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Discrimination in discourses 367

citizens or “foreigners”, as adults against children, as young people against sen-
iors, as healthy people against the disabled or those with special needs), whereas
they may become victims of discrimination in another situation and respect.
Even though some forms of discrimination (like racism, nationalism and sex-
ism) are kept alive by rather stable social structures in specific social, political
and historical contexts, and are thus rather permanent in kind, discrimination is
never an absolute, but always a relative matter.
(2) Victims or beneficiaries of discrimination are very often (members of)
minorities or socially marginalized groups, and minoritization as well as margi-
nalization themselves are frequently the result of discrimination. Sometimes, as
in the case of sexism, in which the victims of discrimination are usually women,
discriminated individuals do not belong to a numerical minority, but to a so-
cially widely suppressed group. In certain social contexts, victims of a specific
form of social discrimination can sometimes themselves become discrimi-
nators, and some victims often turn out to be manifold victims of different forms
of discrimination. This latter fact has been neglected in social research for some
time. Since the late 1980s and in the beginning of the 1990s, however, feminist
African American scholars introduced the concepts of “multiple discrimi-
nation” and “intersectional discrimination” into the debate about particular
forms of discrimination of African American women, which both differed from
discrimination against other groups of women (e.g. “white” women) and from
discrimination against African American men (see Fredman and Szyszak 1993:
221; Makkonen 2002: 57, 2003: 14).
“Multiple discrimination” is conceived of as complex discrimination on the
basis of different distinguishing features and for different (e.g. racist, sexist,
ageist, religious fundamentalist) reasons, which operate separately and subse-
quently, i.e. independently, in different social fields and situations at different
times: “A disabled woman may be discriminated against on the basis of her
gender in access to highly skilled work and on the basis of her disability in a
situation in which a public office building is not accessible to persons with
wheelchairs.” (Makkonen 2002: 10).
“Intersectional discrimination”, in contrast, is considered to be a complex
discrimination on the basis of different distinguishing features and for different
(e.g. racist, sexist or religious fundamentalist) reasons, which operate simulta-
neously and concurrently in one and the same social field and situation: “One
example of such discrimination would be unjustified subjection of disabled
women to undergo forced sterilization, of which there is evidence around the
world: this kind of discrimination is not experienced by women generally nor by
disabled men, not at least anywhere near to the same extent as disabled women.”
(Makkonen 2002: 11).
Makkonen also distinguishes a third form of complex discrimination, which
he terms “compound discrimination” (Makkonen 2002: 11). According to him,