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Week Four Lesson One

Intersectionality

A core concept from the field of Gender & Sexuality Studies is that of intersectionality. As discussed in some of this week’s lecture videos, intersectionality refers to perspectives that integrate gender and other systems of inequality. Feminist women of color in the United States, as well as white women who were poor and/or lesbian, were among the first to articulate intersectional perspectives, writing about their experiences as oppressed in society because of their gender, their race, and/or their class. Reflecting back on Sojourner Truth’s statement of 1851 shows us that intersectional thinking is hardly new.

During the Second Wave Women’s Movement, lesbian women, disabled women, Black women, Chicanx women, Asian American women, and women who were poor or working class began integrating their identities and experiences as members of these social categories with feminism. The Combahee River Collective’s Statement, Audre Lorde’s work on multiple oppressions, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s writings on mestiza consciousness that we are reading for this week are but some examples of a rich terrain of intersectional writing from the Second Wave. These writings illuminated how the experiences of many individuals and groups could not be analyzed or understood accurately if only looking at them as grounded in a single social structure (like gender); instead, multiple structures (like gender, race, and class) needed to be considered.

Some of these writers—starting especially with white working class and poor women—also began articulating the idea of a feminist standpoint. Drawing on the work of Karl Marx (remember him? The German social theorist who brought us the social theories that undergird socialism and communism?), who argued that members of the working class see the world from a different perspective than people in power (who he called the bourgeoisie), feminist standpoint theorists began asserting that women see the world and develop knowledge from a different starting point than their oppressors, men. Anzaldúa’s idea of mestiza consciousness also articulates a standpoint theory in which the mestiza has a particular vantage point from which to see gender relations, tensions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and more. By the 1980s, Black women scholars were also articulating the idea of a Black feminist standpoint. Intersectionality was first articulated as a perspective in the early 1990s, when two Black women scholars in two different fields of study began talking about the interconnections between systems of structural oppression as a lens or prism through which to understand the social world and generate new knowledge. These women— UCLA Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and University of Maryland Sociology Professor Patricia Hill Collins—are widely seen as the originators of intersectional feminist analysis. Crenshaw and Collins drew on both their experiences as Black women, and their knowledge (from research and observation) of Black women’s lives to introduce a new vocabulary that recognizes that structures of domination and oppression in society—whether based on gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, dis/ability—are

interlocking and support one another. Crenshaw referred to this as “intersectionality;” Collins initially used the language of a “matrix of domination.” Today, the overwhelming majority of feminist scholarship is intersectional. Research and theorizing about gendered structures, lives, and identities considers how gender intersects with other axes of oppression and identity to shape individual and group experiences. Feminist scholars take as a starting point that, “Expectations for what constitutes femininity and masculinity, along with the options available to different women and men are deeply affected by sexism, poverty, racism, homophobia, cisheterosexism, and other cultural constraints and expectations. To understand people’s identities and opportunities, we need to understand the privilege or oppression that they experience, the historical times and circumstances in which they are currently living, the structural arrangements that surround their lives, and the possibilities for empowerment that they encounter or create” (Disch 2009: 32). Intersectional perspectives recognize that at some moments—whether in the experiences of an individual or of an entire category of people—one particular axis of oppression may be most salient. In much of her activism since 2010, Prof. Crenshaw, for example, has been critical of the #BlackLivesMatter movement for failing to acknowledge or mobilize around Black women who were killed by police officers. Here, Crenshaw notes that although these women share the same racial category as men who have been killed by police officers, their gender renders them invisible and outside of the framework of who people think of when they imagine “victims” of police violence. But in the context of their interactions with police, we can assume that their race was particularly salient. Prof. Crenshaw was raised by parents who were active in the Civil Rights Movements. In this movement, women were sidelined by male leaders, often given diminished roles and credit for their work, and the concerns of Black women were never (and in many ways have yet to be) integrated into the politics of civil rights. Thus, in the context of the internal organization of the Civil Rights Movement, gender is particularly important for understanding the experiences of Black women. When Black women engaged with the Second Wave Feminist Movement, they often found their perspectives as Black women were sidelined. For instance, while white women were significantly focused on increasing the social acceptance of women working outside of the home, many Black women did not see working outside of the home (which they had been doing for generations) as a pathway to emancipation. In this context, then, their race was often very salient. Intersectionality also drives our attention towards how structures of inequality work together. When we look at particular social institutions, we can see intersectional processes at work that help maintain existing structures of power and domination. For example, the system of Black slavery in the United States was a system of racial oppression (white people were allowed, by law, to treat and trade Black people as property), a system of class oppression (white capitalists exploited the unpaid labor of Black slaves for their own profit), and a system of gender oppression (Black women were denied the right to control their own bodies or reproduction, and Black men were

prevented from protecting their families in ways considered normal and appropriate for men; both Black men and women had little or no choice over their family formation or the conditions of their labor). Slavery thus was a system of racial-class-gender oppression—and the racial and gender logics worked to prop up and justify the gender oppression, the gender and class logics worked to prop up the racial oppression, and the racial and gender logics worked to prop up the class oppression. Intersectional perspectives are now employed in understanding the experiences and identities of many different groups, including those of dominant groups, such as whites and men. In fact, scholarship on masculinities and on whiteness routinely uses an intersectional lens. Many of our readings in this course will employ intersectional perspectives, including (by way of some examples) work that examines the experiences of Latinx immigrants negotiating US immigration law, of low-income trans people of color, of Latinx sex workers in a poor country, of Native American women activists, and more. As we keep reading in the class, keep a keen eye out for moments of intersectional analysis. Ask yourself what would be lost in those moments if we only considered one dimension of structural oppression.

1. Identify your gender, race, class , and sexuality (using whatever terms feel comfortable to you). Then make two columns, one in which you list a privilege associated with your identities along each of these axes and one in which you list a penalty. Consult with McIntosh (#9) if needed.

2. When you are done with #1, identify at least one penalty and one privilege your experience that can be explained better by thinking about your race, class, gender, and/or sexuality together than thinking about them in isolation (it’s okay to focus on an intersection of just two, but if you can think about an intersection of three or more, that’s even better!)

3. Develop an intersectional hypothesis about the current COVID crisis.