To fully understand the innovative potential of intersectional advocacy, one needs to understand the traditional policymaking process that it confronts. In Chapter 2 illustrates how policy boundaries contribute to inequality in the United States. Drawing from a textual analysis of the Congressional hearings on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and newspaper articles covering VAWA, the chapter presents evidence that the policy boundaries in the VAWA harmed intersectionally marginalized groups. Moreover, it shows advocacy groups that did not represent intersectionally-marginalized groups contributed to the setting of these policy boundaries by participating in the policymaking process. Underscoring how advocacy groups that do not represent multiply-marginalized intervene in the policymaking process, this chapter illustrates what is at stake with the traditional policymaking process and the ways that mainstream advocacy groups have participated in it.

Chapter 1 brings the American state into full view by showing the ways in which its policy arm reinforces gender, economic, and racial inequality. The chapter situates this institutional function within a larger historical context of patriarchal systems that reproduce these inequalities in ways that must be understood when it comes to addressing gendered violence. The chapter then introduces the original concept of intersectional advocacy and explains its theoretical and empirical contours: how it is rooted in Black Feminist theory and developed from a practical understanding of how advocacy groups represent intersectionally marginalized constituents. After establishing the theoretical and empirical groundwork for intersectional advocacy, the chapter ends with a discussion of why this practice is important, how it travels across issue contexts, and how it is studied throughout the book.