Nobody knows what intersectionality means. I certainly don’t, and the more I read about it the more confused I become. There are a few things I think I know: it’s something to do with oppression, especially multiple oppressions; if you run in certain feminist circles, especially online, it’s bad to not be it (intersectional); if you run in certain socialist circles, it’s something to make fun of. Every time I feel I’m getting closer to an acceptable definition I find someone using a different one, usually to defend or condemn their particular version of the concept.

It’s not just me, either: the scholar who coined the term, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, said in 2009 that she is ‘amazed at how [intersectionality] gets over- and underused; sometimes I can’t even recognize it in the literature any more’.