The overall aim of this article is to explore how the intersectional approach is used in health-riskresearch. The concept has been recognized in health-risk research since the early 2000s, but not asmuch as in the broader field of health-inequality studies. However, in the past 5 years, Social Scienceand Medicine has published a series of review articles that argue for the necessity of bringingintersectional perspectives to the field of health-risk studies more generally and quantitative healthriskresearch in particular. Asking what it means for health-risk researchers to practiseintersectionality shows the implications of translating a theoretical approach across fields anddisciplines. When applying intersectional theory in relation to health-risks, the theoretical conceptualizationof health and risk are often very limited and treated as fixed categories – something thatbecomes problematic when taken within an intersectional framework. This does not mean that thiswork is unimportant, but rather that the link between theoretically driven intersectionality andempirical-focused health research is weak. In order to overcome the dividing lines of health-riskresearch and intersectionality, we argue for a new approach that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of genderstudies: doing risk.