Evolving Intersectionality Within Public Health: From Analysis to Action

Abstract

Intersectionality scholars typically use the term flattening to describe how intersectionality as it becomes mainstream is being depoliticized and stripped of its attention to power, social justice, and praxis 5,6 Consider, for example, the NAS (formerly the Institute of Medicine), one of the first national research organizations to embrace intersectionality as crosscutting perspective for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health research in 2011 7 The NAS report's glossary defined intersectionality as a theory used to analyze how social and cultural categories intertwine7(p318) and attributed the definition to White Swedish professor's conference presentation In May 2018, the Division of AIDS Research at NIH's National Institute of Mental Health concretized its interest in the topic of intersectional stigma (https://bit ly/31IKzTr), prompting requests for proposals (https://bit ly/ 34uU36D) that applied intersectionality to HIV prevention and LGBT health research Poteat argues that it has been community-based organizations and policy think tanks, not traditional public health agencies or public health surveillance systems, that have provided the most sophisticated intersectional analyses (p 91) about the disproportionate and structural toll of COVID-19 on US racial/ethnic minority communities