I suppose that many mature leftists, in their younger years, were influenced by intersectionalist thought, but with a bit more analysis and real-world inspection, realized that society is more complex than such simplistic generalizations.
That’s funny, because as someone who uses the concept of intersectionality on a regular basis at work, I think the absolute purpose is to recognize complexity.
I work for a human services organization (domestic violence and sexual assault) and we can’t effectively serve our clients without a recognition that depending on their identity, they may all have different needs and disadvantages. To be as straightforward as possible, let’s say we have three shelter residents, all women who are exactly the same age:
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a white, straight woman who is middle class
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a Latina undocumented lesbian who is middle class
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a trans woman who lives under the federal poverty line
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Woman #1 is probably dealing with your standard set of issues: she’s been physically threatened, perhaps strangled, maybe she doesn’t have much of a job history because she hasn’t been permitted to work. She needs help with safety planning, housing, maybe some budgeting skills. I’m not implying she’s in an easy situation, but her race or sexual identity most likely don’t factor significantly into her issues.
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Women #2 is dealing with the issues as outlined in #1, only as a result of her undocumented status she’s facing the additional threat of being turned in to the authorities if she leaves her partner. Maybe she does have a job, but her girlfriend is threatening to out her at her conservative place of business. Since she’s a Latina, she’s going to be at a disadvantage for finding work if she loses her job. In addition to the standard career and safety planning and wrap-around services, she’s going to need to talk to a lawyer about obtaining a U-VISA. Because she’s a lesbian in this locale, she may have difficulty finding a supportive social network, as this is the kind of area where ‘‘everyone knows everyone’’ in the LGBT circle. The social pressure to stay with her partner is likely to be very strong for this person.
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Woman #3 has been abused and belittled by her partner for her trans status, there’s a high chance that she’s been forced into sex work, she’s at threat of losing both her job and any future housing due to her trans status, and she’s also going to likely need assistance obtaining her medication. This is a woman at a very high risk of homelessness.
Being aware of the different issues that different types of oppression are likely to cause and acting accordingly when attempting to meet the needs of those people is the purpose of intersectionality. You are going to be asking different questions and exploring different issues in the case of all three women. It’s not really clear from the OP how he would define intersectionality, and some of the posts here make me wonder how well it is really understood. All it really means, at bottom, is that we can’t be defined by any one aspect of our identity, and our issues are going to vary in some likely predictable ways depending on who we are. Furthermore, when one identity intersects with another, it can create special problems that must also be addressed in order to provide the highest quality help to those people.
An example that stands out in the latter - I was once a juror on a case in which a man who struggled with drug addiction was struck by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury. His drug addiction made it impossible to treat the traumatic brain injury in the standard way. He had to go to a special out-of-state facility to receive treatment for both issues concurrently. He had more problems than a standard drug addict and more problems than a standard TBI, and those problems were unique to the intersection of those two characteristics. Intersectionality is recognizing that when two (or more) identities collide, special issues arise.
To the OP: What evidence do you have that “The Left” (whatever that is) is obsessed with the concept?
Excellent points, Spice Weasel.
Let me amend my earlier statement: intersectionality is an excellent *social *tool and a useful way of looking at the world in social science terms. It’s only when it’s carried over into politics that it becomes a problem - but then, politics makes everything stupid.
You’re spending so much time on this you’re getting a migraine, and it’s the other people who are obsessed?
How does the Left feel about sugar on its porridge?
My understanding is that intersectionality helps to mitigate the blindness created by privilege.
For decades, feminism was defined solely by white, upper-middle class and middle-class women. They got to frame the discourse around issues that were important to them.
But there are a lot of different “woman experiences” out there. Rich white women shouldn’t be absolute arbiters, because they can only speak to their experiences, not all the others out there.
For instance, are all sex workers oppressed victims? The traditional feminist would say yes, because OF COURSE no healthy, self-respecting woman would voluntarily choose to be a prostitute. SHE HAS OPTIONS, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE. But an intersectional feminist would be able to appreciate that sex work is not inherently exploitative, or at least not any more exploitative than any other work that people engage in. Rather than tearing down the sex industry, let’s make it safer and empower workers. And about those options? Those “other options” are not necessarily safer or better and can be difficult to attain for everyone. So stop with that privileged noise.
As a leftie who has often been at odds with peers who have always wanted (IMO) to sort people into two groups, one right and one wrong, I embrace intersectionality as the beginning of a paradigm shift away from simple in/out good/bad understanding of people towards a more compassionate, nuanced and complex appreciation of the whole person/society/nature/nurture system.
Here’s a good TED talk on the subject, by the person who coined the term “intersectionality”:
She describes the case of a black woman who was denied employment by a company that allowed white women to work in the office and allowed black men to do physical labor. She brought suit and the court found against her, holding that the company hired women and hired blacks, and so was not discriminating. The point is that being a woman and being black at the same time barred this person from employment here, and that treating only one group membership at a time brought the court to an erroneous conclusion.
Aye; same here.
It’s nice to know that the OP is concerned tho, now that I know that intersectionality is a thing.
Then maybe you guys should stop calling it that.
The feminist movement is a big example of how an appreciation of intersectionality matters.
It’s undeniable that sexism has historically been meted out to women, but race and class have largely shaped its effects. Post-WWII housewives, for instance, whose disillusionment with life became the leading narrative of feminisim as most of us know it, were not representative of all women. Rather, the Feminine Mystique story was born out of the experiences of white, middle-class women. Not poor women who could never afford to not work. And not African-American women, whose socioeconomic background also largely made employment an expectation for them. And then there’s racism.
In a society that regards your race as ugly, dirty, and animalistic, sexism takes on a different flavor when applied to you. While white women were patronizingly regarded as these dainty vessels of purity and child-like vulnerability to reinforce notions of strength and competence in the white male establishment, black women were largely regarded as the opposite of these romanticized properties. They were treated like brutish, undignified things, unworthy of chilvarous protection that white women deserved.
So decades ago, a white woman talking about her right to self-determination might merit a patronizing pat on the head, as if to say “aww, isn’t it cute when they get mad” or “you silly little girl, if you only knew what the real world is really like.”. But a black women saying the same thing? She might have been labeled a trouble maker and threatened with violence. Not just by white men, but black men too. Both women were being harmed no doubt, but the difference in treatment signals differences in how the two are oppressed.
This matters because when feministic activists talk about women’s experiences with sexism as if they all look like white middle-class experiences, they will alienate women whose experience with sexism has been shaped by racism and classism.
These two posts are the best way I’ve ever seen it written. I ran across the term a year or so ago from some ultra-left SJW facebook friends and tried to understand it. Even with wiki and some other links (provided by them, natch) I had no idea what I was reading. Honestly, their links were so awful I couldn’t tell if they were saying ‘you have to understand intersectionality or you’re a terrible person’ or ‘you’re a terrible person because intersectionality is something you do’…yes some of those links were so bad I didn’t even know what part of speech the word was.
I came away from it with the honest belief that some of them were purposely trying to muddy the waters to find more things to be oppressed [for others] about.
Many people mean many different things by “The Left”: the conservative half of the country sometimes uses it to mean the liberal half. It wouldn’t surprise me if the use of “intersectionality” was more prevalent from The Left in the way that *liberals * use the phrase on the other hand, even though I’ve never heard it used in seriousness.
I’ve only seen it used by conservative snowflakes obsessing over some vague “Left”. Even by what I would consider representatives of The Left which is social rights involved people on NPR programs who seem vaguely to the right of Cornel West.
So either the use of the term is so rare that “The Left” is those to the left of those social justice folk who are acceptable to NPR, and thus small and powerless, or “The Left” is anyone who votes for the Democratic Party and mostly don’t use the term “intersectionality”. So not even possibly a problem in either case, even if the term is somehow objectionable.
I mean the only civil issue I purely heard of back then was racism, to me a patriarchy is still something newly learned.
So then I got another question regarding the dynamic
Would people who are bullied in school be qualified enough to enter the oppression olympics? Geeks, nerds, losers, beta males, wussies and dumbasses for example…
Who really is more obsessed with the dynamic???[Conservatives or liberals]
In this case, would a white rapper or a male model still be on the top of the ladder despite the people who dominate both areas?
Thnx, in advance.
So then what about women with disabilities, underage girls[Cuz you know youth rights], lesbians and female animals. Would they be included anytime soon?
I first encountered the term in this thread. If you’d asked me about intersectionality prior to this thread, I’d think it was something I forgot from geometry class.
I’m sure this may be a thing among liberal arts majors at private schools, but it certainly isn’t a thing among the mainstream left of center USA, of which I consider myself.
Do you think this clever?
What makes you think they aren’t included?