Zero-category

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A normative category that is conceptualized not merely as being normative but as not being a category at all. For example, in a context where it is normative to be white and male, these categories can develop into zero-category by people getting the idea that gender is something that only women have and that skin-color is something that only “people of color” have. (In Swedish: nollkategori)

A lack of intersectionality goes well together with making the normative category invisible. It thus becomes easy to talk about “women” as a concept that actually refers only to white heterosexual women, “people of color” or “muslims” as a concept that actually refers only to heterosexual men of that wider category, and so on.


This is an abstraction of categorism.

Also known as normat. The word zero-category will probably be phased out in favor of the word normat