entrench, challenge, or shift social inequalities and social and environmental relationships. Instead of adopting a narrow conception of gender, in which gender is seen as separate from other dimensions of identity, Nightingale examines embodied performances along axes of social difference, demonstrating how boundaries of bodily purity and pollution, for both women and men, are bent by contesting vertical power dynamics between castes. For instance, her analysis illustrates how lower‐caste members can circumvent exclusionary spaces in domestic arrangements, for instance gaining access to otherwise taboo areas in a home. By doing so, they make space for lateral power shifts that open up new opportunities for engagement with high‐caste members, structural change, and well‐being.

Fewer examples present intersectionality as a lived experience in the form of live stories of individuals that reflect in yet more detail how their dimensions of identity and disadvantage change over time and depending on social and spatial contexts. Valentine (2007) provides excellent insight into a woman’s life experience in the United States in which the concept of ‘woman’ intersects with class, motherhood, sexuality, and disability (deafness), shedding light on interlocking expressions of privilege and oppression, strongly influenced by critical race studies. Such an analysis draws attention away from disadvantaged groups as homogenous entities by highlighting how dimensions of partial privilege, power, and discrimination within one and the same person are ‘done’ and ‘undone’. This is a reflection of shifting subject positions and power dynamics in particular spatial contexts (e.g. at the workplace, the Deaf club, in the family). For instance, the same woman is in a subordinate position as a woman and conjugal wife with her husband at home, with few options to defend herself against domestic violence. Yet, in the Deaf club, she is first and foremost culturally Deaf and empowered among equals. Power, exclusion, and sense of belonging shift with the fore‐ and backgrounding of different facets of identity and discrimination, and so do the adaptive response strategies against various stressors that occur in a person’s daily life. In other words, response strategies are not fixed based on just one identity marker.

A quote by Butler (1990) below illustrates this co‐constitution of identity. By appreciating such critical ways of exploring inequality without falling into the trap of essentializing women, ethnicity, class, etc., we can envision that more sophisticated analyses on the linkage between intersectionality, poverty, and climate change impacts would most likely reveal multiple layers of harm and opportunities with fluid identities. Such analyses would further advance our understanding of poverty dynamics within life cycles and beyond, without the need to compare and measure differences between and across cases. This would require much more dynamic and context‐specific analyses to be incorporated into more nuanced and flexible social protection programs. To date, however, we are a long way away from this goal.

If one ‘‘is’’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered ‘‘person’’ transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘‘gender’’ from the political and cultural intersections in which is it inevitably produced and maintained. (Butler 1990: 3) 24