In 1989, legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw published an article addressing a puzzling gap in antidiscrimination law. Although laws existed to prohibit employment discrimination based on race, and other laws prohibited discrimination based on gender, Crenshaw observed that in practice Black women who experienced discrimination were sometimes unable to find a remedy in the courts because they were viewed by law as imperfect representatives of either protected class. Because of their intersectionality, Black women plaintiffs were vulnerable to unfair treatment based on race, gender, as well as their combination (e.g., prohibitions on braided hairstyles that employers deemed “unprofessional”), even as they found themselves outside the protection of laws designed to recognize and prohibit inequitable treatment based on a single axis. In the thirty years since this article appeared, the concept of intersectionality has become arguably the signal contribution of women’s studies (McCall, 2005; see also Overstreet et al., 2020) and has been taken up in countless publications across many disciplines, including in the social sciences.

Although critical legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw crafted the neologism of intersectionality (1989), in doing so she drew and expanded on over one hundred years of theorizing by African American women “[advancing] the idea that systems of oppression—namely, racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism—worked together to create a set of social conditions under which [B]lack women and other women of color lived and labored, always in a kind of invisible but ever-present social jeopardy” (Cooper, 2015, p. 389). At its root, the concept of intersectionality aims to understand and challenge (Hancock, 2016) the ways that inequality is created and maintained through social categories that I have termed “identity, difference, and disadvantage” (Cole, 2009, p. 170). These typically include (but of course are not limited to) race, gender, sexuality, social class, ability status, and nation. Within this framework, which has implications for theory, research, and political organizing, such categories are revealed to mutually construct one another and work together to shape outcomes (May, 2015).

Yet despite intersectionality’s focus on the structural and political processes that create, maintain, and sometimes disrupt social categories, within the discipline of psychology, intersectionality is all too often flattened to refer only descriptively to identity (Bowleg, 2008; Guidroz & Berger, 2009). This chapter aims to address this misrepresentation by foregrounding the role of power within an intersectionality framework in order to reflect on the implications for research in psychology. Throughout, I draw on examples from the literature on women of color organizing, both because this political work is the terrain from which intersectionality theory emerges and which it was intended to explain, and because these activists’ work is innately concerned with the complex ways power works through social categories of identity, including gender.

The Role of Power in Intersectionality Frameworks

Importantly, intersectionality was not originally conceptualized as a theoretical or academic framework. Rather, scholar-activists developed this analytic to complicate conventional understandings of race and gender based on what May calls “either/or logics” that tend to erase and distort the experiences of women of color, and they did so in the service of identifying opportunities for collective organizing across difference (May, 2015, p. 4). As such, the concept of intersectionality is primarily a theory about power and inequity. Cho et al. (2013) noted “What makes an analysis intersectional… is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by the dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (p. 795, emphasis added). This means that intersectionality is not primarily concerned with the various permutations of identity (e.g., Black women), but rather the ways that race, for example, may have different meanings depending on one’s gender, and these meanings have significant consequences for life experiences, chances, and choices (Feree, 2009). For example, Goff and Kahn (2013) discuss research showing that White undergraduates rate Black women as less attractive than White women, even as they found Black men more attractive than White men. Subsequent analyses showed that both African American men and women were perceived as more masculine than their White counterparts; this resulted in an attractiveness bonus for Black men, and a disadvantage for Black women. Moreover, this disparity has greater significance for Black women compared to men; Monk et al. (2021) showed that the well-known impact of attractiveness on income is greater for African Americans than other groups, and greatest of all for Black women. This means Black women face the greatest income penalty for failing to adhere to appearance-based norms, which are necessarily highly gendered.

This is not to say that intersectional analyses are not concerned with identity (membership in social groups) and identifications (the significance individuals place on their membership) (Settles & Buchanan, 2014). Rather, an intersectionality analysis presumes that identities are not static, and that an analysis of power is necessary to understand which identities are associated with power, and thus inequity (Tomlinson, 2013). The definition of social categories structures political life, delineates problems and remedies, and constrains (and affords) access to opportunities, spaces, and institutions (and the resources they offer). Categorization differentially positions individuals in these systems, conferring both privilege and vulnerability, but identity is a mechanism within these systems rather than either an outcome or an independent variable with important explanatory power. Sociologists Collins and Bilge (2016) articulated the stakes of these distinctions in their concern that all too often the discussion of intersectionality has come to be about race, class, and gender, rather than racism, capitalism, and sexism (etc.); their insistence that we attend to forms of discrimination and prejudice rather than identities makes clear that an intersectionality framework is primarily concerned with understanding processes of power.

Psychology’s focus on identity often leads scholars to invoke intersectionality descriptively, by describing the demographic characteristics of research participants, rather than analytically, by theorizing categories and how they work together to structure outcomes (see Cortina et al., 2012). However, this approach falls back on simplistic, additive models, in which experiences of Black women, for example, might be characterized in terms of Black + woman, rather than defining a unique experience (Bowleg, 2008). Moreover, a focus on demographics cannot recognize, let alone explain, the ways institutionalized structures of power affect life chances and choices, except in the most superficial ways, as in attention to disparities (May, 2015). Thus, research based on comparisons between groups defined in terms of demographics cannot be said to employ an intersectionality framework. Rather, as Bowleg argued (2008), an intersectionality framework entails “the analysis and interpretation of research findings within the sociohistorical context of structural inequality for groups positioned in social hierarchies of unequal power” (p. 323). Yet in psychology, we rarely talk about power, preferring terms such as inequality and disparities, perhaps because they are easier to define and measure. But power and inequality are mechanistically linked, not synonyms. As my colleague, sociologist Alford Young, Jr., explained, “Power is a resource (I think of it as the fuel) for the production of inequality” (personal communication, October 22, 2019).

Although this conceptualization of identity in terms of power and structure is distinctly sociological, intersectionality nevertheless has much to say to psychologists. In the sections that follow, I describe four ways that an understanding of power from an intersectionality framework complicates approaches to social identity commonly taken by psychologists: attention to contexts of power and privilege; transcending the “but for” analysis; recognition of the coalitional nature of social identities; and heeding intersectionality’s social justice imperative.

Contexts of Power and Privilege

If the study of social identity is to move beyond a descriptive focus on individuals’ locations within a static list of social categories and toward an intersectionality framework, psychologists must deepen their understanding of the social, historical, and political circumstances that have created the conditions under which minoritized groups live today (Bowleg, 2008). This entails attention to how power and privilege structure the relations between groups that are always defined by multiple dimensions of social identity. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has proposed that the organization of intersecting oppressions can be understood as a “matrix of domination” (2000, p. 18), in which power distributes privilege and disadvantage unevenly across a multidimensional space defined by social identities. Grzanka (2018) describes these dynamics as “fundamentally relational, intertwined, and co-constitutive, as opposed to parallel, independent, or discrete” (p. 588). The contours of this matrix emerge out of historic and ongoing practices and are specific to place and time. Across this matrix power operates in different domains including structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal (Collins & Bilge, 2016). While the interpersonal domain is of obvious interest to psychologists, an intersectionality framework demands attention to how power works in the other domains as well.

For example, in 1989, psychologist Aida Hurtado published an essay articulating how Black and White women’s differential structural positions in relation to White men in the United States created different experiences of subordination even as both groups faced gender inequality. Arguing that “The definition of woman is constructed differently for white women and for women of Color, though gender is the marking mechanism through which the subordination of each is maintained” (p. 845), Hurtado traced the historical consequences of this discrepancy from slavery to the ongoing disparities in the present. As daughters and (for heterosexual women) potential partners to White men, the most structurally powerful race/gender group, White women are subordinated through these relationships even as they benefit from privilege associated with them. In contrast, women of color are largely excluded from intimate relationships with White men and are perceived by them instrumentally, in terms of their labor and “as objects of sexual power and aggression” (p. 846). One implication of this asymmetry is that White women and women of color have very different experiences of gender oppression. Hurtado also discussed the ways this different experience of gender and power created difficulties for Black and White women attempting shared political mobilization. Because White women are subordinated through what Hurtado calls seduction, they may be less comfortable using anger to motivate collective action compared to women of color. Hurtado’s analysis attends to both the structural and interpersonal domains of power. Her discussion of anger in response to power inequities illustrates how psychologists might use an intersectionality framework to understand the ways that individuals’ positions within the matrix of domination can shape affect, cognition, and behavior.

This matrix-style approach also complicates a simple binary between the oppressor and oppressed, a fact that popular discussions and critiques of intersectionality often misunderstand (Bartlett [2017] provides examples). Most individuals are privileged in some ways, even as they are disadvantaged in others. As an example of the complexity this framing aims to describe, Grzanka (2018) compared the experiences of two college students, one middle-class and African American, the other an Asian American student from a working-class family. While both students may be at risk of stereotype threat, the content and experience of this vulnerability may be distinct. This example demonstrates that attempts to understand the students’ shared experiences in terms of “effects of institutional racism on the academic performance of students of color” overlooks their multidimensional locations in relation to power and cannot adequately describe or explain their experiences.

Attention to the complex contexts of power and privilege helps psychologists understand how social identities are lived in relation to other groups, thus resisting the “flattening” of identity described by Guidroz and Berger (2009). For example, research on differences between Black and White women’s body image has sometimes reported that Black women are more satisfied with their bodies compared to their White counterparts. This comparison cannot be meaningfully interpreted without consideration of the ways that beauty ideals hierarchically confer relative social power (even if limited) both on individual women, as well as groups of women. Further, men’s evaluative gaze also reflects inequities of power, both between men and women, and between diverse groups of men (see Cottom’s [2019] incisive analysis, illustrated with autobiographical detail, of how racialized beauty standards confer social capital by excluding Blackness). Thus, all members of society are situated in asymmetrical relation to one another within a matrix of domination defined by categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage; these locations influence perceptions and evaluations of their bodies by themselves and others (Cole & Sabik, 2009). Considering this context, it makes little sense to conclude that Black women’s scores on scales measuring body image that were normed on White women indicate the former are somehow buffered from dissatisfaction (Sabik et al., 2010). Rather, one might begin by asking how Black women perceive their bodies and beauty and whose evaluations matter to them.

By taking an intersectional approach, theorizing individuals as located asymmetrically within a matrix of power defined by categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage, such as race, class, age, and sexuality, psychologists, are better able to see the mechanisms of identity and identifications and the ways that identities shape not only affect, behavior, and cognition, but more specifically, responses to inequality including stress and resilience for diverse individuals. Importantly, such an analysis requires that the experiences of a diverse range of individuals be considered.

Transcending the “But For” Analysis

As a discipline, psychology tends to favor parsimonious explanations, which can lead to a preference for investigating social identity categories one at a time. For example, a recent but already highly cited paper about the psychology of racism that appeared in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association relegated intersectionality to a footnote (Roberts & Rizzo, 2021; see Grzanka & Cole, 2021b, for a discussion of the consequences for this omission). To give another example from my own subfield, a content analysis of personality psychology papers (Cortina et al., 2012) found that those published in gender-focused journals seldom theorized race—that is, included race in the theory, hypothesis, analysis, and discussion (from 1 to 21% across the journals). Similarly, papers that appeared in race/ethnicity-focused journals were even less likely to theorize gender (2–16% across the journals).

All too often this single-axis approach generates studies focusing on individuals who occupy only one minoritized category; for example, studies of women and sexism are most often theorized based on the experiences of White women and tend to rely on predominantly White samples. Although this is less true of studies about people minoritized by race (simply due to the demographic gender gap among African American college students), nevertheless racial discrimination is most often theorized and conceptualized in terms of the experiences of men. This methodological inclination means we understand gender and race only from the perspective of those who are otherwise privileged, that is, those who hold the most power. Crenshaw (1989) calls this a “but for” analysis (e.g., “but for gender [white women] would not have been disadvantaged” [p. 144]). Less obviously, this type of bias in single-axis studies can shape the very questions taken up for study, even as such investigations are framed as not explicitly addressing other aspects of identity. For example, Goff and Kahn (2013) observed that the study of discrimination tends to focus on areas such as employment, access to education, and encounters with the criminal justice system, outcomes that are not framed as gendered. However, this focus is consistent with centering the experiences of minoritized men; beginning the study of discrimination from the experiences of minoritized women could lead to greater interest in access to maternal and child health care, for example (p. 374). The cumulative impact of this approach shapes the entire body of extant literature in psychology such that we know very little about prejudice and discrimination, and their impacts, on populations that occupy more than one minoritized status. Centering the experiences of individuals who experience multiple forms of marginalization provides an opportunity for psychologists to add more nuance to the questions they investigate. In many cases, it would also demand reconceptualization of constructs and item development, as in the example of women’s body image described above (Cole & Sabik, 2009).

Another example stems from an interview with bioethicist and psychologist Adrienne Asch (Cole & Luna, 2010). Asch criticized feminists for failing to consider the standpoint of women with disabilities, in particular “their failure to acknowledge the implications of women choosing abortion in cases of fetal genetic anomalies, which [Asch] argued implicitly devalues the lives of people with disabilities, many of whom are women” (Cole & Luna, 2010, p. 82). By framing reproductive choice from the perspective of women who are privileged but for gender (i.e., women without disabilities), a movement aiming to broaden self-determination for women contributed to the erasure and disparagement of women with disabilities. Importantly, this outcome was not likely to have been what organizers of the movement intended, but from their social location of relative power they did not perceive the impact of their actions. Similar critiques of the reproductive choice movement have been made by women of color. For example, the reproductive justice movement argues that feminist organizations have prioritized abortion rights while failing to address reproductive issues that jeopardize women’s opportunities to have the children they want and to parent the children they have, such as the difficulty of accessing prenatal care in the U.S. medical system and legal policies that separate parents from children. These concerns disproportionately affect women of color (Luna, 2020; Silliman et al., 2004).

The work of the African American Policy Forum’s (AAPF) Say Her Name campaign demonstrates what can be revealed by moving beyond a “but for” analysis. Despite the work of organizations such as #Black Lives Matter to draw attention to Black victims of police violence, AAPF’s campaign notes that state violence against men is more likely to receive widespread media coverage and public response and to be held up as emblematic of systematic police brutality against African Americans. Founded in 2014, the project aims to bring attention to the experiences of Black women and girls who have been the targets of police violence “in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally” (Crenshaw & Ritchie, 2015, p. 4).

Police violence committed against Black women often takes very similar forms to that experienced by men, such as assaults on those living with mental illness, in poverty or on the streets, those involved in the drug trade, and during traffic stops. Certainly, these crimes against Black women represent an injustice and must be made visible. But Crenshaw and Ritchie (2015) note that Black women also experience victimization by the police based on gender and sexuality, and the lack of representation of these victims obscures our understanding of systematic state violence. For example, Black women experience disproportionate rates of domestic violence compared to women of other races; while representing only 7% of the U.S. population, they are the victims of 22% of homicides committed by intimate partners. Yet for Black women, turning to police for protection can result in further victimization. Crenshaw and Ritchie recount multiple cases in which police responding to reports of domestic violence shot and killed women victims in their homes. Black women’s vulnerability at the hands of the police even as they face victimization by partners is missing from the national conversation about state violence against African Americans. As well, the report notes that because of Black women’s traditional roles as caregivers to both the young and old, their murders have a distinctive impact on Black communities. This too remains outside the conversation on police violence.

Moving beyond a “but for” analysis is necessary for psychologists to understand experiences of people who face multiple forms of subordination, and to work against “intersectional invisibility” experienced by those who are considered less prototypical members of their social identity groups (e.g., Black men represent the prototype of Blackness (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008)). This work is critical to changing disparities in power. As Kimberlé Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED talk, “…we all know that when there is no name for a problem you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.”

Transcending a “but for” analysis also offers a broader perspective on how discrimination associated with social identities (e.g., sexism, racism) works by allowing us to perceive how it operates through the other identities. For example, in a study of women’s experiences in the military, Buchanan et al. (2008) showed that sexual coercion, considered a severe form of sexual harassment, was most strongly associated with psychological distress for Black officers, and had the weakest association for White officers; enlisted women of both races were between these extremes. They interpreted this finding to reflect White officers’ stronger perception that they would be protected by their rank and racial privilege. By showing that Black women officers were not afforded the same psychological benefit of rank that their White colleagues enjoyed, this example demonstrates the complex ways that identities intersect to create outcomes within a matrix of domination. It also suggests that an analysis that did not attend to diversity among women could have concluded that sexual coercion harassment was not distressing for women officers.

Finally, a “but for” analysis obscures the ways that all individuals’ experiences are shaped by their multiple social locations. In the Say Her Name example, the deaths of Black men who were victims of police violence are no less gendered than those of Black women victims, but this can be difficult to perceive if we take the experience of one segment of a subgroup as normative. Similarly, the relative lack of distress reported by White women officers who experienced sexual coercion is no less racialized than that of their Black women counterparts. This line of vision is particularly important in movements for social justice (or what May [2015] terms antisubordination [p. 229] a term that emphasizes power) because sometimes strategies framed by a “but for” analysis can reinforce subordination on some subgroups (as in Asch’s critique of the reproductive choice movement’s omission of women with disabilities; Cole & Luna, 2010).

The Coalitional Nature of Social Identities

Intersectionality begins from the observation that there is diversity within social identity groups; for example, at the simplest level the category “woman” includes racial diversity, just as the category “African American” includes women, men, and nonbinary people. From this perspective, it could be argued that because all social identity categories are in fact, constructed, they are coalitions of a sort (Cole, 2008). This observation reveals at least three important aspects of the way power shapes social identities. First, identities are often ascribed—by both in and outgroup members—in ways that create exclusions (Anthias, 2002). Within social identity groups, a sense of the distinctiveness of the group is associated with loyalty and increased identification (Brewer, 1991). As a result, group members who also have allegiances to other groups may be treated as outsiders by groups with which they identify (Carastathis, 2013), or they may be rendered invisible and silenced within those groups (Luna, 2016) and this is particularly true for group members with less relative power. Feminist activists have long identified such perceptions as an obstacle to organizing (Reagon, 1983). For example, King (1988) describes how Black women’s concerns were not made central to the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, or to labor organizing, despite their significant contributions to all three struggles.

Second, recognition that identities are socially constructed means that “unities and divisions are constructions rather than representing actual and fixed groupings of people” (Anthias, 2002, p. 277). When social identities are conceptualized as constructed through coalitions, it reveals the work of how identities are made, as well as the understanding of similarity underlying the definition of the group. For example, Yuen (1997) traced the genealogy of the term “people of color,” revealing the term to be a “political formation created in the crossfire of white supremacy and identity politics” (p. 99). “People of color” represents a racial project in which members of different ethnic groups claim a unified identity and solidarity in a common community and cause.

Third, pairing the understanding that social identities are often defined in ways that are exclusionary with the realization that these definitions are subject to human agency, reveals the possibility of crafting more expansive definitions that challenge relations of power rather than reinforcing the status quo. For example, in an interview, political scientist Cathy Cohen suggested that the identity “queer” could be defined not in terms of one’s relationships, but in structural terms as including anyone marginalized by their sexuality. In this reframing, “queer” could transcend a queer/straight binary by including not only people identifying as LGBT, but also women in poverty who have children, or sex workers (Cole & Luna, 2010). In practice, achievement of such a capacious identity is challenging: how do groups construct a shared identity that is broad yet bounded, with internal coherence that is not unraveled by the complex patterns of power and privilege within it?

In a study of the reproductive justice movement, Luna (2016) describes how activists faced exactly this dilemma. The concept of “women of color,” ostensibly women lacking race privilege in comparison with White women, had long been poorly defined and contested based on the very diverse experiences of women subsumed under the umbrella term. For example, Native Americans’ struggles for sovereignty distinguish them from other groups. Luna found women in this movement navigated internal differences of power and privilege to forge a collective identity as women of color by using two strategies. “Same difference” logic was invoked to establish the shared distinction between women of color and White women; “Difference-in-sameness” logic acknowledged internal distinctions that necessitated continual coalitional work within the organization, so “material differences in experience and varying levels of power are brought to the fore” (p. 777). Luna cautioned that methods of organizing can “both challenge and reproduce precisely those structures and relations of inequality that it seeks to transform” (p. 777). In order for the organization to continue its work, it was necessary to deploy both logics in a balanced and flexible way.

I have written elsewhere about how thinking about identities in terms of coalitions can help psychologists achieve a more intersectional understanding of social identities (Cole, 2008). This discussion suggests that psychologists who want to understand social identities need to look at dynamics within groups, both in terms of how psychologists theorize and hypothesize about social identities, but also in terms of the questions they investigate. To understand how groups define the meaning and membership of identities, psychologists need to view identities as historically contingent, changing in response to shifts in political power. McCormick-Huhn et al. (2019) urge psychologists to consider a dynamic model of identity, noting that “Historical context can … contribute to the dynamic nature of intersectional positions by affecting both people’s experiences as members of a particular group and connections between group membership and structural power” (p. 448). Importantly, the meaning and impact of these historical shifts are determined by human agency and changes in identity come about through social relations. Crenshaw (cited in Carastathis, 2013) argues that organizing based on identity is always negotiated and coalitional. Making these decisions and setting this agenda are forms of power, power that is accessible even to groups that are otherwise less powerful.

Intersectionality’s Social Justice Imperative

Intersectionality was originally theorized as an explanatory tool to support efforts advancing social justice. This commitment persists in contemporary accounts. For example, Hancock (2016) describes intersectionality as a two-fold project including “an analytic approach to understanding between-category relationships and a project to render visible and remediable previously invisible, unaddressed material effects of the sociopolitical location of Black women or women of color” (p. 33, emphasis added).

To demonstrate the inseparability of the analytic of intersectionality from its social justice aims, Collins (2019) made a dramatic comparison between intersectionality and eugenics. Like intersectionality, eugenics offered a lens to understand the world in the service of making change. Also like intersectionality, eugenics provided an analysis attuned to the ways that social categories are mutually constructed and reinforcing. For example, nationalism often makes claims about the responsibilities that able-bodied persons (typically men) bear to the state, implicitly degrading the citizenship of those with disabilities. This is a gendered logic as well, as (able-bodied) women have a responsibility to reproduce the nation. This hierarchy of humanity lays the groundwork to differentially value other bodies, including on the basis of race. Like intersectionality, eugenics is committed to social change; however, unlike intersectionality which seeks to further antisubordination, it does so in the service of creating and maintaining hierarchies of power. Collins’ comparison demonstrates both that intersectionality cannot be reduced to an intellectual analysis and that it is existentially tied to a praxis of social justice, that is, intersectionality demands enactment to reduce hierarchies of power and privilege.

This position is not without controversy; Collins notes that some academics believe that imbuing a commitment to social justice into scholarship is antithetical to the ideal of social scientists as impartial observers and renders one’s conclusions as untrustworthy. Writing about psychology in particular, Warner et al. (2016) identify intersectionality’s commitment to social justice as key to its transformative character, noting that in this way it challenges normative paradigms (see also Grzanka, 2020). Some of this resistance may stem from a disconnect between the social justice imperative and some aspects of the discipline’s worldview. Tracing the history of the concept of social justice, Thrift and Sugarman (2019) identify disciplinary obstacles to psychologists’ attempts to engage social justice in their scholarship. They note that the focus on identity in psychology can obscure inequities created by capitalism, and that psychology’s interest in, and emphasis on, the behavior and experience of individuals aligns with neoliberal explanations for injustice.

Conclusion

Psychologists have recently issued calls for the discipline to take intersectionality seriously (Grzanka, 2020; McCormick-Huhn, et al, 2019). These scholars assert that an analysis of power is fundamental to any project deploying an intersectionality framework (see also Else-Quest & Hyde, 2016) and provide examples illustrating how this insight might be integrated in research in the field. In this chapter, I’ve provided four principles that might shape future research aiming to incorporate these insights: attention to contexts of power and privilege; transcending the “but for” analysis; recognition of the coalitional nature of social identities; and the social justice imperative. Intersectionality provides a tool for theorizing social identity in terms of both lived experience and structural constraint (May, 2015), as it is experienced by diverse groups located across a full range of locations of power and privilege. Within an intersectionality framework, identities come into view as produced in part by social structure and inequality rather than properties of individuals (Cole, 2009); nevertheless, these identities carry both ideological and experiential meaning (May, 2015). Finally, the social justice imperative reminds us that discussions of power cannot be purely academic, or else they are as likely to support hierarchy as to challenge it. Any intersectional analysis of power must be ethical. In this, intersectionality poses a challenge to disciplinary norms in the social sciences, and it is hardly surprising that psychologists’ ideological commitments and accepted practices have served to exclude it from the mainstream, including top disciplinary journals (Settles et al., 2020; see also Grzanka & Cole, 2021a). Together these principles hold promise to broaden psychology’s interpretation of intersectionality as merely pertaining to “multiple identities” (Grzanka, 2020), a necessary corrective if research in psychology is to be a tool for reducing power disparities and bringing a more equitable society into existence (Grzanka & Cole, 2021a, 2021b).