By Gillian Schutte

Cancel Culture proliferated on campuses across South Africa around 2016 – when the Fees Must Fall campaign was in its second year. It developed out of intersectional feminism premised on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s salient work in the late 1980’s. Hers was a call for an intersectional legal approach, that “recognised multiple and overlapping points of oppression.” In a nutshell a google search describes intersectionality as the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Crenshaw’s work offered the space for “radical and complex analysis of power and limitations.”