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If race and gender are seen as inseparable, then it is also impossible to separate other categories of difference in the development of inclusive and intersectional feminist theories. Sexuality, for example, is not analogous to race and gender in identity formation, but it is not a category that can be bracketed as if incidental to experience. In her extremely influential 1984 essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” anthropologist Gayle Rubin called for studying sexuality as a “vector of oppression” intersecting with but separate from gender. She noted ways that non‐normative sexual practices became sites of marginalization, oppression, and persecution far beyond their actual social impact as they became proxies for other fears and anxieties. In her speech, “Learning from the Sixties,” published in Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde wrote, “As a black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be” (1984: 137). She recalled in the 1980s a student president at Howard University commenting on black lesbians and gay men, “The Black community has nothing to do with such filth – we will have to abandon these people” (460). Throughout her speech, Lorde asserts the multiple dimensions of her identity that separated her from others, from other blacks and women who would not tolerate her difference in sexual orientation, and in consequence, her need to “hold on to all the parts of me that served me, in spite of the pressure to express only one to the exclusion of others” (461).

Lorde’s statements illustrate how some women’s identities are fragmented by others who either erase an intrinsic part of who they are, or who isolate and define them by one part – their sexual orientation. Tessie Liu (1991), for example, admits that the inseparable link between race and gender puts an emphasis on heterosexuality, and Judith Butler suggests that attempts to define a category of women “achieve stability and coherence only within the context of the heterosexual matrix” (1990: 5). Like invisible whiteness, and invisible gender, heterosexuality operates as an assumed norm, whereby lesbians, even in the company of women, are made other. This marginalization of homosexuality is increasingly contested in works such as Deepa Mahta’s film Fire (which was banned in India because of its portrayal of same‐sex relationships), in Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body, where ambiguous pronouns challenge a reader’s apprehension of sexual identities, in Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, and in Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman.

Gloria Anzaldua (1999) wrote about the difficulty of identity formation between cultures – as a woman of mixed racial identity, Anglo, Mexican, and indigenous, she was excluded by dominant white culture on the basis of color, excluded by Mexican culture on the basis of her indigenous and white heritage, and, in both cultures, excluded on the basis of gender and sexuality. Her identity formation occurred in the isolated territory of borderlands: a physical borderland between Mexico and the United States, a psychological borderland between racial and cultural identities, and a sexual borderland between binary sexuality. Within one fragmented identity, she explains, there are competing values and beliefs of multiple cultures – white, indigenous, Mexican, female, lesbian – effectively bringing the hostile relationships of the outside world into her own inner battle between oppressor and oppressed.

In Anzaldua’s work, geographical borders reflect and construct figurative borders, which she defines politically and ideologically as an “unnatural boundary with a destabilizing potential” (1999: 2). Borders, she asserts, “are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them” (25). Consequently, borders are intended to exclude and relegate some to a borderland, “not a comfortable territory to live in,” since such a life requires continuous border crossings to negotiate the spaces that are safe and unsafe. Women whose identities are fragmented by unnatural borders must create for themselves a new territory. The answer to the problem of fragmented identity, for Anzaldua, “lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our language, our thoughts” (102). In providing a way for women who occupy borderlands to reintegrate fragmented identities, Anzaldua also suggests the need for feminist work to find new ways to reintegrate other differences among women into theories of race and gender, which have been the dominant terms in intersectional analysis. Sexuality and other differences cannot remain marginal in considerations of the category women. Just as race dismantles false gender homogenization, when diverse sexualities and border identities enter into these considerations, all assumptions about women and women’s experience are altered.

Perhaps the most marginalized difference in feminist discourse is disability, although this has changed somewhat in the last decade. Whereas all societies, for all time, no doubt, defined “ability” and demarcated levels of acceptance and rejection for conditions on the broad spectrum of “disability,” nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century eugenics theorists sought to categorize and judge variations in the human condition as “science.” Susan Burch and Lindsey Patterson argue that eugenics theory drew on a calculus of what “bodies and minds should do” in all facets of life, including in both the public and private settings. Based on a social scale of moral and physical worthiness, members of society fell into a hierarchy that relegated the poor, members of ethnic and racial minorities, people with perceived sexual deviance whether openly homosexual or considered as such, and those with abnormal mental and physical characteristics, as incapable of full citizenship. Women as the most verifiable bearers of children and their caregivers were an obvious target of blame as the source of such “imperfections.” (2013: 124–5).

The study of gender, race and sexuality in light of ability/disability is particularly apparent in labor history. As the labor market became more mechanized in the twentieth century, standards of perceived ability were used as ways to exclude laborers, and to extend such criteria to whatever employers deemed inconvenient, unproductive, or troublesome. In the commodification of labor power, the market decided worth according to fairly narrow standards of strength and agility, physical attractiveness and prowess, intellectual competence, acceptable manifestations of sexuality and virtue, cleverness and genius, all filtered through a defined racial hierarchy. Success in the workforce, be it intellectual or physical, became the standard of success in society. As such “disabled workers came to be viewed as both worthless and dangerous” with implied gender weakness. Men who deviated from society’s masculine, able‐bodied, ideal and women who “failed” at motherhood, or did not measure up to a defined image of femininity, lost status in the broader society (Boris and Baron, 2013: 23–43).

Assumed values and goals such as independence and productivity create ideal models of women that are problematic for women who are disabled and for women who are their caregivers. In Feminism and Disability, Barbara Hillyer (1993) states, “I wrote this book because of the dissonance between the ideas of the feminist and disability movements” (x). As a mother of a daughter who is both physically and mentally disabled, Hillyer says that her experience as a woman “is not reflected at all in feminist literature, even though mother‐daughter relationships are often discussed there” (9). The feminist emphasis on independence, for example, can threaten a disabled woman’s sense of identity and create problems in the relationships between women who are disabled and women who care for them. The assumed value of independence may cause “resentment of proffered help, whether it is needed or not,” Hillyer points out, and “inhibit the articulation of the caregiver’s own needs” (12).

Even the terms used to talk about the experience of disability (despite efforts to escape hegemonic dualities such as “handicapped” and “normal” or “disabled” and “able”) are problematic, and often the anxiety invoked by these terms means that issues of disability simply are not addressed. Hillyer argues that terms that seek to correct pejorative connotations are too inclusive. “They minimize real problems, and they imply that truth is shameful” (27). The term, differently abled, for example, includes everyone, thereby denying the reality of the body. In providing a sensitive analysis of her relationship with her daughter and the experience of other women who live with disabilities, Hillyer shows how a wide range of assumptions about gender difference and experience apply in complex and often reverse ways. Emotional responsiveness, a value commonly attributed to women, for example, is often denied both to disabled women and to women caregivers who are expected to suppress their grief and anger. Or, for example, feminist discussions of women’s experience within patriarchal institutions, Hillyer notes, do not address the difficulties for some women who must rely on the still predominantly male institutions of medicine and government for the support they need.

Disabilities span a broad spectrum and necessarily encompass different levels of impairment, require widely varied accommodations, and are visible, or sometimes not visible at all, to observers. Women with disabilities are often erased within feminist theories, but the extent of their erasure, just as the judgment, appraisal, and accommodation of particular disabilities, is highly dependent upon context. Undoubtedly that is true about the intersection of gender with race, sexuality, and nationality, and with the scholarship and necessary activism such identities invoke. Disability studies have come more recently to the “intersectional scene.” In the profoundness of its reach as a facet of the human condition that potentially engulfs us all currently, or one day will, the examination of the impact of disability on the construction of gendered identity provides an opportunity to uncover deeper levels of analysis of intersectionality.