2021) represented some of the experiences of African American women climbers. Among them was Gabrielle Dickerson who explained that some of the best climbs in the region where she lived are in places that typically, she would not go. Dickerson shared the joy that climbing brings to her but also the fear, racism, and generational trauma that are a part of her experiences when she climbs. “I was very aware of how uncomfortable I was in the backcountry of West Virginia . . . Not only because I [am] a Black woman, but also because of the relationship and trauma my ancestors had with the woods” (Kandula, 2021, para. 2). Dickerson’s grandfather escaped from a cotton farm in North Carolina in the 1940s, and on his way to Philadelphia, he witnessed his best friend lynched in the woods. Dickerson noted, in particular, the ways generational trauma remains invisible to her white climbing counterparts and the loneliness she felt as the only Black climber in her climbing group. She reminds us that the spaces of participation in sport are not neutral for many athletes. The colloquial “great outdoors” holds meaningfulness for those for whom access, safety, and enjoyment outdoors have been possible. For Dickerson, the absence of neutrality remained invisible to her predominantly white rock-climbing community. The complex emotional registers while climbing remain opaque to her climbing partners.

Kandula also noted structural inequities and discrimination have remained unaddressed in climbing. One convention of the sport is that first ascensionists, who have been overwhelmingly white and male, choose new route names. In the United States, historically, segregation determined access and who participated in climbing. Consequently, across the country route names have been created predominantly by white men. The Brown Girls Club has documented a number of route names that refer to the white enslavement of Indigenous Africans, white racial terrorism, and route names that specifically target women of Color (as co-authors we chose not to reproduce them here). Disrupting these racist–sexist–misogynist legacies, the Brown Girls Club has contacted guidebook publishers and authors to request changes to names. They have created an app as well that climbers can use “to signal when they feel unsafe or targeted in an area” (Kandula, 2021, para. 15). For us, the experiences Dickerson and Black women shared in the BGC community offer connections across structural, political, and representational intersectionality.

Structural intersectionality reflects both the white-only history of access to segregated parks in the United States, and therefore, higher participation, mastery, and the dominance in naming routes by white men. Even after state parks desegregated in 1963, access and travel to parks meant threat and danger for Black people (Kandula, 2021). The BGC addressed structural intersectionality by directly challenging some of the existing structure of the sport, specifically, the process and criteria of naming new routes. Route names constitute climbing discourse as climbers use them in everyday speech. When climbers use racist–sexist–misogynistic route names, the violence to which route names refer is reproduced in rock climbing discourse, creating oppressive, discriminatory communication in the sport. Because the route names have targeted Black and Indigenous women in particular, issues of political and representational intersectionality are present as well. The BGC’s work to change violent route names disrupts structural intersectionality through their challenge of first ascensionist naming when such naming is racist–sexist–misogynist and/or homophobic and alters representational intersectionality in processes of renaming—an example in itself of political intersectionality.

Access and Equality: Structural Intersectionality and Sport

Crenshaw’s (1991) work remains particularly productive for its potential to expand how we understand subordinated locations and systemic intersectional disenfranchisement and oppression in structures of sport. For sport researchers interested in governance, Title IX, or institutional equity, intersectionality is a productive analytic in the examination of disproportionality and discriminatory impact. That there is racial disproportionality and discriminatory impact is well known to scholars across sport studies (see, for example, Carter-Francique, 2018; Flowers et al., 2023). However, what is particularly compelling about structural intersectionality as a form of theorizing is that it functions not only to describe and represent experiences of disparities and discrimination but also requires analysis of how structures have reproduced particular subordinated locations. Such analyses address the logics of equality and the actual distribution of resources, support, and direct aid. We want to note as well that structural intersectionality is useful in framing ways Black women, women of Color, and others have created already inclusive, intersectional resources and support, for example, the leadership and positive impact of head coaches and assistant coaches who are Black women in their work with Black sportswomen and sportswomen of Color (Carter-Francique, 2018; Outlaw & Toriello, 2014; Thames, 2023).

In the United States, the disproportionately low representation in college athletic scholarships Black women and women of Color receive when compared with white counterparts and Black men (Osborne, 2017; Women’s Sport Foundation, 2011) is one example of systemic disenfranchisement and disempowerment in structures of sport, and one connected to specific institutional locations in colleges and universities. Although women of Color have experienced some Title IX benefits, “they have not experienced those benefits to the same degree and/or range as White females” (Carter-Francique, 2018, p. 50). Common-sense understandings of Title IX sport are centered on the notion of equal opportunity and participation, equal benefits, and equal treatment for all genders; however, Title IX applies only a single-axis analysis to potential scholarship recipients. The policy does not reflect intersections of identity, nor does it account for the qualitatively different experiences of access to athletic participation and support Black women face compared with their white counterparts or Black men. Among the 183,000 athletes who represent over 1,200 NCAA member institutions during the 2020 to 2021 academic year, only 5% identified as Black women (NCAA, 2021). Participation by Black women exceeds 10% in only five of the 21 sports the NCAA sponsors for women: Basketball (31%), Indoor and Outdoor Track and Field (20%), Bowling (19%), and Volleyball (11%) (NCAA, 2021).

In addition, inconsistency exists both in widespread variation in models of oversight and in the supervision of Title IX at NCAA member schools. According to Staurowsky and Weight (2013), athletic directors (ADs) and senior women administrators (SWAs) described only moderate understandings of Title IX policies and compliance, and standards of compliance were difficult to identify. Often ADs and senior women administrators were in conflict over compliance issues. Although scholarships are one way to increase access to higher education for Black sportswomen and sportswomen of Color, Title IX only requires proportionality for compliance. Proportionality represents the comparison of total aid to the respective participation rates of men and women. Title IX does not require equal numbers of scholarships for men and women, nor equal amounts of direct aid. For example, a man who plays football might be offered a full scholarship, whereas a woman who plays soccer player might be offered a partial scholarship and a work study position (Osborne, 2017). Research and reporting that includes intersectional identities and not only single-axis identities (e.g., ethnicity/race, gender, dis/ability) often is a needed first addition (Flowers et al., 2023). Additional engagement also includes addressing Title IX offices and the leadership of them. Here, not only does Crenshaw’s work on structural intersectionality provide an additional form of engagement in research on systemic inequity but her expansive views of equality do as well. For those researchers and practitioners committed to equity and justice in sport, Crenshaw’s (1988, 2019) expansive view of equality, which emphasizes outcomes and not just procedural access, gives us a framework to address policy in practice. The analytic of structural intersectionality is not merely descriptive. It includes analysis of the ways decision-making (whether anti-discrimination rulings by judges, distribution of resources by ADs, or compliance assessments by SWAs) reproduce subordinated locations. In this case, institutional support for the woman soccer player demands her investment in additional labor in a work study. In this way, structural intersectionality addresses applied work in sport management. In addition, researchers interested in praxis have opportunities to work with leadership in athletics and Title IX offices to refine, reform, or re-establish access to resources, including but certainly not limited to scholarships, using intersectional analyses and expansive definitions of equality.

Sport researchers interested in issues of access, retention, and advancement in athletic leadership can use structural intersectionality as well. In the United States, white men continue to dominate sport leadership. According to the NCAA (2021), Black women constituted only 3% (30 of 1,114) of AD leadership and only 2% (448 of 20,233) of head coaches in 2020–2021. The proportion of women ADs (24%) in the NCAA was nearly equal to that of female head coaches (25%) as ADs tend to hire head coaches that resemble themselves (Cunningham & Sagas, 2005). While Black women represent a significant number of athletes in basketball and track and field, the coaching staffs still predominantly consist of white men and women. Only 10% (107 of 1,097) of head coaches in women’s basketball coaches were Black women in 2020–2021, a decrease of nine coaches from 2019 to 2020 (Madsen et al., 2017). There are no female head coaches among the 1,086 NCAA men’s basketball programs, and 42% of women’s basketball head coaches identify as male (33% white men; NCAA, 2021).⁶ The greatest number of Black women athletes competed in track and field (20%, 6,211), yet only 4% of head coaches and 6% of assistant coaches were Black women. Men accounted for 81% of head coaches (62% white men; NCAA, 2021).

The lack of representation and disproportionately low representation of Black women and women of Color in leadership positions in athletics (less than 7% across all NCAA member institutions) not only reflects structural inequity but also affects Black sportswomen. Black women’s leadership in head and assistant coaching positions positively impacts the experience of Black sportswomen (Carter-Francique, 2018; Outlaw & Toriello, 2014; Thames, 2023).

While researchers and players have shared how important Black female coaches are in establishing a programmatic culture that affirms and promotes cultural differences among team members (Outlaw & Toriello, 2014; Thames, 2023) and race remains a significant factor in social relatability (Corr et al., 2022; Thames, 2023), Black female coaches continue to be underrepresented on college coaching staffs. Black women athletes have emphasized the importance of feeling culturally accepted by their team in order to perform at the highest level and succeed inside and outside athletic settings (Carter-Francique, 2018); they also have shared the significance of mentorship from Black women coaches (Foster, 2003; Thames, 2023). Former WNBA number one overall pick, Angel McCoughtry, shared how important it was for her to have University of South Carolina Head Coach Dawn Staley as her coach: “We need more coaches to protect us. We just never had any inch to be human, like our Caucasian counterparts. But who understands that? Our Black coaches. Because they went through everything we went through” (Thames, 2023, para. 17, 20).

In basketball and track and field where the representation of Black women athletes has been high, head coach and assistant coach positions for Black women also remain disproportionately low compared with Black men. In addition, women of Color in athletic collegiate leadership have identified discrimination and the absence of racially diverse workplaces and communities among the most pressing challenges and obstacles (Hollomon, 2016; LaVoi et al., 2019).

Only 36% of racially and ethnically minoritized women in athletic leadership positions reported satisfaction with the treatment of men and women within the athletic department where they worked and less than 50% reported satisfaction with the way racially and ethnically minoritized employees and sexual minoritized employees were treated (Hollomon, 2016). In addition to witnessing discrimination based on gender (over 65%), race/ethnicity (58%), and sexual orientation (33%), over 60% of respondents reported the following obstacles to recruiting women of Color: an absence of racial/ethnic minoritized women in leadership roles, job availability, stereotypes of women in athletics, racial/ethnic discrimination in athletics, and limited opportunities to live/work in racially diverse communities. Although the last challenge rests beyond the scope of direct assessment and intervention, increasing racial and ethnic minorities in athletic leadership roles, addressing stereotypes and discrimination in policies, and confronting them in everyday practice are all a part of our collective responsibility and care in athletics. Crenshaw’s structural intersectionality explicitly turns our attention toward remediation.

“The W is the Movement”: Political Intersectionality and Sport

In addressing political intersectionality, Crenshaw (1991) reminds us that historically, political platforms in Black communities expected Black women to obscure gendered intra-group differences and that political platforms of suffragist and feminist movements prioritized white women’s agendas and often ignored racial and economic violence and inequities Black women and women of Color experienced. Crenshaw argued that intersectional justice work was one way to build collective action. In this section, we explore in relation to political intersectionality exemplars of activism in sport that Black women and women of Color are leading. We note that Crenshaw emphasized, too, the qualitatively different risks Black women and women of Color face when they speak back. In this section, we address both.

Political intersectionality functions not only to address the targeting of individual Black women athletes and women athletes of Color, but also to amplify calls for collective work against oppression. The WNBA has a long history of collective action toward racial and social justice. WNBA players have addressed police violence, protested bans against same sex marriage, organized media blackouts, encouraged voter turnout, and kneeled in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick in 2016, and partnered with Crenshaw and the AAPF to support the Say Her Name campaign in 2020 (Abrams et al., 2020; Myers, 2022), dedicating their 2020–2021 season to Breonna Taylor. In July 2020, the WNBA/WNBPA also announced The Justice Movement, and the creation of the WNBA/WNBPA Social Justice Council to address the “long history of inequality, implicit bias and systemic racism that has targeted black and brown communities” (“WNBA announces”, 2020) in the U.S. Education and mobilization for action were direct goals. Liberty guard, Layisha Clarendon, characterized the WNBA this way, “The W is the movement. It’s where this country is going. It’s where progressive and forward-thinking folks are looking to” (Abrams et al., 2020, para. 13). We note that collective action in the WNBA is multiracial as white players support racial and social justice efforts alongside Black players’ advocacy and leadership. Such work reflects multiracial coalition building Crenshaw’s concept of political intersectionality addresses.

In contrast to the activism in the WNBA, the experiences in U.S. Soccer for Black women during the same period were radically different. Crystal Dunn, 2021 CONCACAF Player of the Year and a Black woman the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), shared what happened in fall 2016 when her white, gay teammate, Megan Rapinoe, decided to kneel in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick.

I saw the way U.S. Soccer responded and treated Megan . . . They kept her out of some games, kept her out of camps . . . she lost money not being called into camps. I was like, “Yes. That’s bad”; but to me, I was thinking “They could rip up my contract.” So I thought I was actually going to get it much worse. And I remember telling her, it hurts me to my core that I’m going to stand, but I’m supportive. (The Bleacher Report et al., 2020)

Dunn surmised that if she knelt “as the Black girl on the team,” she might lose her job. She feared worse retribution from U.S. Soccer than Rapinoe had received. Rapinoe kneeled only one other time before U.S. Soccer issued a statement during the same game that prohibited all players from kneeling—a prohibition that was not repealed until June 2020 the same month team conversations about race and racism took place for the first time (The Bleacher Report et al., 2020).

The presumptive logics of U.S. Soccer not only deeply contrast the WNBA but also reveal its failure to recognize players as Black women and women of Color, who embody identities at intersectional locations. Moreover, the prohibition perpetuated “colorblind” ideologies through the structure of U.S. Soccer’s policies and compartmentalized race from gender, and race and gender from athletic performance in ways Black women and women of Color do not experience them.

Suppression and discrimination occurred both in league-wide prohibitions and in individual attacks against Black women athletes and athlete women of Color. As one example, some tennis fans responded with defamatory insults to Naomi Osaka’s decision to withdraw from the Western and Southern semi-final in protest of police violence against Black people and the police shooting of Jacob Blake.⁷ Osaka, a professional tennis player of Haitian and Asian descent, who at the time was the highest paid woman athlete in the world, had worn face masks with the names of unarmed Black children and adults killed by police as well as a mask with Trayvon Martin’s name at the U.S. Open, and she had encouraged people to march for Black Lives Matter.⁸ Racist and sexist targeting ensued on social media. Osaka was called a “terrorist” and informed that tennis was a “sport played by gentlemen” (Denyer, 2020). The derision Osaka faced reflects the intersectional and systemic dominance of white supremacy and patriarchy. Some fans rebuked Osaka’s commitment to racial justice and challenged her agency as an Asian and Black woman addressing racial injustice. In her own social media Osaka shared,

Before I am an athlete, I am a black woman. And as a Black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand that need immediate attention, rather than watching me play tennis. I don’t expect anything drastic to happen with me not playing, but if I can get a conversation started in a majority white sport I consider that a step in the right direction. (Boren, 2020)

Osaka centered the intersections of her own identity as a Black woman in her response and explicitly named the dominance of whiteness in tennis.

Crenshaw (1991) called for intersectional work in building justice initiatives. She critiqued the historic absence of white women’s support of Black women’s experiences and argued that feminist work must center intersectional experiences and challenge racism. Here, the WNBA is leading by example. Research on collective work and coalition building can deepen all of our understandings about building multiracial, multigender movements toward equity and justice in sport.

“You Have to Basically Be a Saint”: Representational Intersectionality and Sport

With representational intersectionality Crenshaw (1991) invited us to think about racist–sexist cultural constructions of Black women and women of Color and the marginalization of Black women and women of Color in critiques of those representations. Examples of representational intersectionality are egregiously prolific, and as above, we have chosen not share them in detail here. The targeting of Black women’s bodies and the bodies of women of Color exists not just in contrast to cultural constructions of white femininity but also in historic relation to white, European genocide, colonization, and the structure of white settler enslavement, including systemic rape as reproduction of capital and as a weapon of violence against Indigenous African girls and women and their communities (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Harris, 1993; hooks, 1992). Symbolic and verbal assault against Black women and women of Color through image and discourse reproduce white dominance and supremacy. Neither achievement nor status protects. Across sport, Black women and women of Color have faced discrimination that white women athletes and athletes who are Black men do not. In response to racist–sexist discrimination, athletes have held press conferences, met with organization officials and perpetrators of the offense, and established educational platforms to combat harassment (see, for example, Serena Williams’s response to the 2018 French Tennis Federation president establishing a dress code to prohibit her compression suit; Gabby Douglas’s 2016 decision to serve as a Change Ambassador to Hack Harassment following the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro; the 2007 NCAA Women’s Championship Team from Rutgers University meeting with Don Imus; Cooky et al., 2010; Payne, 2016). Black women athletes endure white discrimination against them in forms of “dominant cultural standards of white feminine beauty” (Messner, 2002, p. 102) facing critiques of muscular physique, hair, and dress, as well as criticisms about their play, and questions about gender identity.

In NCAA Division I athletics, Withycombe (2009, 2011) documented Black women athletes’ perspectives on media representation of them. Players noted how much more coverage men’s teams received compared with women’s teams, how much more coverage white teammates received compared with teammates of Color, and shared mixed responses to the representations of them in the media. Some players felt empowered while others discussed the racist imagery and stereotypes they fought as Black women and athletes, including in their own university’s media guides. In addition, players described the higher standard of behavior demanded of them by coaches and their institution compared with male athletes and the way coaches surveilled their social media accounts. The players referred to historic racist–sexist stereotypes and explained that they practiced hypervigilance, making sure the media had no opportunities to portray them negatively, something their white teammates did not have to consider. “You have to basically be a saint” (Withycombe, 2009, p. 148), one player shared. Another player explained she was working harder to gain representation on a media guide cover. Although the players recognized the overrepresentation of their white teammates, the goal of working harder for a cover reflects how structural inequity—more frequent coverage of white teammates—affected individual behavior. Black sportswomen labored to exceed social expectations compared with men’s teams and labored to exceed performance expectations compared with white teammates.

Crenshaw’s representational intersectionality provides an additional way to analyze discriminatory impact and disproportionality and address directly inequity in discourse and representation. Effectively identifying discriminatory impact informs the development of responsive protocols, targeted resources, and forms of redress; it also aids in future, proactive agenda setting in our work with and representations of Black women athletes and women athletes of Color.

Looking Back To Look Forward

More than just identarian, Crenshaw’s intersectionality addresses both the power of structures in reproducing discriminatory impact and the power of leadership among Black women and women of Color. For us, her concepts of structural, political, and representational intersectionality offer sport researchers an unique set of analytics to study the interrelatedness of structure and everyday experience and address the reproduction of subordinated locations in sport. Crenshaw’s intersectionality also serves as a frame from which to build inclusive intersectional research, policies, and practices and amplify those already in place. Decades of action plans in women’s and girls’ human rights (Raj, 2002; Wing, 1997) based on her work can inform sport organizations and institutions in their development of race conscious, intersectional work in sport management and leadership, institutional policies and initiatives, and programmatic work, particularly in this moment of backlash and retrenchment.

Research that continues to work beyond single-category analyses deepens particular intersectional understandings and invites the creation of more inclusive and complex diversity initiatives, action plans, and strategic planning. The application of intersectionality can identify as well those initiatives, teams, institutions, and organizations that already have successfully integrated intersectional policies and practices into their work. Studying such success informs its next iterations.

The ongoing work toward racial and social justice by the WNBA and individual athletes invites elaborations on the praxis of Crenshaw’s intersectionality in research on activism and sport. The BGC initiative to change the violent language of climbing routes is just one example of activism that addresses both the everyday discourse used among athletes and the geographies of discourse in the sport. Other efforts to rename (e.g., awards, buildings, fields, and stadiums) are more than just symbolic. Renaming alters the everyday discourse we share in sport.

Black athletes and coaches navigate layered systems of surveillance in collegiate and professional structures of sport. Representational intersectionality not only provides ways to analyze discriminatory cultural constructions but also requires that we deepen our understandings of the intersections of racism and sexism by listening to Black women and women of Color. Participatory research with intersectional affinity groups and/or caucuses for groups might serve as spaces for collaboration. In addition, Crenshaw’s work demands that we all attune to representations of Black women and women of Color in sport and produce affirming, inclusive intersectional representations.

Finally, Crenshaw’s intersectionality when coupled with her work on expansive views of equality asks us to approach issues of access, resources, and support as substantive processes and not just procedural ones. For critical race scholars, meritocracy is a myth not because hard work is not real, rather, meritocracy is a myth because hard work does not result in parity of outcomes (Crenshaw, 1988; Lawrence, 2001). For Crenshaw, descriptions of discrimination and disproportionality in outcomes must be accompanied by applied work that moves us toward eradicating them. Coalition building across antiracist justice work and feminist justice work is central to the work, and Black women who are athletes and coaches are leading the way.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Allison Daniel Anders

Christina L. Myers

Notes

Author Biographies

Allison Daniel Anders, PhD, is an associate professor in educational foundations and inquiry, and qualitative research at the University of South Carolina.

James M. DeVita, PhD, is a professor in higher education and the director of high impact pathways at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Leslee A. Fisher, PhD, NBCC, LLPC is professor emerita in sport psychology and motor behavior at the University of Tennessee.

Chris Corr, PhD, is an assistant professor in sports management at Troy University.

Christina L. Myers, PhD, is an assistant professor in journalism at Michigan State University.

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Looking Back to Look Forward: Exploring Crenshaw’s Political,Structural,and Representational Intersectionality in Sport

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Critical Legal Studies, Crenshaw’s Expansive Views of Equality, and Critical Race Theory

Structural Intersectionality, Political Intersectionality, and Representational Intersectionality

Structural Intersectionality

Political Intersectionality

Representational Intersectionality

Black Girls Climb: Structural, Political, and Representational Intersectionality

Access and Equality: Structural Intersectionality and Sport

“The W is the Movement”: Political Intersectionality and Sport

“You Have to Basically Be a Saint”: Representational Intersectionality and Sport

Looking Back To Look Forward

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author Biographies

References