Across this first season of Strange Life, we’ve met many of my selves — or rather, many aspects of one:The autistic one with learned patterns in place of reflexes.The Igbo one, shaped by ancestors and colonial ghosts.The ADHD one, chasing sparks and struggling in stillness.The 21st-century woman, performing a 12 000-year-old script.The traumatized one, re-wiring a spiky nervous system.The gifted one, both bright and burnt by her own voltage.
Each episode turned one of these facets toward the light — examined it, questioned it, reframed it. But none of them exist alone. Each interacts with the others, transforms the others.
That, in essence, is intersectionality: not addition, but chemistry.
A concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
To be autistic and Nigerian is not the same as being either alone.To be a gifted woman is not to be a gifted man with longer hair.To heal trauma within one culture may look like betrayal in another.
Intersectionality is how those truths braid together.
It shows us that identity is not a list of labels but a weave of forces — a living chemistry between internal wiring and external expectation. It’s why two people can live through the same event and walk away with entirely different readings of it. It’s why “who is the most oppressed?” is the wrong question, and “what is happening at this intersection?” is the right one.
In this final episode of Season One, I try to map that weave — tracing how autism and ADHD merge into AuDHD; how womanhood and giftedness distort and refract each other; how trauma and heritage entangle across generations. And, ultimately, how intersectionality is not only an academic framework but a way of seeing — one that teaches us to recognize complexity with more precision, and each other with more care.
Maybe that’s the invitation this season leaves you with:To look at yourself not in parts, but in patterns.To see how your intersections make you specifically, singularly, strangely you.
🧭 Further Reading & References
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color (1991) — PDF via Stanford:https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/04/Crenshaw_43_Stan_L_Rev_1241.pdf
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (1981) : https://www.routledge.com/Aint-I-a-Woman-Black-Women-and-Feminism/hooks/p/book/9781138821514

Feminism is for Everybody (2000): https://www.routledge.com/Feminism-Is-for-Everybody-Passionate-Politics/hooks/p/book/9781138821620
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984) : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990) : https://www.routledge.com/Black-Feminist-Thought-Knowledge-Consciousness-and-the-Politics-of-Empowerment/Collins/p/book/9780415964722
Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1990) : https://www.open.ac.uk/cultural-identity-and-diaspora-stuart-hall.pdf
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) : https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Care-Work
Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (2017) : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600122/these-wilds-beyond-our-fences-by-bayo-akomolafe/
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017) : https://www.dukeupress.edu/living-a-feminist-life
Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) : https://www.dukeupress.edu/bodyminds-reimagined
Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed (2021): https://nyupress.org/9781479830376/misogynoir-transformed/
Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018): https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ijeoma-oluo/so-you-want-to-talk-about-race/9781580056779/
Kimberlé Crenshaw, TED Talk – https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality