The intersectional approach has drawn significant scholarly attention and has been used in various fields, including criminology. This viewpoint emphasizes the need to work toward structural changes to advance social justice and equity and the interconnectedness of oppressive institutions. Racial differences exist within the health communities and at the intersection of the criminal justice system and communities. Over the years, it has been shown that police departments and policies have epitomized socioeconomic racism while at the same time desensitizing the consumer. The intersectionality of urban communities and how they are policed, mainly through the justice system, highlights imbalance as it relates to economics, disparity, and race. Based on the body of existing literature, the current article aimed to investigate how intersectionality might explain health care disparities and policy for women at various stages of the judicial process.
Explaining Intersectionality
Modern people are members of different systems that cooperate with one another. In particular, societies continue to deal with emergencies that worsen because of rising racial and gender-based violence, socioeconomic inequality, care crisis, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (Collins & Bilge, 2020). The necessity of addressing these crises can hinder efforts to create inclusive and resilient futures and run the risk of escalating already significant social, economic, and political divisions in cities (Gueta, 2020). Thus, there is a growing need for policymakers and planners to adopt intersectional frameworks that address these disparities holistically while also working to increase capacity for creating transformative sustainable futures.
Using an intersectional analysis to examine the problem of pre-incarceration health can help pinpoint the structural and representational issues that underlie the obstacles women encounter in getting health care within the judicial system. Relying on an intersectionality perspective to study women’s health while incarcerated may help identify the structural obstacles to carceral health services and the role of stigma in inflicting and normalizing harmful practices within prison walls. Simultaneously, this approach addresses invisible subpopulations of women, including incarcerated older women, and their health issues. An intersectionality lens also draws attention to the danger of the unintended application of academic research on the health of women participating in the criminal system. Last but not least, one can better understand the process of the reentry of women into the criminal system by relying on an intersectionality viewpoint. It can be used to examine gender-sensitive reentry services, in particular, that ignore other axes of marginalization, like class and race. This approach can lead to a powerful dynamic that results in incomplete service, denial of access to therapeutic resources, and potential exposure to environments that are harmful to one’s health.
Since intersectionality participates in the power connections it analyzes, it faces a unique definitional conundrum. As a result, it should pay close attention to the circumstances that enable its knowledge claims to make sense. The sociology of knowledge, which traditionally examines the relationships between knowledge and power, offers crucial theoretical terminology for conceiving intersectionality as reflecting and influencing the power relations it inhabits. According to a sociology of knowledge paradigm, knowledge is socially constructed, disseminated, legitimated, and reproduced, including knowledge targeted at improving understanding of intersectionality (Keller, 2019). Within this fundamental precept, researchers have given varying emphasis to the kinds of information judged worthy of study, the ideas of social structure that knowledge inhabits, and the impact of expertise on determining power relations.
Intersectionality and Socioeconomic Racism
Racial formation theory has promise for tackling the definitional conundrum of intersectionality within a larger critical race theory environment. Racial formation theory separates the discourses on race and the power relations in which racial meanings are situated because race is conceptualized as located within the recursive relationship between social structures and cultural representations. Racialized groups, the unique patterns of racial inequality that connect racialized populations, and the social issues that result are all organized by historically created racial formations. For instance, in the United States, color-conscious racism has its roots in a pervasive segregationist logic that permeates all facets of social institutions and cultural representations.
Contrarily, modern color-blind racism is a different kind of forceful racial formation replicating racial hierarchies, frequently without drawing attention to race in the open. Color-conscious and color-blind racial formations do not displace one another, despite being more evident in various historical eras or across international contexts. In particular, South Africa’s racial apartheid and Brazil’s racial democracy are suitable examples of racial hierarchies that still exist. Although various racial formations may predominate in terms of structural forms of power, they often coexist. Interest groups promote varied interpretations of racial inequality for the distinctive configurations of racial projects that make up racial formations. Ideas matter in the context of racial formation theory, not just in the form of hegemonic ideologies created by elites. They additionally exist in the shape of concrete, multi-faceted knowledge projects pushed by interpretive communities. Knowledge is at the core of racial projects because groups want their interpretations of racial disparity to be accepted as valid.
Across different racial formations, various kinds of racial projects emerge and vanish. For instance, African American intellectual production has a long history of criticizing the cultural representations of persons of African origin and the social structural aspects of racism (Bilge, 2020). Nevertheless, despite these attempts, the depth of these knowledge initiatives hardly ever enters the acknowledged canon of recognized fields. Similar to this, the eugenics efforts that contributed to advancing accepted scientific knowledge on race impacted the public policies of Germany, the United States, and other states. Eugenics’ arguments lost favor after World War II, indicating that the opposing view that race is socially constructed and unrelated to biology had gained ground.
However, the focus of research, law, and medicine on race in the postgenomic era indicates the resilience of biological understandings of race within current racial projects of science itself, usually without racially discriminating intent. The name eugenics lost an appeal, but it has been more challenging to eradicate beliefs about biology’s fundamental role in shaping various characteristics of human social behavior (Atewologun et al., 2018). Racial projects alter in response to shifting racial formations, just as racial figures alter in response to racial projects.
The notion of racial formation provides one more advantage for intersectionality. Racial formation theory can explain change by analyzing racial projects in ways that preserve the agency of some human actors and group-based activity. This idea allows for various interpretive communities, in contrast to the sociology of knowledge’s conventional emphasis on individual intellectuals as superior, if not the only, providers of expertise. Understanding racial disparity is still at the heart of racial formation theory, giving marginalized social groups, including African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and indigenous peoples, intellectual and political space. For the group-based knowledge of racial projects that fight racial hierarchy and inequality, such groups find academic and political freedom within the theory of racial formation. The view of racial formation offers advice to social actors on how their individual and collective actions affect the development of racial disparity.
The ability of racial formation theory to connect knowledge projects with historically fabricated power relations is one of its most vital points. Racial inequality includes many forms of inequality that are arranged according to a similar logic, but intersectionality can build on this foundation by expanding beyond this narrow focus. This paradigm can first be used to analyze other social formations, such as capitalism, heterosexism, and patriarchy, and the related knowledge projects that reproduce inequality (Amorim-Maia, 2022). However, intersectionality goes beyond this single-system analysis by adding more nuance to how inequality is conceptualized. While intersectionality studies the social formations of several complex social inequalities, racial formation theory explores racism as a single, mono-categorical structure of power.
However, intersectionality would need to develop a more complex sociological knowledge of how social structures and cultural representations interact to draw on the potential of racial formation theory. Knowledge projects are not spontaneous phenomena; instead, they are based on specific social processes with which real individuals have firsthand experience (Al-Faham et al., 2019). Here, a thorough examination of the new politics of community offers a means of anchoring the more theoretical ideas in intersectionality and the theory of racial formation. The concept of community, which connects knowledge and power, is a crucial foundation for comprehending the interpretive communities that promote intersectionality’s numerous knowledge projects.
Within this broad umbrella, intersectionality can also be usefully conceptualized as a constellation of knowledge projects concerning one another and changes in the interpretive communities that advance them. Intersectionality can be thought of as an overarching knowledge project whose changing contours grow from and respond to social formations of complex social inequalities. A collection of concepts from the larger knowledge project offers brief definitional consensuses. The reason why overarching intersectional frameworks have been so successful is that they are still general and vague. They provide the impression that the constellation of more compact knowledge initiatives can be unquestioningly grouped within intersectionality’s broad definition. There is, however, a need for more agreement regarding the origins, structure, and future directions of intersectionality among the sets of practitioners who assert it through numerous cross-cutting and rival intersectional knowledge projects. In this intellectual and political environment, the definitional conundrum of intersectionality exists.
Projects involving intersectional knowledge often concentrate on three interconnected issues in light of this paradigm. The first focal point is on the field of study of intersectionality as the subject of inquiry. The primary goal is to evaluate the concepts and content that define the field. Intersectionality as an analytical approach is the second area of focus for intersectional knowledge projects. These projects rely on intersectional frameworks to generate new information about the social world. This method uses intersectional frameworks to examine social phenomena such as social institutions, practices, social problems, and the field’s epistemological concerns. It has received the majority of attention within the intersectionality field of research. Intersectionality is emphasized as a critical praxis in the third focal point, particularly its linkages to social justice. With scholarship offering theoretical frameworks that people are encouraged to use in practice, this praxis perspective must distinguish between scholarship and practice. Instead, there is a recursive relationship between scholarship and practice, with practice serving as the basis for intersectional analysis.
Conclusion
In the judicial system, women are subject to socioeconomic racism that manifests itself in poor access to healthcare services. Intersectionality can be considered the rationale behind this issue because the given phenomenon contributes to various kinds of racism, and credible evidence from reputable sources supports this idea. This finding demonstrates that comprehensive and multi-faceted interventions are needed to address the problem and introduce an improvement to various processes that cause socioeconomic racism.
References
Al-Faham, H., Davis, A. M., & Ernst, R. (2019). Intersectionality: From theory to practice. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 15(1), 247-265. resources.equityinitiative.org
Amorim-Maia, A. T., Anguelovski, I., Chu, E., & Connolly, J. (2022). Intersectional climate justice: A conceptual pathway for bridging adaptation planning, transformative action, and social equity. Urban Climate, 41, 101053. Web.
Atewologun, D. (2018). Intersectionality theory and practice. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management. Web.
Bilge, S. (2020). The fungibility of intersectionality: An Afropessimist reading. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(13), 2298–2326. Web.
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality. John Wiley & Sons.
Gueta, K. (2020). Exploring the promise of intersectionality for promoting justice-involved women’s health research and policy. Health & Justice, 8(1). Web.
Keller, R. (2019) New materialism? A view from sociology of knowledge. In U. T. Kissmann & J. van Loon (Eds.), Discussing new materialism: Methodological implications for the study of materialities (pp. 151-169). Springer.