A large body of work has shown that organizations and movements that represent and mobilise marginalized groups devote significantly more attention to issues affecting advantaged members of these groups at the expense of those affecting intersectionally marginalized group (Adam 2017; Ayoub 2019; Cohen 1999; Dwidar 2025; English 2018; Lépinard & Laperrière 2016; Lépinard 2020; Lindsay 2013; Luna 2020; Marchetti 2014, 2019; Murib 2018; Price 2018; Severs, Celis, & Erzeel; Strolovitch 2007; Terriquez 2015; Tormos-Aponte 2017; Townsend-Bell 2011; Tungohan 2016; Verloo 2006; Zepeda-Millán 2017). The last two decades, however, have witnessed the increasing incorporation of intersectionality as a concept and a practice into the discourse of economic and social justice movements, and an increasing array of feminist, racial justice, and LGBT organizations claim to take an explicitly intersectional approach to their work (Chávez 2013; Crowder 2020; Einwohner et al. 2019; Heaney 2019; Fisher et al. 2018; Milkman 2016). The last two decades have also witnessed the creation of an increasing array of newer social movement organizations founded based on explicitly intersectional understandings of marginalization (DeFilippis & Anderson-Nathe 2017), including (but by no means only) the Silvia Rivera Law Project (founded in 2002), the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance (founded in 2007; #BlackLivesMatter; and BYP100. This paper explores what this “intersectional turn” looks like in practice. Combining evidence from in-depth interviews, data from three surveys of organizations, and content analyses of evidence from publicly available sources, it focuses on six broad policy areas (climate justice; immigration; anti-poverty and redistributive policy; health, disability, and reproductive justice; LGBTQ+ rights; and anti-violence and the carceral state) and examines whether, to what extent, and to what effect social and economic justice organizations and movements have, in fact, “intersectionalized” their advocacy, whether and how this “intersectionalization” varies across policy issues and movement sectors, and whether we can identify predictors of barriers to and opportunities for “intersectionally-responsible” advocacy and activism. The newest data also allow us to explore movement’s efforts to put intersectionality into practice and to examine how these efforts have been helped or hurt by the advent of the Trump administration’s targeting of marginalized communities.
