Law Commons^™

Intersectionality And Identity: Revisiting A Wrinkle In Title Vii, Brad Areheart

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

This article revisits intersectionality, a way of postulating legal identity. Simply put, intersectionality acknowledges that one person's identity can never be reduced to solely one characteristic, such as religion or sex. Rather, each person's identity is constructed of the various intersections of ways one might describe oneself.In the legal context, intersectionality has typically arisen in cases of employment discrimination, where those who theoretically could file a claim under more than protected category are forced to choose only one for their claim - for example, parsing one's identity as either race or sex, even though a statute like Title VII provides …