Intersectionality

Question 1

Bernice Johnson Reagon definition

Answer 1

We need to understand how multiple systems of oppression combine to oppress certain women. We have to give up the fantasy of politics as a home, a place of ease, comfort and belonging

Question 2

Adrien Wing introduction

Answer 2

Experiences being multiplicative rather than merely additive

Question 3

Spelman

Answer 3

There is no ‘essence’ to the idea of ‘woman’, arguing against white, middle-class feminism which treats other women as ‘inessential’

Question 4

Combahee River Collective

Answer 4

Used the term ‘interlocking oppressions’; outlines struggle unique to black women, and for understanding the synthesis of oppressions. Notes pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger)

Question 5

General definition of intersectionality

Answer 5

That oppression is not a singular process or a binary political relation, but is better understood as constituted by multiple, converging, or interwoven systems

Question 6

Alarcón

Answer 6

The pursuit of a “politics of unity” solely based on gender forecloses the “pursuit of solidarity” through different political formations and the exploration of alternative theories of the subject of consciousness

Question 7

Edison and Notkin

Answer 7

‘Identity politics cut political energy up into small separate pieces; ally work started looking at fitting those pieces together; and intersectionality is the quilt’

Question 8

Crenshaw introduction

Answer 8

Intersectionality ‘underscores the ‘multidimensionality’ of marginalized subjects’ lived experiences’. Rejects the ‘single-axis framework’ often embraced by both feminist and anti-racist scholars. We need an intersectional framework ‘greater than the sum of racism and sexism’

Question 9

Patricia Hill Collins

Answer 9

1. Black women’s sexualities have been constructed within a historically specific matrix of domination characterised by intersecting oppressions. Anita Hill’s and Clarence Thomas’s sexual narratives - Hill seen as a race traitor and airing dirty laundry.
2. Straightness is one of the only things Black women can hold onto because they have no other privilege. Notes the stereotype of the black male rapist and the female jezebel, or homosexuality as the other side of the hypersexual coin, with Black lesbian women labelled as ‘frigid’.
3. Notes that many feminist discussions (eg. how work is empowering to women) ignores the lives of Black women because they have been working and in the home this whole time

Question 10

Mohanty

Answer 10

A comparative account of Morgan’s theory on a universal feminist anthology or ‘planetary feminism’, and Reagon’s theory of ‘coalition’, supporting the latter (more) by discussing the temporality of struggle characterised by many locations rather than a beginning or an end.

Why? We cannot assume that sameness of experience is what ties a woman to the group ‘women’, because this notion is rooted in the idea of the individual self, which is a European and modern concept. ‘Universal sisterhood’ erases difference and is a ‘reductive Utopian vision’.

Question 11

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Answer 11

There is a difference between ‘home’ and ‘coalition’.
1. Home is a nurturing space where you are safe and recharge yourself. But being a woman is not an automatic basis of unity - it is the meanings attached to gender, race, class, and age at various historical moments that is of strategic significance
2. Cross-cultural commonality of struggles. Survival, rather than shared oppression, is the ground for coalition
3. Argues for a politics of engagement vs a politics of transcendence

Question 12

bell hooks

Answer 12

1. Need for an independent black feminist movement based on a) the marginalisation, exclusion and tokenisation of black women within mainstream feminism, and b) the struggles of black women being qualitatively different.
2. Even though many women experience the same ‘sexist tyranny, there is little evidence that this forges ‘a common bond among all women’
3. Eg. the ‘groundbreaking’ book by Betty Friedan was about ‘housewives bored with leisure’

Question 13

Crenshaw

Answer 13

1. The law only recognises race- or gender-based injuries, so black women’s injuries as black women cannot be wholly addressed
2. ‘If their efforts instead began with addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged and with restructuring and remaking the world where necessary, then others who are singularly disadvantaged would also benefit’ - bottom-up vs top-down approach

Premises for intersectionality:
1. Categories and systems of domination are neither separate nor competing frameworks
2. The effects of categories and systems of domination are multiplicative and cannot be understood independently from one another
3. Categories and systems of domination cannot be ranked in terms of importance or influence, and are not reducible

Question 14

Crenshaw (more recent)

Answer 14

Urgency of Intersectionality (2016) - There is far more recognition of police violence against black women than black men. Argues this is due to a lack of intersectionality and its failure to fit into our existing frameworks

Question 15

Nash critique of Crenshaw

Answer 15

Crenshaw ‘reifies cumulative notions of identity’:
1. Treats race and gender as constants that mark all black women equally instead of how they change over time
2. Does not focus on the multiplicity of burdens as wide as nationality, sexuality, class, and how to incorporate this variability and just focuses on race and class

Question 16

Carastathis

Answer 16

Benefits of intersectionality:
1) simultaneity (multiple co-constituting analytic categories are salient and prevents simplistic unitary categories),
2) complexity (Intercategorical, intracategorical and anticategorical approaches),
3) irreducibility,
4) inclusivity (corrective against the white solipsism, heteronormativity, elitism, and ableism of dominant power and hegemonic feminist theory)

Question 17

Butler (not universalistic)

Answer 17

1. Universalistic claims are based on a common or shared epistemological standpoint. The category of “women” is normative and exclusionary and is invoked with the unmarked dimensions of class and racial privilege intact.
2. The insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed.
3. Can we say that shared womanhood links black women deeply to white women? Does that not assume that their experiences are largely a function of being female, and black distinctly, failing to appreciate the significance of being black and female jointly?

Question 18

Alice Ludvig

Answer 18

The social world is ‘insurmountably complex’ - on what basis can a judgment be made as to which categories are salient? Who defines when, where, which, and why particular differences are given recognition while others are not?

Question 19

McCall

Answer 19

Intersectionality assumes the stability, fixity, and homogeneity of social groups, which can lapse into positivism and add together monistic categories of identity

Question 20

Zack

Answer 20

Intersectionality
1. Fragments the movement by having no solid basis, because each group speaks for itself with no unified feminist social theory
2. Multiplies ‘genders’ beyond necessity by leading to an infinite number of genders
3. Precludes common goals and basic empathy

Reclaims the idea that all women share something in common, namely ‘historical and socially constructed, disjunctive category of female birth designees [F], biological mothers [M], or [primary] heterosexual choices of men [P].

Solution: inclusive feminism and empathy, with FMP a common ground upon which women can speak across difference and recognise their commonality for solidarity

Question 21

Carasthasis (response to Zack)

Answer 21

1. Zack grants too much theoretical power to intersectionality - it is a tool which provides us with a conceptual vocabulary to make difference visible
2. Zack presents a false dichotomy - it is not between absolute segregation (leading to political fragmentation) or coalition work (grounded in stable gender identity). But segregation when used for strategically disenfranchised groups can benefit feminism in the long run. Intersectionality gives us the conceptual vocabulary for successful coalition building

Question 22

Alison Bailey

Answer 22

Responds to Zack:
1. At present intersectional approaches are incomplete, but their basic ability to make plurality and relationality visible is worth engaging.
2. Intersectionality deals with the two large problems with white feminism, which a) foregrounds gender as the most salient analytic category, and b) obscures power relationships among different women

Question 23

Butler short thesis

Answer 23

Neither intersectional coalition nor universal feminism are good solutions. Solution: an open coalition which affirms identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand

Question 24

Butler arguments

Answer 24

Argues 1. for an anti-foundationalist approach to coalition politics,
2. that unity is not necessary for effective political action and no movement should demand an ‘advance purchase on unity’,
3. the premature insistence on the goal of unity causes ever-more bitter fragmentation among the ranks,
4. the very form of a coalition is an emerging and unpredictable assemblage of positions which needs to acknowledge its contradictions and undergoes ‘democratisation’

Question 25

Nash (cons)

Answer 25

Problems of intersectionality:
1) the lack of a defined intersectional methodology;
2) the use of black women as quintessential intersectional subjects (eg. under Crenshaw, and there is no mechanism for articulating or examining the ‘multiple levels of consciousness’);
3) the vague definition of intersectionality; and
4) the empirical validity of intersectionality.

Question 26

Nash (pros)

Answer 26

Acknowledges some benefits:
1) subverts the race/gender binary,
2) provides a vocabulary to respond to critiques of identity politics,
3) centres experiences of subjects whose voices have been ignored

Question 27

Nash (questions)

Answer 27

1. Do black women use their multiple identities to interpret the social world or do they deploy one at a time?
2. What determines which identity is foregrounded in a particular moment, or are both always simultaneously engaged?
3. What is the relationship between the ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins), the various forms of power that are inflicted on all bodies, and the processes and articulations of identity?

Question 28

Tommy Curry

Answer 28

1. Intersectionality has ‘utilised various feminist theories that continue subculture of violence thinking about Black men and boys’.
2. Claims of intersectionality fail to explain race, class and gender based on subcultural values; it replicates the pseudo-science of racist criminology and presents decades-old theories as cutting-edge gender analyses.
3. Even though Black women have been able to create nuanced experiences and epistemological accounts of Black womanhood, the same theory has confined Black male experience to the perpetration of violence and defined Black manhood as lesser - merely the exemplification of white masculinity’s pathological excess

Question 29

Zheng

Answer 29

Yellow fever and racial fetishisation are wrong:
1. Places disproportionate psychological burdens on women of colour,
2. Who have to constantly negotiate their identity
3. Depersonalised - seen as fungible with other women of colour
4. Otherised - seen as sexy becuase she is Asian, or in spite of it.
5. Need to recognize the historical and categorical nature of differential treatment based on racialized phenotypes, and how it reproduces racial meanings

Question 30

Halwani

Answer 30

Mere Preferences Argument, and that there is nothing morally defective with the individuals who harbour racial sexual desires. Even if some are racist, their racism stems from their overall beliefs and not their sexual desires

Question 31

Stacey and Forbes

Answer 31

Men who are fetishised feel:
1. Objectified
2. It hindered the formation of platonic or intimate connection
3. Minimised to a stereotype

Question 32

Isoke

Answer 32

Racialisation = the political and social practice of making race real. Refers to categorising and reproducing human difference through the uneven distribution of life chances

Question 33

O’Shea

Answer 33

Uses a structural justice framework (also used by Iris Marion Young) to analyse the systematic discrimination done to certain racial groups through racial fetishisation. Also argues we can habituate our sexual desires, BUT points out Srinivasan writes ‘no one really wants a mercy fuck’

Question 34

Kwan

Answer 34

Quoted in Nash - who can be intersectional? White straight male is also an intersectional identity