Intersectionality Flashcards
what is intersectionality?
Crenshaw, 1991
our personhood is constituted of different, intersecting characteristics, such as: race, gender, class and sexuality and the way they interact affects how we view the world and how the world views/treats us.
if people belong to more than one minority characteristic…
they are subjected to multiple discrimination - if you are a black, lesbian woman - you’re fucked
what is the main benefit of intersectionality - according to Nash?
enables us to theorise identity in a more complex way and analyse individual’s experiences of the effects of race+gender in the CJS
identity politics =
a tendency for people of a particular religion, race or social background to form exclusive political alliances (whites/blacks stick together!)
intersectionality tries to combat identity politics by showing…
the variation within the broad categories of ‘women’ and ‘blacks’ (racial, ethnic, religious, class, sexual differences)
main problem with intersectionality is…
the lack of a clearly defined method to examine multiple, overlapping subject positions
Nash criticises Crenshaw for…
ignoring how factors beyond gender and race (nationality, age, sexuality, culture, nationality) can influence lived experiences
intersectionality fails to answer whether…
subjects employ one identity at one time (e.g. being female) or multiple identities (poor, white woman)
Nash criticises Crenshaw for ignoring how…
privilege and power intersect and the ways this affects and informs an individual’s experiences – not every aspect is privileged
The coherence between intersectionality and lived experiences of multiple identities is
very hard to measure
Anticategorical complexity approach is
a methodology that is skeptical of categories nd considers categories such as race and gender too simplistic to capture the complexity of lived experience so deconstructs them by drawing attention to the social processes of categorisation (and how it invokes exclusion/inclusion)
but of course we need categories!
Intracategorical complexity approach
– takes marginalised intersectional identities (e.g. black lesbian women) as a starting point and uses their narratives to elucidate their ‘lived experiences’. - does not reject categories but shows how categorisation results in exclusion and is inadequate to capture the lived experiences of multiply marginalised subjects
Intercategorical complexity approach
adopts existing categories to expose the inequality between different social groups (the categories themselves) and takes the ‘relationships of inequality’ as the centre of analysis (which are imperfect and ever changing)
intersectionality rejects the additive model of identity and instead focuses on…
the interplay between ‘vectors’: black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and differ from those experienced by white women and black men – but by law have to assert either race-based or gender-based discrimination
inersectionality focuses on theorising about those marginalised in society so…
(Zack 2005)
women begin at a disadvantage - which are worsened if she belongs to an ethnic minority, is poor, is gay/transgender etc
