Intersectional Disadvantage

Abstract

ABSTRACT When people simultaneously occupy multiple social identities, ascriptions of disadvantage and advantage, as well as our reasoning with them, need to be handled with care. For instance, as various US-American courts have come to acknowledge, we cannot in general reason from the premise that someone has neither been discriminated against as a woman nor as a Black person to the conclusion that they have not been discriminated against as a Black woman. In this article, I show how, by systematising such qualified ascriptions of disadvantage (and advantage), as well as the patterns of reasoning involving them, we can articulate and defend central theses of intersectionality theory in remarkably general terms, and without having to commit to a particular metaphysics of intersectional identity.