Understanding Intersectionality

Intersectionality Introduction

• The concept of intersectionality has emerged through movements and efforts such as media representations, black feminism, and womanism.
• Intersectionality is widely used by scholars to understand diverse intellectual and political projects and is applied at the grass root level.
• Intersectionality serves as a heuristic approach.
• Intersectionality provides an immediacy towards problem-solving and decision-making, helping to understand the complexities of diverse world structures.
• Intersectionality conceptualizes individuals, groups, or social problems affected by multiple discriminations or disadvantages.
• It considers the overlapping of identities and experiences to understand the complexities of prejudices faced by people.
• People are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of operation, such as differences in race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion.
• These identity markers result in independent systems of impairment, leading to varied means of operation.
• As a qualitative analytic framework, intersectionality recognizes that identity markers do not exist independently
• Identity markers inform each other, resulting in a convergence of operation.

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and the Coining of "Intersectionality"

• The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw in a 1989 paper: "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex; A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”.
• Crenshaw, a trained lawyer, realized that the same law marginalizes black women differently in the context of different races.
• During the 1960s and 70s, African-American women activists and theorists realized that their needs were falling through the cracks of anti-racist social movements, feminisms, and unions.
• Social movements upheld a single category of analysis at the expense of others.
• Anti-racist social movements were against racial discrimination only, overlooking the combination of gender and race.
• The feminist movement was against gender-based discrimination but overlooked intersections of race.
• Union movements were against the exploitation of labor.
• Feminist theorists felt that existing social protest movements were unable to represent their requirements adequately.
• During the second wave of feminism, the participation of black women was minimal.
• African-American women were doubly marginalized, and a single focus lens or social inequality left hardly any space for them to address the complexity of social problems they faced.
• This encouraged them toward the development of a theoretical perspective to accommodate their experiences.

Combahee River Collective

• The Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian organization, defined and encouraged black feminism in a 1978 statement.
• Black feminism is seen as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous operations that all women of color face.
• Crenshaw expanded on the feelings of previous thinkers and theoretical statements of organizations like the Collective’s theory.
• The legal system fails to protect black women and black women experience injustices differently from white women.
• Understanding the typical nature of the operation and exploitation of black women requires looking at the intersecting statements of blackness as well as womanhood.
• Intersectionality is necessary to understand a wide range of differences, including individual sexual orientation, age, disability, class etc.
• Even in environmental studies, this approach is being taken up.
• Many people have started to use intersectionality as a heuristic problem solving or analytical tool.

Crenshaw's Argument for Addressing Violence Against African-American Women

• Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to explain the overwhelming underrepresentation of violence against African-American women in activism, politics, and media.
• Communication experts suggest that when facts do not fit with available frames, people have difficulty incorporating new facts into their way of thinking about a problem
• Without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all members of a targeted group, many slip through the cracks of our movements left to suffer in virtual isolation.
• Many social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice.
• The third wave feminists found that they were struggling to look at the best way to theorize the relationship between different dimensions of gender, race, class and sexuality.
• The main differences in feminist approach are tended to be understood broadly in terms of socialist, liberal or radical feminists
• The question of racism forms a point of conflict, and the understanding of the social class remains a contested category in all these different approaches of feminist theory.
• Intersectional approach shifted the focus to encompass several dimensions simultaneously under study.

Anne McClintock and Patricia Collins

• Anne McClintock suggests that to understand colonialism and postcolonialism, we must first recognize that race, gender and class are not distinct or isolated realms of experience.
• Race, gender, and class come into existence in and through contradictory and conflictual relations to each other.
• Patricia Collins and Bilge suggest that intersectionality can be used as a theory, a methodology, and an activist practice.
• This perspective is reassuring for analyzing contemporary cross border projects related with different types of domination such as racism, sexism, capitalism, homophobia or xenophobia.
• Intersectional theorizing enables us to question the growing dogmatism in academia.
• Uncritically defining or celebrating intersectionality as a finished social theory undercuts its critical potential.
• Counter hegemonic knowledge production is not limited to academia only, but it requires a dialogic relationship between activists and scholars.
• Collins and Bilge take an approach with a continuity of applying intersectionality theory in practical ways.

Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry

• As a critical inquiry, intersectionality invokes a broad sense of using intersectional frameworks to study a range of social phenomena.
• It can be the organizational structure of a sports activity, a philosophical approach, or different type of social movements.
• Across local, regional, national or global social context, intersectionality becomes a framework to study.
• It consists of using the experiences of disenfranchised groups to deepen our understanding of human life and behavior to understand the nature of a peculiar operation.
• Feminist scholars in postcolonial studies found critical theoretical insights in the framework of intersectionality by assessing on the influence of continental post-structuralist philosophy on the field.
• Intersectionality enables one to perceive privileges as well as imbalances of power and oppression among the experiences of the marginalized sections of different societies.
• Intersectionality is not simply a method for doing research in an academic environment, but it also becomes a tool for empowering people.
• Scholars and practitioners recognize the knowledge production in their respective fields and think that this production of knowledge cannot be separated from professional practices.
• Intersectionality is trying to interconnect theory and practice in a closer fashion.
• Some scholars find that the concept of intersectionality is not compatible with the idea of Christianity, as it offers a different view in terms of sin and individual salvation.
• As a critical praxis as well as a critical theory rejects the binary conception that scholarship scholars only provide theoretical strands and practice is more related with the translation of these theories into real life settings.
• As critical praxis, using the knowledge which has been gained through practice to guide subsequent actions in our everyday situations.

Core Ideas

• The core ideas of intersectionality were elaborated during academic debates and movements during the 1960s and 70s.
• During this time, women of color engaged themselves with the ideas and practices of civil rights and black power, and also Chicano liberation, Red power and Asian-American movements from within racially and ethnically segregated neighborhoods.
• Within these movements, women were typically subordinated to men despite having a titular equality and therefore, different problems started to emerge.
• Black feminism started to become popular.
• Mexican American feminists articulated a political subjectivity as Chicana and formed an autonomous Chicana feminist movement.
• They realized the importance of testing ideas within political context and conversely they used what they had learnt in social movements to frame analysis of social inequality.
• African-American women understood that in order to challenge the operation they have to face that cannot be solved only by race only, gender only or class only perspective
• Crenshaw’s article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color” argues that intersectional inquiry as well as praxis are both needed to address the social problem of violence against women of color.
• Crenshaw’s experiences as a lawyer and civil right activists made her profoundly sensitive about the shape and effects of violence against women of color, which was very different from what was faced by white women.
• A close reading of this article helps us to understand intersectionality as a legitimate field of academic inquiry as well as a form of praxis, which has been honed within social movement settings.
• Crenshaw focused on women of colour, a group which is devalued from the perspective of academia as well as within broader dominant US society.
• The experiences of women of color are essential and especially significant in understanding their social issues as well as remedying them.
• The term women of color risks on an understanding of solidarity that has to be constructed and not assumed.
• Crenshaw's idea that solidarity has to be constructed and not assumed has also been investigated into by several black feminist scholars before and after her.
• Crenshaw perceives those discourses in the context of violence against women come from a particular standpoint.
• Her innovation lies in building her argument from the ground up from the experiences of women of colour and then showing how multiple systems of power are inseparable in the ways they impact their lives and cannot be met by looking at any single category of analysis.

Crenshaw's Mutual Systems of Power

• Structural intersectionality talks about the ways in which the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender marks their actual experiences of different types of violence and the remedial action which can be taken.
• Political intersectionality is related with how the feminist as well as the anti-racist politics have often helped to marginalize the issue of violence for women of color.### Representational Intersectionality
• Focuses on the cultural construction of women of color.
• Can obscure the specific circumstances of women of color.
• Can lead to intersectional disempowerment.
• Impacts both women and men of color.

Structural Intersectionality

• Kimberle Crenshaw uses the example of immigrant women vulnerable to spousal violence due to fear of deportation.
• Language barriers and cultural pressures exacerbate their difficulties.
• Women of color occupy distinct social, economic, and political positions.
• Their subordination is compounded by institutional expectations that are not intersectional.
• Limits effective interventions.
• Women of color require more funds for shelter and housing compared to white women, but this need isn't adequately addressed.
• Creates burnout among counselors assisting them.

Political Intersectionality

• Highlights inadequate legal support for women of color.
• Gender biases worsen marginalization in rape cases involving women of color.
• The seriousness of a rape case involving a Black woman is often diminished.
• Social stigma is intensified if the perpetrator is a Black man.

Devaluation in Cultural Imagery

• Representational intersectionality involves the subtle devaluation of women of color in cultural imagery.
• Women in general experience routine violence.
• Collective political demands are more impactful than individual pleas.
• Politicization has reshaped understanding of violence against women.
• Issues like domestic violence and marital rape have transitioned from private family matters to systemic domination affecting women as a class.

Identity Politics

• Recognizing the social and systematic nature of issues once seen as isolated and individual characterizes identity politics for people of color.
• Identity-based politics serve as a source of strength, community, understanding, development, and intellectual growth for people of color.
• Intersectionality helps mediate tensions between different identity assertions.
• Categories like gender and race have individual significance.
• An intersectional approach is necessary to understand power dynamics and subordination.
• Isolating categories hinders meaningful identity development or solutions.
• The descriptive content of these categories and their associated narratives often privilege certain experiences while excluding others.
• Narratives of race tend to focus on Black men, while narratives of gender focus on middle-class white women.
• Solutions involve asserting erased aspects of location and multiple dimensions of identity.
• Understanding intersectionality facilitates better acknowledgment of differences and constructive means of expressing them.

Crenshaw's Academic Audience

• Crenshaw targets those working in social justice and those interested in narrative traditions.
• Her work appeals to activists and scholars involved in race, class, and gender studies.
• Post-structuralist narrative aspects resonated with scholars who value narrative traditions and truth-telling.
• Crenshaw challenges academic norms.

Global Projects

• Intersectionality has gained importance in global projects as both an analytical and political tool.
• It is used in environmental justice projects and research on climate change.

UN World Conference Against Racism (2001)

• Played a key role in intersectionality's engagement with human rights issues.
• The conference theme linked racism to poverty, gender discrimination, immigration, and homophobia.
• UN preparatory committees included representatives from various countries.
• These representatives brought multi-issue frameworks reflecting complex lived experiences and political struggles.
• References to intersectionality in international forums have become increasingly common.

Intersectionality and Identity

• Intersectionality has facilitated a complex understanding of individual identities.
• Scholarship in this area explores intersecting and performative themes of individual identities.
• Meaning of identity shifts "from something one has to something one does".
• Individual identities are performed differently across social contexts.
• These social contexts are shaped by intersecting power relations.
• Stuart Hall emphasized that identity is a shifting process of positioning, not fixed attributes.
• Crenshaw's contributions are essential for reconceptualizing individual identity and subjectivity.
• It has become a space of individual empowerment.

Conclusion

• Intersectional frameworks are used to uncover multi-layered structures of power and domination through a praxis approach.
• It also engages conditions shaping interpretive lenses through which knowledge is produced and disseminated.
• Links between various aspects highlighted by intersectionality must be considered to fully understand the dispersal of power and knowledge.