{"id":435,"date":"2025-01-30T03:57:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T08:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/accessiblehealthcare\/?post_type=chapter&p=435"},"modified":"2025-12-19T02:14:58","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T07:14:58","slug":"unpacking-intersectionality","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/accessiblehealthcare\/chapter\/unpacking-intersectionality\/","title":{"raw":"Unpacking Intersectionality","rendered":"Unpacking Intersectionality"},"content":{"raw":"Intersectionality, like other frameworks, is also informed by people\u2019s lived experiences. This analytic framework emerges from the frustrations experienced by Black, working class women, who did not feel that the complexity of their material and social life conditions were adequately reflected in the civil rights and other social justice movements of the day (Hill-Collins & Bilge, 2016).\r\n

Intersectionality in Healthcare<\/span><\/h2>\r\nIntersectionality attempts to account for how people\u2019s experiences are shaped by multiple axes of power relationships that afford both privilege and disadvantage. Disability experience within the healthcare system is not only characterized by disability, but also by race, class, gender and other [pb_glossary id=\"612\"]power relations[\/pb_glossary]. The treatment of and subsequent responses by disabled people within health care always involve a complex interplay of intersecting forms of power that inform and hold one another in place and are difficult to consider separately (Hill-Collins & Bilge, 2016; Hancock, 2016; Valentine, 2022).\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1796\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"978\"]\"A Illustration of a visually impaired Black person boarding a bus. Artwork by Sherm for Disabled And Here. Source: Disabled And Here Project (CC BY 4.0).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nTo demonstrate how intersectionality involves the interplay of power, privilege, and disadvantage, we can look to Parin Dossa\u2019s narrative research on the experience of racialized disabled women in Canada (Dossa, 2005; 2009). Dossa introduces a participant\u2019s narrative, Mehrun, a disabled South Asian Muslim woman who grew up in Uganda before moving to Canada as a refugee when she was nineteen. Growing up in Uganda the 1950s and 60s, the intersection of disability, gender, ethnicity, and economic privilege afforded Mehrun both disadvantage and unanticipated opportunity. As a disabled young girl she was not understood by her parents and her wider social circle as having a future as a wife and mother (Dossa 2005, p. 2535). Her family leveraged their economic privilege to ensure she had an education, not typically available to other girls. As a young migrant woman in Toronto in the 1970s, Mehrun was able to access university education, employment opportunities as a social worker, and eligibility for direct funding and independent living. While these are all opportunities associated with the privilege and material resources of class, Mehrun continued to experience both [pb_glossary id=\"674\"]ableism[\/pb_glossary] and newfound racism in housing, education and employment. Intersectionality as a lens allows us to see how social positions come together in different contexts of lived experiences.\r\n\r\nIntersectionality is not additive. It\u2019s not as simple as saying that a greater number of marginalized identities leads to greater oppression. As for Mehrun, there are times when different systems of oppression can come together to create opportunity. In other instances, ableism can fuel forms of oppression like racialized disablement. Desiree Valentine defines racialized disablement as an intersectional lens for understanding and taking account of how racism and ableism interact to produce health inequities (Valentine, 2022, p. 342).\r\n

Medicalized Racism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n
\"Relationship\r\n

From the Community<\/h3>\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\nRacialized disablement affects Canadians in their everyday healthcare encounters.\r\n\r\nIn the following clip, Sydney talks about their experiences navigating the Canadian healthcare system as a Black person with chronic pain.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/youtu.be\/huwPq_l5Cy4[\/embed]\r\n\r\n[h5p id=\"29\"]<\/code>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nSydney\u2019s treatment could be understood as a form of everyday medicalized racism.\r\n\r\nMedicalized racism<\/strong> refers to the historical and contemporary forms of [pb_glossary id=\"880\"]structural violence[\/pb_glossary] directed towards Indigenous, Black and other racialized people through the institution, policy and practice of medicine. Medicalized racism contributes to the extractive use of racialized bodies to generate medical science, the inequitable distribution of social determinants of health including housing, income and employment; lack of access to the healthcare system and discriminatory treatment by healthcare providers.\r\n\r\nFor more on this, listen to the Black Pain podcast<\/a>.\r\n
\"Question\r\n

Reflection Moment<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\nReview the following two CBC news reports for recent Canadian examples of medical racism.\r\n