Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Prejudice and Discrimination Arise—and Change?
Ask who is treated as the representative member of each category used in research or policy.
Why you’re reading it. Examine how measures of progress can overlook distinctive exclusions.
A question to consider. How could an improvement reported for women overall conceal a worsening outcome for a subgroup, and how would you redesign the comparison?
Why this reading
A broad category can conceal the people who do not fit its assumed representative. This paper develops intersectional invisibility to explain distinctive forms of exclusion that disappear when identities are examined one at a time.
Before you read
Intersectionality examines how social positions combine in shaping experience. A prototype is a perceived representative of a category. Here, invisibility concerns whose experiences are recognized in representations and institutions; it does not mean literally going unnoticed in every encounter.
Read for
- Trace how assumptions about the typical person produce expectations about group members.
- Distinguish illustrative historical and institutional cases from direct tests of the proposed mechanism.
- Examine the conditions under which reduced visibility might spare one kind of targeting while producing another disadvantage.
Consider afterwards
- A workplace reports outcomes separately for women and ethnic minorities. What could those two summaries miss, and what additional comparisons would reveal it?
Editorial context
This is a theoretical proposal supported by selected examples, not a scale for ranking which group is most oppressed. The authors recognize that prototypes change with context and limit their discussion mainly to ethnic, gender, and sexual identities. Illustrations of reduced exposure to a particular harm do not establish less disadvantage overall. Historical legal examples describe the argument's setting, not current legal guidance.