History, aspirations, and transformations of intersectionality: Focusing on gender.

541 http://dx.doi. org/10.1037/XXXXXXX-028 APA Handbook of the Psychology of Women: Vol. 1. History, Theory, and Battlegrounds, C. B. Travis and J. W. White (Editors-in-Chief ) Copyright © 2018 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Increasingly, gender researchers have acknowledged that to understand the critical issues affecting women and men in multicultural societies such as the United States, they must use an inclusive theoretical and methodological approach (e.g., Ghavami & Peplau, 2017; Hyde, 2014; Mays, Maas, Ricks, & Cochran, 2012; Shields, 2008). This approach must take into account not only how gender shapes experiences but also how other meaningful social group memberships and contextual statuses, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and life course stages (e.g., Ghavami, Katsiaficas, & Rogers, 2016), combine with gender to create experiences that are more than merely the sum of the statuses (Collins, 1999; Crenshaw, 1995; Mays et al., 2012). In addition and more important, there is an increasing recognition in the social sciences that because the meaning and mechanisms at play in social categories are politically and historically bound, the ways social categories combine at various developmental stages to shape outcomes must be understood within the context of power and privilege (e.g., Browne & Misra, 2003; Del Toro & Yoshikawa, 2016; Else-Quest & Hyde, 2016; Ghavami et al., 2016; Marecek, 2016; Warner, 2016). Scholars and social activists interested in change for those marginalized in society have called for a move beyond a single category or simple additive approach to understanding experiences and consequences of various simultaneous combinations of multiple social statuses in particular contexts using an intersectional framework. Our goals in this chapter are threefold. The first is to present the early history of intersectionality, with a focus on the use of the method of social activism as the foundation of intersectionality development in addressing the marginalization of individuals, particularly African American women, whose multiple minority statuses have often rendered them invisible and unprotected. To that end, we begin with the genealogy of intersectionality, focusing on key figures who significantly shaped the evolution of contemporary intersectionality. A second goal is to highlight the potential transformation that can take place through the integration of micro-level psychological theory and research, as well as the transformation of psychological theory and research by using intersectionality approaches in its methods and analytic approaches. A third goal is to outline future aspirations for intersectionality—particularly as a method, tool, and approach—even returning to its early origins of social activism that can contribute to the advancing of intersectionality. In the sections that follow, we first review the origins of intersectionality by focusing on the social, political, and historical contexts that shaped the social activism for the inclusion and protection of Black women and others in the United States. We then turn our focus to the ways in which intersectionality can be advanced using C h a p t e r 2 8