on (against) plain language

When Kimberlé Crenshaw first developed "intersectionality", she intended it as a metaphor. She articulates this very clearly in her 1989 paper: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.” Where Racism Street meets Sexism Avenue, vehicles crumpling into each other, a collision over too quickly and chaotically to assign blame: such is the life of Black women in the US.

Various scholars have since riffed on this representation of power and oppression.
What if, given our varying levels of privilege and disadvantage, the roads also wind around mountains and through valleys?¹ What about the constant near-misses that we'll never hear about; the minor scrapes and dents that nevertheless might leave us feeling shaken?² We like being able to rely on metaphor as a communicative device. Power is abstract, invisible; rugged terrain and roundabouts are far more worldly and familiar. As Patricia Hill Collins points out, this is a key dimension of intersectionality's wide-ranging legacy, its appeal: it uses something material, tangible, to make Black women’s experiences of discrimination recognisable to a wider audience.³

It's perhaps rather ironic, then, that intersectionality is accused of being jargon, a stuffy term, unwieldy in the mouth. It is, I am told, a bookish concept only for the intellectual elite — out-of-touch academics who don’t really understand the real world. "It's a useful idea," a fellow public servant tells me. "If only we had a snappier word!"