For my text investigation, I looked at two different articles by Yolanda Wilson, a professor and researcher at Howard University. She was analyzing the idea of using an intersectional framework in the medical field.

    I was introduced to the idea of “intersectionality” in my feminism elective this year, and was intrigued about how it could apply to medicine. Intersectionality is the idea that race, gender, and other social identities converge to create unique forms of oppression. In my feminism course, we learned about Kimberle Crenshaw’s analogy of intersectionality as a crossroad where your identities intersect to create their own individual identity. When we look at a person’s individual identities separately, it is useless because having these several identities create their own unique experience.

    In her article, Wilson describes the current framework for promoting social and cultural awareness as “cultural competence”. This is a process in which physicians become aware of different social and cultural influences that may affect a patient’s health and attitudes towards healthcare, but ignore the structural institutional forces that contribute to this inequality. For example how someone living in a lower SES household, may live in neighborhoods without healthy food options or safe places to exercise. More recently, clinicians have taken an approach referred to as “cultural humility” which emphasizes self critique and attention to power imbalances in the physical patient relationship. Although both approaches are important, Wilson believes that intersectionality allows physicians to be conscious of their patient’s perspective as a result of their intersecting identities and experiences. She writes, “By adding a lens through which to consider the multidimensional axes of a patient’s identity and thereby understand a patient’s background, perspectives, areas of vulnerability, and needs more fully, an intersectional framework serves to supplement cultural competence and humility. It draws attention to structural and institutional forces that lead to the patient’s experience of marginalization on account of these intersecting identities.” This is interesting in a field like medicine where efficiency and an almost “one size fits all” approach to patient care seems to be preferred. Her strategy does not provide this type of “manual”, but more of a lens that accounts for all intersecting identities.

 

Sources:

Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine: The Need for a Conceptual Framework,

Yolanda Wilson, Amina White, Akilah Jefferson & Marion Danis https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a8b20d4f14aa1408b2b4922/t/5c6d76e5c83025a2c6636c13/1550677747156/AJOB+Intersectionality+in+Clinical+Medicine+The+Need+for+a+Conceptual+Framework.pdf

 

Broadening the Conversation About Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine, Yolanda Wilson, Amina White, Akilah Jefferson & Marion Danis https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a8b20d4f14aa1408b2b4922/t/5d39bdff8b5ad000018d1877/1564065280056/Broadening+the+Conversation+About+Intersectionality+in+Clinical+Medicine.pdf