This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released in April 2023. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, examples, and critical perspective.

Intersectionality has become an increasingly influential concept in feminism, media studies, and popular culture. We now encounter references to intersectional feminism, intersectional cinema, intersectional journalism, intersectional marketing, and intersectional advertising. Although the term is not yet used consistently in mainstream culture, it has moved far beyond the academic discussions in which it originated.

The concept is particularly useful because it allows us to ask more precise questions about representation. A film, television series, or advertisement may focus on women and still fail to recognize that women experience society differently. Gender never operates alone. It intersects with class, ethnicity, race, religion, sexuality, disability, age, appearance, and other forms of identity.

Intersectionality therefore helps us move from a general category such as “women” toward an analysis of different experiences of womanhood. It also gives us a richer way of evaluating whether media narratives are genuinely inclusive and pluralistic.

From Black Feminism to Intersectionality

The term intersectionality was introduced by the American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”. Crenshaw wrote from within the tradition of Black feminism and criticized the dominant feminism of the period.

Second-wave feminism had made indispensable interventions into domestic violence, sexual harassment, reproductive freedom, unpaid labor, and women’s bodily autonomy. Yet the most visible feminist agendas in the United States were often shaped by urban, educated, middle-class white women. Their experiences could consequently be generalized as though they represented all women.

Crenshaw did not argue that these issues were unimportant. She asked what happened to women whose lives were shaped simultaneously by gender, race, and class. Black women encountered sexism, but they also experienced racism and economic inequality in ways that could not be understood by examining each category separately.

This is the central insight of intersectionality. To understand a woman’s social experience, we must consider the identities and inequalities that intersect in her life. These intersections can create disadvantages, but they can also produce forms of privilege. A middle-class white woman and a poor Black woman are both affected by patriarchy, yet their relationships to education, employment, state institutions, and economic security may be very different.

During the 1990s and 2000s, the scope of intersectional analysis expanded. Alongside gender, race, and class, scholars and activists examined sexuality, religious belief, ethnicity, cultural identity, disability, age, physical appearance, and migration. The purpose was not to create an endless list of identities. It was to understand how a person’s position in society is shaped through their interaction.

Intersectionality is not restricted to women. Masculinity is also differentiated by class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, and appearance. Men do not experience social power in identical ways. The framework therefore contributed to a more plural understanding of both femininities and masculinities.

Intersectional Feminism in Türkiye

Intersectionality is especially useful for understanding the development of feminism in Türkiye. Until the 1990s, the most visible feminist movement was often associated with urban, educated, ethnically Turkish, middle-class, and secular women. This movement made crucial interventions into patriarchal family structures and violence against women, but it could not represent every experience of womanhood in the country.

From the 1990s onward, the feminist field became more visibly diverse. Working-class women and socialist feminists emphasized labor and economic exploitation. Kurdish and Alevi women discussed the interaction between gender, ethnicity, religion, and state power. Muslim women questioned both patriarchal religious authority and secular approaches that treated religious identity as incompatible with emancipation. Lesbian and queer women challenged the heterosexual assumptions of mainstream feminism.

These interventions made feminism more inclusive, dynamic, and plural. They showed that “the Turkish woman” could not be treated as a single social category. Women’s experiences differed according to whether they were secular or religious, Turkish or Kurdish, affluent or poor, heterosexual or queer, able-bodied or disabled, urban or provincial.

The purpose of recognizing these differences is not to divide feminism into isolated identities. It is to create a more accurate basis for solidarity. A movement becomes more inclusive when it does not require every woman to describe oppression in the same terms.

What Makes a Media Narrative Intersectional?

When we apply intersectionality to media, we ask whether a narrative recognizes different identities and the advantages or disadvantages associated with them. Does it portray society through homogeneous and stereotypical characters, or does it examine how gender interacts with class, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and geography?

There is no mathematical test that can determine whether a cultural work is sufficiently intersectional. The concept functions as a critical perspective. It asks whose experience is treated as normal, which differences are explored, and which remain invisible.

The 2023 Netflix film Oh Belinda, a remake of the 1986 Turkish film Aaahh Belinda, offers a useful example. Its premise brings two contrasting forms of womanhood together. A successful actor is transported into the life of the conventional housewife she portrays in a shampoo advertisement. The story therefore creates an opportunity to explore differences of class, secularism, conservatism, work, family, and sexuality.

In my view, however, the film does not develop these intersections sufficiently. Conservative domestic life mainly becomes a nightmare from which the modern, secular protagonist must escape. The narrative contrasts two women but does not fully examine how class and conservative culture shape different experiences of womanhood. Even conservatism itself is treated too uniformly, although it contains secular as well as religious forms.

Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s 2016 film Clair Obscur (Tereddüt) offers a stronger example. It brings together Şehnaz, an educated urban psychiatrist, and Elmas, a young woman from a poor provincial background who has been married to an older man. Both women are affected by patriarchal power, but class, age, education, geography, and sexuality make that power operate differently in their lives. The film does not present one woman as the universal representative of oppression.

Berkun Oya’s Netflix series Ethos (Bir Başkadır, 2020) creates an even broader social field. Its characters encounter one another across divisions of secularism and conservatism, Turkish and Kurdish identity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. The relationship between Meryem, a working-class headscarved cleaner, and Peri, her affluent secular psychiatrist, is particularly revealing. Their encounters are shaped not only by gender but also by economic dependence, professional authority, religious identity, and cultural prejudice.

These examples show that intersectional representation is not achieved simply by placing different people in the same image. What matters is whether the narrative explores the social relations that make their experiences different.

Intersectionality in Advertising

The same distinction applies to advertising. A campaign does not become intersectional merely by declaring that women are strong. Femvertising can challenge traditional gender roles while continuing to imagine women as a uniform group.

An intersectional advertisement makes room for women of different classes, ages, bodies, appearances, religions, ethnicities, sexual identities, and abilities. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign is a well-known attempt to broaden visibility by presenting women from different racial backgrounds, age groups, and body types. Its message challenges the idea that beauty belongs to one narrowly defined kind of woman.

Apple’s 2017 “Inclusion and Diversity” film similarly presented employees from different backgrounds working together without prejudice. The campaign used the company’s workforce to communicate an inclusive institutional identity and to suggest that different experiences can contribute to common forms of creativity and value.

For marketing, intersectionality offers a way to recognize differences within target audiences instead of dividing society only into women and men. It can help brands communicate with people whose identities and experiences were ignored by conventional advertising. This may create more authentic and lasting relationships between brands and consumers.

Yet the critical purpose of intersectionality should not be forgotten. The concept is valuable not only because it helps organizations identify more market segments, but because it questions the inequalities that shape representation. Inclusion is meaningful when different identities are treated as lived social experiences rather than decorative signs.

Intersectionality gives us a rich framework for reading media and popular culture. It encourages us to ask whether a narrative represents different identities, how those identities intersect, and whose experiences remain outside the story. It also reminds us that feminism is a dynamic movement capable of criticizing and transforming itself.

A media text is not intersectional simply because it includes visible difference. It becomes intersectional when it helps us understand how differences are produced, experienced, and connected within society.