Volume 3 issue 1 May 2015
Getting Emotional at the Intersections of Intersectionality: A Review of ‘Intersectionality: Traumatic Impressions’, by Emily Grabham
Jonathan Ow
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In a time when our own unique identities within society are becoming ever more important to us, one has to ask: just how well are our identities represented within the law? For example, in the context of employment discrimination an employee can seek redress for discrimination on the grounds of certain ‘protected characteristics’, as defined by section 4 of the UK Equality Act 2010. However, these categories tell us nothing about the com¬pound types of inequality experienced by subjects whose complex identities mean that they do not fit neatly into those categories. In her 2009 essay, ‘In Intersectionality: Traumatic Impressions’, Emily Grabham critiques ‘the law’s propensity to classify’ and discusses a need for law that not only focuses on the ‘intersections’ of these legal categorisations of our identity, but that also takes into account the more complex inequalities that victims of discrimination experience.
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