The aim of this collection is to link theory and practice in a way that is largely lacking in mainstream health research and policy. This collection also complements and builds on Intersectionality: Moving Women's Health Research and Policy Forward (Hankivsky and Cormier 2009), a step-by-step guide to implementing an intersectional perspective in health research and policy. Because many of the ideas explored in the chapters concern still relatively under-theorized applications of intersectionality theory to understanding health in the Canadian context, the nature of the methodological innovations discussed by the authors is not always straightforward.
Each chapter provides a unique example of the implementation of theories of intersectionality to answer specific questions about health or lack thereof in the Canadian landscape.
Intersectionality Research across the Life Course Edited by Nazilla Khanlou and Olena Hankivsky
In this part of the book, the authors reinforce the idea that basing an investigation or intervention on low-level factors that contribute to marginalized people's health is not enough. Instead, and in essence, the authors suggest that intersectionality must be embraced and acted upon if social justice is to be achieved in Canada – with health being a key component. The authors argue that dominant models of integration do not apply to all immigrant and second-generation youth when considering the intersections of their life stage, gender, racial status, and immigrant status or the status of their parents.
Drawing on two community-based mixed methods studies (including qualitative and quantitative methods), the authors examine youth cultural identities and psychosocial integration and their relevance for promoting youth mental health in pluralistic societies. The authors suggest that an intersectional approach will aid our understanding of the positions of oppression and privilege held by immigrants and their children, leading to an understanding of the negotiation of their agency across structures. The authors use intersectionality as their conceptual framework and the cross-categorical approach as their methodology to examine HIE.
However, the authors urge policymakers to consider the differential health care needs of immigrant adults, given the gender and age differences found in their analysis, which suggest a more complex understanding of how gender interacts with other factors step. The authors discuss the implications of applying an intersectional framework and intercategorical approach to future research on immigrant health. Her findings lead the author to argue that the degree to which dementia is problematized is related to the social location of the person with dementia.
Social Context, Policy, and Health Edited by Bilkis Vissandjée and Olena Hankivsky
Vissandjée and Hyman conclude by emphasizing the importance of best policies, programs and practices – in the case of diabetes prevention and management among migrants – that should reflect the nuances of difference and heterogeneity of evolving identities. The authors argue for an intersectional analysis to unravel the simultaneous influences of women's immigration status (systemic factor) and socio-cultural determinants that - often too silently - lead to different forms of violence. By providing concrete examples, Oxman-Martinez and Hanley demonstrate that the highly sought-after option for migrant women – reunification – may in fact increase risk factors of exposure to structural as well as systemic violence.
This brings into sharper relief women's structural location in interconnected power relations as well as their ability to negotiate multiple differences. The examples provided highlight the need to examine how different forms of social disadvantage intersect to influence exposure to violence, the response of self and others, and societal and institutional support for women's escape and safety from violence. The authors demonstrate that a single stress-response framework for examining and understanding the factors that influence the development and persistence of mental health problems among women simply cannot address the proximal and distal elements of the complex pathways in women's lives.
In this regard, the authors agree with Oxman-Martinez and Hanley that a cross-sectional analysis allows the discovery of multiple (visible and less visible) systems of oppression and exclusion that lead to social and health inequalities. More specifically, referring to Dossa and Dyck's arguments, Samuels-Dennis, Bailey, and Ford-Gilboe identify women's neighborhoods as one of the most important life contexts that positively and negatively influence women's lived experiences. Oxman-Martinez and Hanley, as well as Vissandjée and Hyman, overlap with these authors with illustrations of the power and privilege associated with these intersections that lead to the development and mismanagement of selected chronic illnesses and the persistence of mental health problems. through their impact on victimization, trauma-induced interpersonal stressors, and women's access to resources.
Disrupting Power and Health Inequities Edited by Jo-Anne Lee and Olena Hankivsky
In Chapter 17, Colleen Varcoe, Bernadette Pauly, and Shari Laliberté explore ethical issues in policymaking; in Chapter 15, Annette Browne, Colleen Varcoe, and Alycia Fridkin address health services and poverty, trauma, violence, and pain; in Chapter 16, Katherine Rossiter and Marina Morrow examine the implications of intersectionality for mental health research, policy, and practice; and in Chapter 18, Jo-Anne Lee reflects on a Canadian national women's organization advocating the adoption of intersectional feminist frameworks (IFFs) in research, while also facing implementation challenges in their practices. Extending this finding, they question how health researchers and the media construct the "problem" in ways that re-enforce biased assumptions and stereotypes about drug addicts, the poor, and women. They challenge how and which categories of analyzes are considered relevant to women's health needs.
Rather than asking questions about intersecting identities, they ask how social problems come together to affect the lives of poor women and question policymakers' paradoxical refusal to respond to complex problems with equally complex policy responses. nuanced. First, the authors identify that an intersectional framework not only challenges the primacy of a single category (such as "women" or gender), but also transcends an additive approach due to its emphasis on the simultaneity and reciprocity of difference. On the applications of interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research in the field of health sciences in Canada, refer to Anderson (2004), Benoit et al.
Gender and health inequalities: A commentary on the final report of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. In the words of Bates, Hankivsky and Springer, the intersectionality perspective brings out the complexity and contingency of social inequalities." In the field of health, scholarship is emerging that demonstrates the importance of intersectionality. And significantly, the need for more Canadian work in the area of intersectionality and health has been emphasized (Zawilski and Levine-Rasky 2005;
In other words, intersectionality as a research paradigm has a longer and more substantive history in the theoretical literature than in some areas of research and policy. In the second part of the chapter, the value and concrete implications of an intersectionality analysis for health research and policy are illustrated using the example of cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Theoretical Considerations
At least four types of interactions are analyzed in the current theoretical literature: the identities of an individual, a group of individuals, or a social group characterized as different (such as a non-white woman, non-white women as a group). , or a specific group of nonwhite women), categories of difference (race, gender), processes of differentiation (racializing gender), and systems of domination (racism, colonialism, sexism, and patriarchy). In addition to the analysis of identities or categories with an intersectionality approach, some feminist theories focus on interactive processes of differentiation and interactive systems of dominance. It is important that the analysis of identities and categories is not erased; rather, studying processes and systems requires examining how identities and/or categories are constituted, resisted, and managed in the first place.
Second, by foregrounding the relationship between processes of differentiation and systems of domination, a framework of intersectionality can be directly applied to critiques of power – how it operates to produce something specific, how it is resisted, and how differences are managed in a discursive way. and structural level. A fourth issue addressed in the theoretical literature concerns the specific model used to describe and explain the relationship between multiple systems of power and multiple forms of identification. On this basis, an intersectionality model does not consider systems of power or forms of identification in isolation, precisely because they exist, operate, and function interdependently.
First, since the matrix itself is structured at different levels, it does not conflate how interactive processes of differentiation and systems of dominance operate at different levels of social life (such as the level of personal biography, cultural context, and institutional). As such, the matrix model describes and explains the relationship between micro and macro—namely, how specific processes of differentiation and systems of dominance interactively function in the context of the broader structure of power. Second, this model shifts the focus from one set of interactive differentiation processes and dominance systems to the relationship between multiple interactive processes and systems, thus addressing the complexity issues discussed above.
Third, the fact that the matrix model is based on the idea that processes of differentiation and systems of power are interdependent illustrates that it is not possible to criticize and thus disrupt one process and system without disrupting them all at the same time. As Fellows and Razack argue, “systems of oppression (capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy) are interdependent in complex ways.
