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Someday I will die, and on my grave will be inscribed the sentence THAT’S NOT WHAT ‘INTERSECTIONAL’ MEANS.
Intersectionality, as developed by black feminist thinkers like Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, does not refer to the idea that some people are oppressed in multiple ways. The knowledge of this fact is what is scientifically referred to as “having eyes.”
Instead, intersectionality is about the idea that each positionality is unique. The natural way for people to think about oppression is to think “well, white women experience sexism, and black men experience racism. Therefore black women experience the racism that black men experience plus the sexism that white women experience!” However, that’s not how it works. Black woman is not black man plus white woman. Black woman is its own, unique experience.
(This is traditionally referred to as “oppression is multiplicative not additive,” the idea being that you don’t just add the numbers together, you produce a totally new number! Yes, gender studies people are bad at math.)
Think about it this way: white women’s oppression, historically, involved being put on pedestals and sheltered from work. Black women’s oppression, historically, involved working long hours in traditionally female fields such as domestic or nanny and returned home to take care of their own houses and children. What a white woman saw as liberating– working outside the home instead of caring for your own home– a black woman experienced as oppressive, because her experience of sexism was fundamentally different from the white woman’s experience of sexism.
Intersectionality applies to a lot of oppressions other than race and gender. For instance, a cis neurotypical woman may experience street harassment which she finds degrading and upsetting. A trans woman may have a complicated experience: on one hand, she finds it upsetting, but on the other hand it’s an affirmation of her gender that was so often invalidated. And a developmentally disabled woman may experience desexualization and treatment as an unperson, which means she isn’t harassed on the street. (Of course, I’m only describing experiences that some people have– many developmentally disabled women are street harassed and many trans women have no complicated feelings about street harassment.)
Intersectionality also means that people in relatively privileged groups also have unique experiences. For instance, black and Latino men are disproportionately likely to be victims of the prison-industrial complex– a fact that’s related not only to their race but to their gender, as men are considered to be more violent and dangerous than women. And poor rural whites have been subject to eugenics and discrimination based on the anxiety induced by white people who acted like black people. (For more, I highly recommend the excellent book Not Quite White.)
Intersectionality is about more than just two oppressions affecting each other, too. The experience of a upper-middle-class cis black butch abled lesbian is fundamentally different from the experience of a rich trans white masculine man with schizophrenia. When you carry through intersectional analysis far enough, each of us has a unique experience of marginalization, based not only on our identities but on our experiences, personalities, and luck. (Fortunately, it is possible to notice trends.)
The problem is that privileged identities tend to be invisible. It’s really easy to say “sexism is when you’re harassed on the street! Anti-autistic ableism is when people don’t want to date you!” An intersectional analysis says things like “while autistics of either gender do experience both, autistic men are more likely to have a hard time finding a partner, while autistic women often can find a partner but have a hard time identifying and avoiding partners who are predatory or abusive.” Or “for many women, street harassment is an unpleasant violation of their boundaries that reminds them that men care only about what they look; however, some women don’t experience street harassment because of pervasive desexualization that means no one sees them as a sexual being at all.”
If you’re not doing that sort of analysis, you’re not doing intersectionality. Please stop using that word.
intrigue-posthaste-please said:
Great points, but I’d like to see class brought up as well. Many of your examples of differing experiences vary enormously along class lines, but it feels like class is so frequently glossed over in conversations about intersectionality.
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Kevin Moore said:
Thanks for mentioning this. I feel particularly sensitive to the elision of class issues from intersectionality discussions after coverage and debates about the Democratic Primary treated class as simply a “brocialist” concern.
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Patrick said:
You’re right. I’ve written something very like this in a few comment threads myself.
The underlying issue is about the structure of arguments and how cultural groups form ideological clusters of ideas. Or at least that’s how it seems to me- that’s a space I’m comfortable in so it seems a particularly important one to me.
Intersectionality was, for lack of a better phrase, an insurgent ideological claim. There were some (a lot? I don’t know) African American women who felt that the actual achievements of the anti racist groups were mostly just benefiting men, and the achievements of feminist groups were mostly benefiting whites. And they felt that these groups were refusing to acknowledge that by assuming that if you ameliorate anti black racism in general it must help everyone black equally because they’re all similarly situated with respect to race, and ditto for feminism.
Enter intersectionality- a theory providing justification for the claim that anti racist groups who didn’t actively seek to specifically address the needs of minority women were in fact not addressing that aspect of racism at all, and ditto for feminist groups.
The fundamental purpose and function of intersectionality is to argue that social justice movements aren’t covering all of their based by claiming that there are far more bases out there than you might think, and that they’re too unique for you to just assume that you can cover all of the brown ones at once with the same ideas or advocacy.
The problem is that this idea, if actually and sincerely accepted, is acid to a coherent advocacy movement. Not only does it splinter a groups focus over time to an almost fractal level, but intersectionality, specifically, undergirds a lot of critiques of existing social justice successes. People may not know to use the phrase, but attacks on affirmative action (in fact, most reactions against the social justice movement that make reference to poverty) are frequently just recitations and applications of the intersectionality argument- “you claim to benefit the disadvantaged, but you’re helping rich and upper middle class women and minorities while stepping on poor white people, and justifying it by treating white and black and men and women as homogenous groups when they really aren’t, thereby ignoring an entire relevant social issue and ignoring the way it impacts people’s lives.”
That’s literally the intersectionality claim- the theory, and the original political application.
Which is why it’s so important to so many to keep a watered down version of intersectionality in their cultural groups belief system. Because it’s a significant claim with powerful consequences if taken seriously.
I guess I should disclaim- I’m not actually completely convinced by intersectionality as a political argument. That I pointed out the analogy between intersectionalities debut and the “it’s really about poverty” pitch should not be taken as endorsement of either. I disagree with both for different reasons.
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Sniffnoy said:
(This is traditionally referred to as “oppression is multiplicative not additive,” the idea being that you don’t just add the numbers together, you produce a totally new number! Yes, gender studies people are bad at math.)
…on the one hand I feel like I should introduce people to the word “superadditive”, on the other hand that’s not actually accurate…
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Guy said:
“Oppression is non-Euclidean”?
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GF23 said:
Oppression is not a vector space.
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Sniffnoy said:
…dude, the entire point of my comment was to replace a nonsensical vaguely-good-sounding abuse of mathematical terminology with one that actually made sense. (Assuming appropriate notions of “sum” and “comparison”, obviously.) “Super-additive” isn’t actually correct because, well, it’s not actually correct, but at least it means something. Why would you post this. What would it even mean for it to be Euclidean or not. Why are you doing exactly the thing I was trying to present a better alternative to.
(Doug S. is more on the mark below. I would really just say “is not additive”, though; linearity, to be meaningful, requires a notion of scaling.)
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Doug S. said:
Well, “not linear” means that Oppression(A + B) doesn’t equal Oppression(A) + Oppression(B), which seems to be the idea of the post…
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Sniffnoy said:
Well, that’s what “not additive” means. Talking about linearity requires a notion of scaling as well as addition. Or should I assume you’re implicitly working over Q, or perhaps F_p? 😛
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Doug S. said:
Oppression is not linear!
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DeviantLogic said:
Gender studies people being good at math.
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MugaSofer said:
Doesn’t this cash out as “axes of privilege, as a concept, don’t make useful predictions”?
For example, you note that black men suffer a number of disprivileges that black women don’t. What, then, distinguishes “men are privileged” from “women are privileged” experimentally? What exactly is the common axis we supposedly identify cutting across public life, that it morphs into entirely different forms in different circumstances?
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Henry Gorman said:
I think that the “axes of privilege” concept could easily be fixed by making it probabilistic rather than deterministic, and dealing with group intersections with conditional probabilities. I wish that there were more social justice people who were good at math.
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Robert Liguori said:
You need to split them more finely, I think. Men are privileged on the sports field, but disadvantaged when in the defendant’s chair. Women have a strong expectation to maintain their appearance and social networks, but less so to get a career to sustain their family.
You could punt, and say “Look, people are complicated and essential attributes tell you very little at the individual level, so Team Social Justice will agree to take claims of discrimination and harassment seriously no matter who is making them about whom.”
Very, very few people who talk about intersectionality actually do this.
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MugaSofer said:
It seems to me that, if your description requires specifying a bunch of things about the person AND the exact situation they’re in, it’s less of a model and more of a lookup table.
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genellanbound said:
Are there any claims that this theory/tool provides that are falsifiable?
It seems to provide infinite retreat into ever smaller demographic groups along any axis you can name. I would say it was limited to the number of individuals that are alive or have ever lived, but throw in time and multiple identities and the only limit is your capacity to innovate.
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HorribleHumanBeing said:
If infinite regress happened to the point of “listen to where other people are coming from, try to see their point of view instead of lumping them in into whatever categories you find psychologically convenient. That’s not a bad thing.
More over, it sounds like Ozy’s beef is with the disconnect between what the word was intended to mean – what it could be used to mean – and what it means when used in the real world. When it’s used to say “I listen to a few black people who reinforce my pre-existing biases and call myself an intersectional feminist to avoid having to engage in deeper self-reflection”, that’s frustrating. I’m sure most of us have a word or two where people misusing it makes us roll our eyes.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
The weaponized version of intersectionality, wielded by some of the social-justice crowd, has given the whole concept a bad name; it seems to go something like “You can’t POSSIBLY understand how I’m uniquely oppressed given the particular combination of marginalized demographics I have, but your own combination of demographics show you to be an EVIL SHITLORD, so you need to just shut up and do what I say, which won’t discharge your debt for the evil your subgroup has committed to mine (nothing ever can), but might make me hassle you a little less for a while.”
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Fisher said:
So what’s the theoretical underpinning for the process for determining who gets to speak next at an OWS rally called?
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Daniel Speyer said:
Is this idea *useful*?
The only thing I can think to do with it is be more cautious about generalizing. That’s good, I guess, but it doesn’t even tell me when to worry I’ve overgeneralized.
Can this idea make predictions? Can it build useful things?
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Liam Bright said:
Ah so I was directed to this website by getting hits to my paper (https://www.academia.edu/12618700/Causally_Interpreting_Intersectionality_Theory) from this website. Interesting discussion yinz, and thank you for the kind shout out Deviant Logic. Just a note to say: in same said paper we argue that one can use ideas from intersectionality theory to make predictions, and, given that they are predictions about the effects of interventions, presumably (in some sense) build useful things. So we have made the case for an affirmative answer to both of your questions Daniel Speyer. Hope people enjoy reading!
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aaa said:
“gender studies people are bad at math”
My dream is that a gender studies people that is good at math will rise and will identify some core combinatorial problems of queer theory and we will have YEY NEW MATH TO STUDY THAT IS ALSO QUEER
Disclaimer: I am a mathematician who thinks there are some truly valuable ideas in queer theory but when confronted with texts like Judith Butler his eyes just glaze over.
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Kenny said:
I second the calls for choosing a better name as there do not seem to be any actual intersections of oppression occurring in general.
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