What happens to those living at the margins of US politics and policy – trapped between multiple struggles: gender-based violence, poverty, homelessness, unaffordable healthcare, mass incarceration and immigration? In this book, Margaret Perez Brower offers the concept of 'intersectional advocacy' to reveal how select organizations addressing gender-based violence are closing policy gaps that perpetuate inequalities by gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Intersectional advocacy is a roadmap for rethinking public policy. The book captures how advocacy groups strategically contest, reimagine, and reconfigure policy institutions using comprehensive new strategies that connect issues together. As these groups challenge traditional ways of addressing the most pressing social issues in the US, they uncover deep inequities that are housed within these institutions. Ultimately, organizations practicing intersectional advocacy illuminate how to redraw the boundaries of policies in ways that transform US democracy to be more representative, equitable, and just.

‘Intersectional Advocacy is a rare scholarly jewel forged from the combined power of rigorous, multi-method empirical analyses and careful, theoretically grounded thinking. Brower crafts a narrative that is at once rooted in deep knowledge of policy processes and centered on organizations struggling to change policy and build a more just world. Intersectional Advocacy offers crucial insights for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand and transform the structure, constraints, and possibilities of policymaking in the context of multiple, enduring, interlocking systems of oppression.’

Jamila Michener - Cornell University

‘In this powerful and important book, Perez Brower uses a multimethod approach grounded in experiences of intersectional advocates as well as social scientific analysis of hypotheticals to draw conclusions about the real and potential impact of intersectional advocacy. She shows the way that intersectional advocates highlight linkages between issues where traditional or single-issue policy advocacy failed to make connections. By making these linkages, advocates transform or ‘reconfigure’ the policy function of the state, fundamentally altering power dynamics. The book not only deepens our theoretical understanding of intersectional advocacy, but also offers lessons for those who want to advance change and improve policy responses to gender-based violence. Engagingly written and passionate in its commitments, the book is must-read for all scholars of policymaking, especially those wishing to understand gender-based violence and/or the substantive representation of marginalized groups in the United States.’

S. Laurel Weldon - Simon Fraser University

‘Perez Brower’s book powerfully demonstrates how public policies, even progressive legislation intending to combat violence against women, enact inequalities, and identifies policy boundaries as a new mechanism connecting social policies to unequal outcomes. Policies that are conceptualized and designed for more privileged members of social groups, such as white women, may benefit some women while producing greater injustices in the lives of more marginal group members, such as women of color and immigrant women. Brower shows that the strategic interventions of civic movements - which she calls intersectional advocates - compelled members of Congress to reform the Violence Against Women Act to serve the needs of underprivileged women. Intersectional advocates succeeded by breaking policy boundaries to link violence against women to welfare policies, immigration policies, and tribal law. This superb book sets the agenda for future research on American political development, social policy, and progressive activism.’

Mala Htun - University of New Mexico