WHILE A RELATIVELY new dimension of scholarly conversation in digital humanities, intersectionality is an intervention in feminist and anti-racist discourse with a much longer history. The origins of scholarship on what has come to be known as intersectionality can be traced to the work of critical race scholar and legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. In the course of her examination of case law in the 1980s, she identified the limitations of legal discourse that focused on single-axis analysis— gender or race— and its consequences for not only anti-discrimination law but also feminist and anti-racist theory and praxis. Through her work with women at domestic abuse shelters in California, Crenshaw identified a further disturbing trend: black and brown women seemed to be disproportionately affected by domestic violence in relation to their white women counterparts. Tracing the root causes of these phenomena, Crenshaw argued that black and brown women had been failed by both feminist movements and antiracist activists. White feminism had presumed that remedying gender inequalities would, in turn, improve the lives of women whose experiences were also affected by racial and other forms of inequality. Meanwhile, black men put race at the forefront of anti-racist organizing, assuming that the effects of remedying racial inequality would trickle down to black women. What both groups failed to realize, however, was that totalizing approaches that focused on single axes of oppression were ill-equipped to address the needs of those at the convergence of race and gender. Their experiences at the confluences of these categories proved that the operations of identity derive from the tangled interplay of factors which form the crux of oppression and require an equally complex response. Since Crenshaw's original thesis, intersectionality has gained a foothold within feminist thought. For the purposes of this volume and within the context of digital humanities research, we draw on Crenshaw's definition of intersectionality and expand it to include not only race and gender but also other axes of identity, including class, sexuality, and nation, as well as the digital divides emerging from disparities in technological access and inequalities that shape the relationships between particular communities and technologies.

Intersectionality occupies central place in digital humanities discourse, with a number of recent interventions calling attention to its value.