Third World women (organic) intellectuals led the search for a new language to express and a theory to explain their everyday experiences as women of color, queers, poor, and migrants. The complexity of intersecting oppressions, they believed, better explained their condition than race alone. Social formation theory purports to account for society in its totality and its changes over space-time. The theory understands power or agency as the means by which societies are organized and changed, and social structures involve primarily race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation.