Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

The history of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland and San Jose, California, over nearly three decades provides a vivid illustration of social movement intersectionality in action and illuminates the relationships that link social theory to social movements. Serving the interests and aspirations of low-wage immigrant women workers with limited English-language skills, AIWA confronts diffuse and differential forms of interlocking oppression and deploys intersectionality to help activists change multiple states of subordinated voicelessness and devaluation into an empowered sense of self-representation and self-activity. For AIWA, an intersectional optic on social movement struggles creates insurgent identities that are dynamic and dialogic, more fluid and flexible than single-axis approaches. AIWA does not embrace intersectionality simply because its members have been wounded by racism, sexism, imperialism, class exploitation, and language discrimination but because each realm of these experiences has helped the organization to see how power works and how new identities are needed to combat its intersectional reach and scope. AIWA's deployment of intersectionality stems from the fact that the very problems its members face are themselves both intersectional and radical.