Reading Lowell’s depictions of madness in poems from The Mills of the Kavanaughs to Day by Day, this chapter follows Lowell’s negotiation of literary conventions to arrive at a notion of diverse mental states that, in life, cannot entirely be controlled. It is argued that he effectively contributes to the reduction of stigmatization by slowly working through conventions of representing madness, such as the gothic, or othering mad persons through race and gender. He arrives at finally owning his mental state as a derangement of his senses, especially his vision, and foregrounds art and humor as coping mechanisms when facing the fragility and suffering of human life.

With disciplinary roots in legal studies and Black feminist scholarship in the United States, intersectionality provides a bird's-eye view of structural inequality and oppression. Yet, as the construct of intersectionality has moved across disciplines, alternate perspectives have come into view and new questions have been asked. Psychological perspectives on intersectionality have centered on questions (and tensions) about how to apply intersectionality in the study of identity – that is, whether intersectionality informs how individuals come to understand themselves and others, and how this may occur. Identity is an obvious link to intersectionality because the categories of difference/inequality that comprise intersectionality are also the identity groups that we study (e.g., racial identity and gender identity). At the same time, identity is (mostly conceived to be) a personal-level construct, which seems to stand in opposition to the structural lens that defines intersectionality. In this chapter, we use empirical data to consider what the study of identity reveals to us about intersectionality as a psychological process. We first define intersectionality and our developmental approach to identity drawing on Erikson’s (1968) psychosocial identity theory. Next, we discuss core challenges that identity researchers in psychology often face when integrating intersectionality: the emphasis on individual-level processes, discrete variables, and linear associations. We then present an analysis of Black and White adolescents’ race × gender identities to conceptualize identity and intersectionality as phenomena that can be measured at the personal, relational, and structural levels. We conclude that this multilevel analytical framework allows us to see intersectionality in identity development.