The concept of privilege is generally considered to be a
theoretical concept used in a variety of subjects and often linked to
social inequality. Privilege is also linked to social and cultural forms of power. It began as an academic concept, but has since been invoked more widely, outside of academia. This subject is based on the interactions of different forms of privilege within certain situations. It can be understood as the inverse of social inequality,
in that it focuses on how power structures in society aid societally
privileged people, as opposed to how those structures oppress others.
Arguably, the history of privilege as a concept dates back to American sociologist and historianW. E. B. Du Bois's 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. Here, he wrote that although African Americans were observant of white Americans and conscious of racial discrimination, white Americans did not think much about African-Americans, nor about the effects of racial discrimination.
In 1935, Du Bois wrote about what he called the "wages of whiteness"
held by white Americans. He wrote that these included courtesy and
deference, unimpeded admittance to all public functions, lenient
treatment in court, and access to the best schools.
Codification of the concept
Early concepts that would lead to the term White Privilege were developed by the Weather Underground in the 1960s. In 1988, American feminist and anti-racism activist Peggy McIntosh
published "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of
Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies". Here,
McIntosh documented forty-six privileges which she, as a white person,
experienced in the United States. As an example, "I can be sure that if I
need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me", and "I
do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection". McIntosh described white privilege as an "invisible package of unearned assets" which white people
do not want to acknowledge, and which leads to them being confident,
comfortable, and oblivious about racial issues, while non-white people
become unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated.
McIntosh's essay has been credited for stimulating academic interest in
privilege, which has been extensively studied in the decades since.
Overview
Historically,
academic study of social inequality focused mainly on the ways in which
minority groups were discriminated against, and ignored the privileges
accorded to dominant social groups. That changed in the late 1980s, when
researchers began studying the concept of privilege.
Privilege, as understood and described by researchers, is a function of multiple variables of varying importance, such as race, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, neurology, citizenship, religion, physical ability, health, level of education,
and others. Race and gender tend to have the highest impacts given that
one is born with these characteristics and they are immediately
visible. However, religion, sexuality and physical ability are also
highly relevant.
Some such as social class are relatively stable and others, such as
age, wealth, religion and attractiveness, will or may change over time.
Some attributes of privilege are at least partly determined by the
individual, such as level of education, whereas others such as race or
class background are entirely involuntary.
American sociologist Michael S. Kimmel
uses the metaphor of a wind to explain the concept. He explains that
when you walk into the wind you have to struggle for each step that you
take. When you walk with the wind, you do not feel the wind at all but
you still move faster than you would otherwise. The wind is social
privilege and if it flows with you, it simply propels you forward with
little effort of your own.
In the context of the theory, privileged people are considered to
be "the norm", and, as such, gain invisibility and ease in society,
with others being cast as inferior variants.
Privileged people see themselves reflected throughout society both in
mass media and face-to-face in their encounters with teachers, workplace
managers and other authorities, which researchers argue leads to a
sense of entitlement and the assumption that the privileged person will
succeed in life, as well as protecting the privileged person from worry
that they may face discrimination from people in positions of authority.
Awareness of privilege
Some academics, such as Peggy McIntosh, highlight a pattern where
those who benefit from a type of privilege are unwilling to acknowledge
it.
The argument may follow that such a denial constitutes a further
injustice against those who do not benefit from the same form of
privilege. Derald Wing Sue has referred to such denial as a form of "microaggression" or microinvalidation that negates the experiences of people who do not have privilege and minimizes the impediments they face.
McIntosh wrote that most people are reluctant to acknowledge
their privilege, and instead look for ways to justify or minimize the
effects of privilege stating that their privilege was fully earned. They
justify this by acknowledging the acts of individuals of unearned
dominance, but deny that privilege is institutionalized as well as
embedded throughout our society. She wrote that those who believe
privilege is systemic may nonetheless deny having personally benefited
from it, and may oppose efforts to dismantle it. According to researchers,
privileged individuals resist acknowledging their privileges because
doing so would require them to acknowledge that whatever success they
have achieved did not result solely through their own efforts. Instead
it was partly due to a system that has developed to support them. The concept of privilege calls into question the idea that society is a meritocracy, which researchers
have argued is particularly unsettling for Americans for whom belief
that they live in a meritocracy is a deeply held cultural value, and one
that researchers commonly characterize as a myth.
In The Gendered Society, Michael Kimmel wrote that when
people at all levels of privilege do not feel personally powerful,
arguments that they have benefited from unearned advantages seem
unpersuasive.
Examples
Educational racism
Racism
is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits
corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the
superiority of one race over another. This can result in particular
ethnic and cultural groups having privileged access to a multitude of
resources and opportunities, including education and work positions.
Educational racism has been entrenched in American society since
the creation of the United States of America. A system of laws in the
18th and 19th century known as the Black Codes, criminalized the access to education for black people. Until the introduction of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866,
seeking out an education was punishable by the law for them. This thus
served to keep African Americans illiterate and only value them as a
workforce. However, even after these institutional and legal changes,
African Americans were still targeted by educational racism in the form
of school segregation in the United States. In the 20th century the fight against educational racism reached its climax with the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
Educational racism also took other forms throughout history such as the creation of Canadian Indian residential school system
in 1831, which forcefully integrated indigenous children into schools
aimed at erasing their ethnic, linguistic and cultural specificities in
order to assimilate them into a white settler society. Until the last
residential school closed in 1996, Canada had an educational system
which specifically harmed and targeted indigenous children. An estimated
6,000 children died under that system.
Nowadays the opportunity gap pinpoints how educational racism is
present in societies. The term refers to "the ways in which race,
ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English proficiency, community wealth,
familial situations, or other factors contribute to or perpetuate lower
educational aspirations, achievement, and attainment for certain groups
of students."
In other words, it is "the disparity in access to quality schools and
the resources needed for all children to be academically successful."
Concretely this can be seen in the United States by considering how,
according to the Schott Foundation's Opportunity to Learn Index,
"students from historically disadvantaged families have just a 51
percent Opportunity to Learn when compared to White, non-Latino
students."
According to McKinley et al.
Students of color are pushed toward academic failure and continued
social disenfranchisement. Racist policies and beliefs, in part, explain
why children and young adults from racially marginalized groups fail to
achieve academically at the same rate as their White peers.
Heterosexual privilege
Heterosexual privilege can be defined as "the rights and unearned advantages bestowed on heterosexuals in society". There are both institutional and cultural forces encouraging heterosexuality in society. Sexual orientation is a repeated romantic, sexual or emotional attraction to one or multiple genders. There are a variety of categories including heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Heterosexual is considered the normative form of sexual orientation.
Heterosexual privilege is based in the existence of homophobia
in society, particularly at the individual level. Between 2014 and
2018, 849 sexual orientation related hate crimes were committed in Canada. Despite the fact that Canada legalized same-sex marriage
in 2005 and has enshrined the protection of the human rights of all
people of all sexual orientations, there is still societal bias against
those who do not conform to heterosexuality.
Beyond this, institutions such as marriage stop homosexual
partners from accessing each other's health insurance, tax benefits or
adopting a child together. Same sex marriage is legal in only 27 countries, mostly in the northern hemisphere.
This results in an inability for non-heterosexual couples to benefit
from the institutional structures that are based on heterosexuality,
resulting in privilege for those who are heterosexual.
Intersectionality
Privilege
theory argues that each individual is embedded in a matrix of
categories and contexts, and will be in some ways privileged and other
ways disadvantaged, with privileged attributes lessening disadvantage
and membership in a disadvantaged group lessening the benefits of
privilege. This can be further supported by the idea of intersectionality, which was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989.
When applying intersectionality to the concept of social privilege, it
can be understood as the way one form of privilege can be mitigated by
other areas in which a person lacks privilege, for example, a black man
who has male privilege but no white privilege. It is also argued that members of privileged social identity groups often do not recognize their advantages.
Intersections of forms of identity can either enhance privilege or decrease its effects.
Psychological analysis has found that people tend to frame their lives
on different elements of their identity and therefore frame their lives
through the privilege they do or do not have.
However, this analysis also found that this framing was stronger
amongst certain nationalities, suggesting that identity and privilege
may be more central in certain countries.
Often people construct themselves in relation to the majority, so ties
to identity and therefore degrees of privilege can be stronger for more
marginalized groups.
Forms of privilege one might have can actually be decreased by
the presence of other factors. For example, the feminization of a gay
man may reduce his male privilege in addition to already lacking
heterosexual privilege.
When acknowledging privilege, multifaceted situations must be
understood individually. Privilege is a nuanced notion and an
intersectional understanding helps bridge gaps in the original analysis.
Criticism
The
concept of privilege has been criticized for ignoring relative
differences among groups. For example, Lawrence Blum argued that in
American culture there are status differences among Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Koreans, and Cambodians, and among African Americans, black immigrants from the Caribbean, and black immigrants from Africa.
Blum agreed that privilege exists and is systemic yet nonetheless
criticized the label itself, saying that the word "privilege" implies
luxuries rather than rights, and arguing that some benefits of privilege
such as unimpeded access to education and housing
would be better understood as rights; Blum suggested that privilege
theory should distinguish between "spared injustice" and "unjust
enrichment" as some effects of being privileged are the former and
others the latter. Blum also argued that privilege can end up
homogenising both privileged and non-privileged groups when in fact it
needs to take account the role of interacting effects and an
individual's multiple group identities.
"White privilege", Michael Monahan argued, would be more accurately
described as the advantages gained by whites through historical
disenfranchisement of non-whites rather than something that gives whites
privilege above and beyond normal human status.
Psychologist Erin Cooley reported in a study published in 2019
that reading about white privilege decreased social liberals' sympathy
for poor whites and increased their will to punish/blame but did not
increase their sympathy for poor blacks.
Black feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism.
Black feminism philosophy centers on the idea that "Black women are
inherently valuable, that [Black women's] liberation is a necessity not
as an adjunct to somebody else's but because of our need as human
persons for autonomy."
According to Black feminism, race, gender, and class discrimination are all aspects of the same system of hierarchy, which bell hooks
calls the "imperialist white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy." Due
to their inter-dependency, they combine to create something more than
experiencing racism and sexism independently. The experience of being a
Black woman, then, cannot be grasped in terms of being Black or of being
a woman but must be illuminated via intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw
in 1989. Intersectionality indicates that each identity—being Black and
being female—should be considered both independently and for their
interaction effect, in which intersecting identities deepen, reinforce
one another, and potentially lead to aggravated forms of inequality.
A Black feminist lens in the United States was first employed by Black women to make sense of how white supremacy and patriarchy
interacted to inform the particular experiences of enslaved Black
women. Black activists and intellectuals formed organizations such as
the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Black feminism rose to prominence in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement excluded women from leadership positions, and the mainstream feminist movement
largely focused its agenda on issues that predominately impacted
middle-class White women. From the 1970s to 1980s, Black feminists
formed groups that addressed the role of Black women in Black nationalism, gay liberation, and second-wave feminism. Alice Walker, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, and Patricia Hill Collins
have emerged as leading academics on Black feminism, while Black
celebrities have encouraged mainstream discussion of Black feminism.
Early history
19th century
Black
feminism has been around since the time of slavery. If defined as a way
that Black women have sought to understand their position within
systems of oppression, then this is exemplified in Sojourner Truth's famous speech at the 1851 Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth addressed how the issues being discussed at the convention were ones that primarily impacted White women.
The book A Voice from the South (1892), by Anna Julia Cooper has been credited as one of the first pieces of literature that expresses a Black feminist perspective. Cooper's contemporary writer and activist, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,
proposed "some of the most important questions of race, gender, and the
work of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century". According to Harper,
White women needed suffrage for education, but "Black women need the
vote, not as a form of education, but as a form of protection". In the 1890s Ida B. Wells,
a trailblazing journalist and activist, became famous for seeking to
find the truth about the lynching of Black men, a subject that many
White feminists avoided.
1900 to 1960
In the post-slavery period, Black female intellectuals and activists, such as Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances Harper, set in motion the principles that would become the basis for Black feminism.
These women accomplished things that were previously unheard of for
Black women, such as giving public lectures, fighting for suffrage, and
aiding those in need of help following Reconstruction. However, fissures
soon developed between White feminists, even those who had been active
in abolition, and pioneering Black feminists.
Suffrage was one of the early areas of a schism between White and
Black feminists. Though feminism as a movement was at a rise in the
late 1800s and early 1900s, Black women were often left behind and
disregarded by the White feminists of this movement. This, however, did
not stop the Black feminists, who would eventually create a separate
path for themselves fighting for the cause. Out of this, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) founded in 1904, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded in 1909, and the National Association of Wage Earners founded in 1921, were born.
Black writers of the early 1900s who undertook themes included educator and activist Mary Church Terrell and Zora Neale Hurston. In her autobiography A Colored Woman in a White World (1940), Terrell chronicled her experiences with both racism and sexism. Hurston's substantial number of published works include the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) featuring a strong female protagonist in Janie Crawford.
Although the decades between the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
(1920) and the 1960s are not included among the "wave" periods of
feminism, this was a particularly important moment in the development of
Black feminist activism.
During this period, a few radical Black female activists joined the
Communist party or focused on union activism. Although they did not all
identify as feminists, their theorizing included important works that
are the foundation for theories of intersectionality—integrating race, gender, and class. In 1940, for example, Esther V. Cooper (married name Esther Cooper Jackson) wrote a M.A. thesis called "The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism". And in 1949, Claudia Jones wrote "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman".
Other feminist activism and organizing happened around different
cases of racial and sexual violence. For example, Esther Cooper and Rosa Parks organized to help Recy Taylor. In 1944, Taylor was the victim of a gang rape; Parks and Cooper attempted to bring the culprits to justice. Black feminist activists focused on other similar cases, such as the 1949 arrest of and then death sentence issued to Rosa Lee Ingram, a victim of sexual violence. Defenders of Ingram included the famous Black feminist Mary Church Terrell, who was an octogenarian at the time.
Despite often initiating protests, organizing and fundraising
events, communicating to the community, and formulating strategies,
women in positions of leadership are often overlooked by historians
covering the civil rights movement, which began in earnest in the 1950s. Many events, such as the Montgomery bus boycott,
were made successful due to the women who distributed information.
During the Montgomery bus boycott, 35,000 leaflets were mimeographed and
handed out after Rosa Parks’ arrest. Georgia Gilmore,
after being fired from her job as a cook and black-listed from other
jobs in Montgomery due to her contributions to the boycott, organized
the Club From Nowhere, a group that cooked and baked to fund the effort.
Later history
1960s and 1970s
Civil rights movement
In
the second half of the 20th century, Black feminism as a political and
social movement grew out of Black women's feelings of discontent with
both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement of the 1960s
and 1970s. One of the foundational statements of left-wing Black feminism is "An Argument for Black Women's Liberation as a Revolutionary Force," authored by Mary Ann Weathers and published in February 1969 in Cell 16's radical feminist magazine No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation.
Weathers states her belief that "women's liberation should be
considered as a strategy for an eventual tie-up with the entire
revolutionary movement consisting of women, men, and children", but she
posits that "[w]e women must start this thing rolling" because:
All women suffer oppression, even
white women, particularly poor white women, and especially Indian,
Mexican, Puerto Rican, Oriental and Black American women whose
oppression is tripled by any of the above-mentioned. But we do have
females' oppression in common. This means that we can begin to talk to
other women with this common factor and start building links with them
and thereby build and transform the revolutionary force we are now
beginning to amass.
Not only did the civil rights movement primarily focus on the
oppression of Black men, but many Black women faced severe sexism within
civil rights groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Within the movement, men dominated the powerful positions. Black
feminists did not want the movement to be the struggle only for Black
men's rights, they wanted Black women's rights to be incorporated too.
Black feminists also felt they needed to have their own movement
because the complaints of White feminists sometimes differed from their
own and favored White women.
In 1964, at a SNNC retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, the members discussed the role of women and addressed sexism that occurred within the group. A group of women in the SNCC (who were later identified as White allies Mary King and Casey Hayden) openly challenged the way women were treated when they issued the "SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement)".
The paper listed 11 events in which women were treated as subordinate
to men. According to the paper, women in SNCC did not have a chance to
become the face of the organization, the top leaders, because they were
assigned to clerical and housekeeping duties, whereas men were involved
in decision-making.
When Stokely Carmichael was elected chair of the SNCC in 1966, he reoriented the path of the organization towards Black Power and Black nationalism.
While it is often argued that Black women in the SNCC were
significantly subjugated during the Carmichael era, Carmichael appointed
several women to posts as project directors during his tenure as chair.
By the latter half of the 1960s, more women were in charge of SNCC
projects than during the first half.
Despite these improvements, the SNCC's leadership positions were
occupied by men during the entirety of its existence, which ended in
turmoil within a few years of Carmichael's resignation from the body in
1967.
The unofficial symbol of Black feminism in the late 60s, a combination of the raised fist of Black Power, and the astrological symbol for Venus, denoted an intersection of ideals of Black Power and militant feminism. Some ideals were shared, such as a "critique on racial capitalism,
starting with slavery". Despite this, Black feminism had reasons to
become independent of Black nationalism, according to some critics,
because it had achieved only a niche within the generally sexist and
masculinist structure of Black nationalism.
The second-wave feminist movement emerged in the 1960s, led by Betty Friedan.
Some Black women felt alienated by the main planks of the mainstream
branches of the second-wave feminist movement, which largely advocated
for women's rights to work outside the home and the expansion of
reproductive rights. For example, earning the power to work outside the
home was not seen as an accomplishment by Black women since many Black
women had to work both inside and outside the home for generations due
to poverty. Additionally, as Angela Davis
later wrote, while Afro-American women and White women were subjected
to multiple unwilled pregnancies and had to clandestinely abort, Afro-American women were also suffering from compulsory sterilization programs that were not widely included in dialogue about reproductive justice.
Some Black feminists who were active in the early second-wave feminism include civil rights lawyer and author Florynce Kennedy, who co-authored one of the first books on abortion, 1971's Abortion Rap; Cellestine Ware, of New York's Stanton-Anthony Brigade; and Patricia Robinson. These women "tried to show the connections between racism and male dominance" in society.
Fighting against racism and sexism across the White dominated second wave feminist movement and male dominated Black Power and Black Arts Movement, Black feminist groups of artists such as Where We At! Black Women Artists Inc were formed in the early 1970s. The "Where We At" group was formed in 1971 by artists Vivian E. Browne and Faith Ringgold.
During the summer of that year, the group organized the first
exhibition in history of only Black women artists to show the viewing
public that Black artist was not synonymous with Black male artist. In 1972, Where We At! issued a list of demands to the Brooklyn Museum
protesting what it saw as the museum's ignoring of Brooklyn's Black
women artists. The demands brought forth changes, and years later, in
2017, the museum's exhibit "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women
1965-1985" celebrated the work of Black women artists who were part of
the Black Arts and Black Power movements.
During the 20th century, Black feminism evolved quite differently
from mainstream feminism. In the late 1900s it was influenced by new
writers such as Alice Walker whose literary works spawned the term Womanism,
which emphasized the degree of the oppression Black women faced when
compared to White women and, for her, encompassed "the solidarity of
humanity".
Black lesbian feminism
Black
lesbian feminism, as a political identity and movement, arose out of a
compound set of grievances involving race, gender, social class, as well
as sexual orientation.
Black lesbian women were often unwelcome in male-dominated Black
movements, and tended to be marginalized not only in mainstream second
wave feminism (as exemplified by Betty Friedan who held off making
lesbian rights part of her political agenda) but also within the lesbian
feminist movement itself. Here the problem was perhaps one more of
class than of race. Among lesbian feminism's largely White, middle class
leadership, the butch/femme
sexual style, fairly common among Black and working class lesbian
pairings, was often deprecated as a degrading imitation of male dominate
heterosexuality.
During the 1970s lesbian feminists created their own sector of
feminism in response to the unwillingness of mainstream second wave
feminism to embrace their cause. They developed a militant agenda,
broadly challenging homophobia and demanding a respected place within
feminism. Some advocated and experimented with as complete a social
separation from men as possible. These separatist notions were
off-putting to Black lesbian feminists involved in Black Power movements and tended to deepen their feelings of alienation from a largely White-led movement. As Anita Cornwell stated, "When the shooting starts any Black is fair game. the bullets don't give a damn whether I sleep with a woman or a man".
In 1970, a defining moment for Black lesbian feminists occurred at the Black Panther's
Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. Several Black lesbian feminists confronted a group of
White lesbian feminists about what they saw as a racially divisive
agenda. Following this event, several groups began to include and
organize around Black lesbian politics. For example, in 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization was founded and included a lesbian agenda. In 1975, the Combahee River Collective was founded out of experiences and feelings of sexism in the Black Power movements and racism in the lesbian feminist movement.
The primary focus of this collective was to fight what they saw as
interlocking systems of oppression and raise awareness of these systems.
In the early 1990s, AWARE (African Woman's Action for Revolutionary
Exchange) was formed in New York by Reena Walker and Laura Peoples after
a plenary session on Black women's issues held at the Malcolm X
Conference at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) entitled Black Women and Black Liberation: Fighting Oppression and Building Unity. In 1991, the Malcolm X
Conference was held again at BMCC, and the theme that year was "Sisters
Remember Malcolm X: A Legacy to be Transformed". It featured plenary
sessions, a workshop on "Sexual Harassment: Race, Gender and Power", and
was held in a much larger theater that year. Black women were a central
focus and not an aside as they were prior. Speakers included Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Verniece Miller, Reena Walker, Carol Bullard (Asha Bandele), and Vivian Morrison.
At the same time, Reena Walker, along with the members of AWARE, also
worked in coalition with AWIDOO (American Women in Defense of
Ourselves), formed by Barbara Ransby, to sign a full-page ad in The New York Times to stand in support of Anita Hill.
In 1995, Reena Walker went on to put out the call to various women and organized the group African Americans Against Violence that effectively stopped a parade that a group of reverends led by Al Sharpton were attempting to hold in Harlem for Mike Tyson.
The group, including Eve and Kathe Sandler, Nsia Bandele, and Indigo
Washington, worked successfully to stop the parade from happening,
bringing attention to the struggle of Black women against sexism and
domestic violence.
A supporter of Mike Tyson, social worker Bill Jones, exclaimed "The man
has paid his debt" (in regards to Tyson's rape conviction), and joined a
large group of other Tyson supporters in heckling the African Americans
Against Violence group, accusing them of "catering to white radical
feminists".
A particularly imminent medium of oppression for Black women in the 1980s and '90s was hip-hop music. The New York hip-hop scene was mainly dominated my men and most producers were focused on rap superstars such as Notorious B.I.G. and Sean "Diddy" Combs.
A number of female emcees can be credited for having expanded Black
womanhood in music during this time; notable artists in the '80s such as
MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and Salt-N-Pepa carved out space for later black female artists.
Throughout the '80s and '90s, black female rappers were classified into
four categories, often seamlessly traveling between or blending a
number of labels together. The categories included the wise "Queen
Mother," an intelligent, Afro-centric, and activist-driven image, the
beautiful and outspoken "Fly Girl," characterized by fashionable clothes
and a self-sufficient attitude, the rebellious "Sista with Attitude,"
an intensely assertive image that threatened patriarchal stereotypes,
and the revolutionary "Lesbian," which openly defied heteronormative
ideals.
While the first three groups emerged throughout the '80s, the "Lesbian"
category was not recognized until the '90s, popularized by the release
of Queen Pen's
track, "Girlfriend;" until then, gay and lesbian hip-hop artists were
alleged. Black female emcees used these categories, and various
combinations of their respective images, to address issues that affected
Black women and girls and push the boundaries of a historically
misogynistic and homophobic industry.
In the 1990s, Lil' Kim who was signed to Biggie Smalls' Junior M.A.F.I.A. Imprint, expressed her message.
She achieved an image of fierce independence and comfort with her body.
She defied the presumption in hip-hop that women are there to humble
the presence of men. Lil' Kim's outspokenness and unprecedented lyrics
were rejected by many people who believed in the traditional sound of
hip-hop. Lil' Kim stood behind her words and never apologized for who
she is. Faith Evans
is another female emcee who broke barriers in the hip-hop world. At
just 21 years old, she was the first female artist signed to Bad Boy
Records. Faith Evans spent more than 20 years in the music business
fighting gender discrimination and harassment in an industry where men
were the dominant content creators and producers.
Mary J. Blige
was another artist who became an advocate of women empowerment in
hip-hop. She was a legendary singer who influenced the Bad Boy Records
label, although she was never signed by them. Together, these women
shared a sense of freedom in the music business that allowed them to
bring women together across the world. There was a new perspective in
the spot light that swung the pendulum in a different direction and gave
women in hip-hop a voice.
Hip-hop feminism, first coined by Joan Morgan in 1999, is considered to be a branch of Black feminism that author Gwendolyn D. Pough
described hip-hop feminists as people who are "immersed in hip-hop
culture" and actively advocate against gender discrimination within that
culture. She asserts that hip-hop feminists share the same predecessors
as black feminists and womanists, inherently connecting the missions
and goals of the two communities and grounding them both in the
examination of racial, class, and gender-based discrimination.
Writers who were figureheads for Black feminism such as Joan
Morgan, Denise Cooper, and others from the Third Wave of Black feminism
blended their passions for hip-hop culture and Black feminism or
womanism, ultimately leading to the inception of hip-hop feminism.
Some argue hip-hop feminism does not simply overlap with Black feminism but is an extension or expansion of Black feminism.
Dr. Whitney A. Peoples argues that examples of Black women being
sexually objectified in hip-hop are hyper prominent due to deep-seated
racist ideologies and stereotypes that deem Black women as sexually and
morally deviant.
Hip-hop feminism explores hip-hop as a vehicle for addressing the
complexities of misogyny in hip-hop and any discrepancies in mainstream
feminism. More than speaking out against misogyny in hip-hop, however, a
key characteristic of hip-hop feminism has been said to be its mission
to uplift black women and girls who partake in hip-hop culture in their
everyday lives.
Black women grapple with some of the complexities and influences of
hip-hop culture within discourse and writing surrounding black feminists
and hip-hop feminists.
21st century
Social media
The new century has brought about a shift in thinking away from "traditional" feminism. Third-wave feminism
claimed the need for more intersectionality in feminist activism and
the inclusion of Black and other ethnic minority women. Moreover, the
advancement of technology fostered the development of a new digital
feminism. This online activism involved the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and other forms of social media to discuss gender equality and social justice. According to NOW Toronto, the internet created a "call-out" culture, in which sexism or misogyny can be called out and challenged immediately with relative ease.
As an academic response to this shift, many scholars incorporated queer of color critique into their discussions of feminism and queer theory. Queer of color critiques seeks an intersectional approach to misidentifying with the larger themes of "radicalized heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy" in order to create a more representative and revolutionary critique of social categories. An example of queer of color critique can be seen in the Combahee River Collective's statement, which addresses the intersectionality of oppressions faced by Black lesbians.
The 2010s saw a revitalization of Black feminism. As more
influential figures began to identify themselves as feminist, social
media saw a rise in young Black feminists willing to bring racist and
sexist situations to light.
One of the defining moment of the re-emergence of black feminism - and
feminism in general - was Beyoncé's 2013 self-identification as a
feminist, and her decision to devote her statues to promote feminism.
Social media served as a medium for Black feminists to express praise or discontent with organizations'
representations of Black women. Lizzo, for example, has been using
social media, especially Instagram, to promote diverse black bodies. She
often speaks against the racism and pushback she gets as a powerful,
fat, black woman musician She has stated: "I make Black music, period...
I’m doing this sh*t for the big Black women in the future who just want
to live their lives without being scrutinized or put into boxes".
Black Girl Magic (#BlackGirlMagic) is a movement that was popularized by CaShawn Thompson in 2013.
The concept was born as a way to "celebrate the beauty, power and
resilience of Black women". Thompson began to use the hashtag
#BlackGirlsAreMagic in 2013 to speak about the positive achievements of
Black women. It also emphasises the idea that black girls thrive and
prevail while enduring blockages and structural walls daily.
Although it was popularized on social media, the movement has inspired
many organizations to host events using the title, along with support
from celebrities and politicians globally.
Alleged instances of the "appropriation" of Black culture were commented on. For example, a 2015 Vogue Italia photo shoot involving model Gigi Hadid
wearing an afro sparked backlash on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Some users claimed it was problematic and racist to have a non-Black
model wear an afro and a fake tan to give the appearance of Blackness
when the fashion magazine could have hired a Black model instead. Kearie Daniel
wrote that White people wearing certain hairstyles is a particularly
touchy subject in Black feminism because of the perceived double
standard that when White women wear Black hairstyles, they are deemed
"trendy" or "edgy", while Black women are labelled "ghetto" or
"unprofessional".
Black feminists also voiced the importance of increasing
"representation" of Black women in television and movies. According to a
2014 study by the University of Southern California, of the 100 top films
of that year, "nearly three-quarters of all characters were white", NPR
reports, and only 17 of those 100 top movies featured non-White lead or
co-lead actors. That number falls further when only looking at
non-White women leads, considering only one-third of speaking roles were
for women, according to the same study.
Conjure Feminism
A new form of Black feminism has emerged with the publication of the article "Conjure Feminism: Toward a Genealogy"
published in a special issue on conjure feminism in Hypatia Journal in
2021. The conjure feminism theory incorporates Black women's knowledges
of African derived spiritualities to guide their methods of survival in
the U.S. and the African diaspora more broadly. Black feminist scholars
Kinitra Brooks, Kameelah Martin, and LaKisha Simmons co-wrote the
Hypatia journal article on conjure feminism and co-edited the special
issue. Other publications on conjure feminist themes include Kameelah
Martin's (2012) Conjuring Moments in African American literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo and Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (2019); The Lemonade Reader (2019) edited by Kinitra Brooks and Kameelah Martin; and Patricia Coloma Peñate's The Erotic as a Marvelous Real Paradigm: Hurston and Conjure Feminism (2023).
Black Lives Matter
The activist movement Black Lives Matter was initially formed by Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Kahn-Cullors as a hashtag to campaign against racism and police brutality against African Americans in the United States. The movement contributed to a revitalization and re-examining of the Black feminist movement. While the deaths of Black men played a major part in the Black Lives Matter movement, Rekia Boyd, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Shelly Frey, Yvette Smith, Eleanor Bumpurs, Sandra Bland, and other women were also killed or assaulted by police officers.
While Black Lives Matter has been critiqued for a failure to
focus on Black women's treatment by the police, it has since been better
about incorporating the interlocking systems of oppression that
disadvantage Black women in particular. Activism of Black feminists in Black Lives Matter has included protests against political candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton, and they have used hashtags such as #oscarssowhite and #sayhername.
Black feminist identity politics and safe spaces
Black feminist identity politics can be defined as knowing and understanding one's own identity
while taking into consideration both personal experience as well as the
experiences of those in history to help form a group of like-minded
individuals who seek change in the political framework of society. It also can be defined as a rejection of oppressive measures taken against one's group, especially in terms of political injustice.
Black feminist writer Patricia Hill Collins
believes that this "outsider within" seclusion suffered by Black women
was created through the domestic sphere, where Black women were
considered separate from the perceived White elite who claimed their
dominance over them. They also felt a disconnect between the Black men's suffering and oppression.
As a result of White feminists excluding Black women from their
discourse, Black feminists expressed their own experiences of
marginalization and empowered Black consciousness in society.
Due to the diverse experiences of Black women, it is imperative to
Collins to speak for and of personal accounts of Black women's
oppression.
Identity politics have often implemented race, class, and gender as isolated categories as a means of excluding those who aren't perceived as part of the dominant group. These constructed biases formed from race, class, and gender are what feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw believes need to be used, not as a means of degradation, but as a form of empowerment and self-worth.
Ignoring these differences only creates more of a divide between social
movements and other feminist groups, especially in the case of violence
against women where the caliber of violence is correlated with
components such as race and class.
Another issue of identity politics is the conflict of group formations and safe spaces for Black women.
In the 1970s, increased literacy among Black women promoted writing and
scholarship as an outlet for feminist discourse where they could have
their voices heard. As a result, Black women sought solace in safe spaces that gave them the freedom to discuss issues of oppression and segregation that ultimately promoted unity as well as a means of achieving social justice.
As the notion of color-blindness
advocated for a desegregation in institutions, Black women faced new
issues of identity politics and looked for a new safe space to express
their concerns. This was met with a lot of contention, as people saw these Black female groups as exclusive and separatist.
Dominant groups, especially involved in the political sphere, found
these safe spaces threatening because they were away from the public eye
and were therefore unable to be regulated by the higher and more
powerful political groups.
Despite the growth in feminist discourse regarding Black identity
politics, some men disagree with the Black feminist identity politics
movement. Some Black novelists, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, uphold the notion of color-blindness and dismiss identity politics as a proper means of achieving social justice.
To him, identity politics is an exclusionary device implemented in
Black culture and history, like hip hop and jazz, that limit outsider
comprehension and access. However, writer Jeffery A. Tucker
believes that identity politics serves as a foundation where such
color-blindness can finally be achieved in the long run if implemented
and understood within society.
Organizations
National Black Feminist Organization
The National Black Feminist Organization was founded in 1973, and dissolved around 1977.
This organization of women focused on the interconnectedness of the
many prejudices faced by African-American women; stating that their
mission was to define their self-image as Black women and not be
rejected by White women. There were chapters in major cities, and the
organization fought for political influence and raised consciousness
about the abuse facing their communities. In 1975, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Cheryl L. Clarke, Akasha Gloria Hull, and other female activists tied to The Civil Rights Movement, Black nationalism, or the Black Panther Party established, as an offshoot of the National Black Feminist Organization, the Combahee River Collective, a radical lesbian feminist group.
The Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective
(1974-1980) was one of the most important Black socialist feminist
organizations of all time. This group began meeting in Boston in 1974, a
time when socialist feminism was thriving in Boston. The name Combahee
River Collective was suggested by the founder and African-American
lesbian feminist, Barbara Smith, and refers to the campaign led by Harriet Tubman,
who freed 750 slaves near the Combahee River in South Carolina in 1863.
Smith said they wanted the name to mean something to African-American
women and that "it was a way of talking about ourselves being on a
continuum of Black struggle, of Black women's struggle". The Combahee River Collective opposed the practice of lesbian separatism,
considering that, in practice, separatists focused exclusively on
sexist oppression and not on other oppressions (race, class, etc.)
The members of this organization consisted of many former members
of other political organizations that worked within The Civil Rights
Movement, Anti-War movement, Labor Movement, and others. Demita Frazier,
co-founder of the Combahee River Collective, says these women from
other movements found themselves "in conflict with the lack of a
feminist analysis and in many cases were left feeling divided against
[themselves]." The Combahee River Collective
argued in 1974 that the liberation of Black women entails freedom for
all people, since it would require the end of racism, sexism, and class
oppression. Within the Black Feminisms: Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, they spoke on how it is, “...difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our [black women's’] lives they are the most often experienced simultaneously".
The Combahee River Collective articulated this interlocking system of
oppression based on sexism, heterosexism, racism, and classism is due to
the lack of basic human rights provided to black women in comparison to
other groups, such as white women. White women fighting for feminism is
distinct from black women fighting for black feminism, as white
women need only to address one form of oppression [sexism] versus many
forms of oppression, like black women. Therefore, the black feminists of
the Combahee River Collective aimed for an inclusive rather than
exclusive movement because, “The major source of difficulty in our
political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one
front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions.
We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely
upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power
that groups who possess any one of these types of privilege have.”
As an organization, they were labeled as troublemakers, and many
said they were brainwashed by the man-hating White feminist, that they
didn't have their own mind, and that they were just following in the
White woman's footsteps.
Throughout the 1970s, the Combahee River Collective met weekly to
discuss the different issues concerning Black feminists. They also held
retreats throughout the Northeast from 1977 to 1979 to help
"institutionalize Black feminism" and develop an "ideological separation
from white feminism".
As an organization, they founded a local battered women's shelter
and worked in partnership with all community activists, women and men,
and gay and straight people, playing an active role in the reproductive
rights movement.
The Combahee River Collective ended their work together in 1980 and is
now most widely remembered for developing the Combahee River Collective
Statement, a key document in the history of contemporary Black feminism
and the development of the concepts of identity.
The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)
Many Black women fought for their rights to public institutions
and benefits, and many were members of The National Welfare Rights
Organization. The Aid To Dependent Children Program (ADC) has received
critiques. For example, in 1960s, eighty five percent of ADC recipients
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania were Black women, and the ADC instituted
midnight raids.During midnight raids, authorities inspected the homes of welfare recipients without a warrant, during the middle of the night. This resulted in it becoming harder for Black women to receive aid.Furthermore,
Johnnie Tillmon writes about her intersecting experience of being a
Black woman on welfare, and how welfare policies, such as the ADC
program, are sexist. Tillmon mentions how she is a part of starting the
Guaranteed Adequate Income (GAI) plan, under The National Welfare Rights
Organization (NWRO).
1970, Black Woman's Manifesto, published by the Third World Women's Alliance, argued for a specificity of oppression against Black women. Co-signed by Gayle Lynch, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Maxine Williams, Frances M. Beal, and Linda La Rue, the manifesto, opposing both racism and capitalism,
stated that "the Black woman is demanding a new set of female
definitions and a recognition of herself of a citizen, companion, and
confidant, not a matriarchal villain or a step stool baby-maker. Role
integration advocates the complementary recognition of man and woman,
not the competitive recognition of same." Additionally, Toni Cade Bambara edited the eclectic volume The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970) which sought to "explore ourselves and set the record straight on the matriarch and the evil Black bitch."
It featured now considered canonical essays, such as Frances Beal's
"Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" and Toni Cade Bambara's "On
the Issue of Roles."
1979, Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel edited the Autumn 1979 issue of Conditions. Conditions 5 was "the first widely distributed collection of Black feminist writing in the U.S."
1992, Black feminists mobilized "a remarkable national response" to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate Hearings in 1991, naming their effort African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.
1994, Evelyn Hammonds: "Black (W)holes and The Geometry of Black
Female Sexuality" Evelyn Hammonds begins her essay by reflecting, as a
Black lesbian and feminist writer, on the "consistently exclusionary
practices of lesbian and gay studies" that produce such problematic
paucities as the presence of writers of color, articles written on Black
women's sexuality by Black women that complexly examine race in
representations of gender, and the visibility of Black lesbian
experiences (Hammonds, 127). Hammonds articulates how Whiteness defines
the canonical "categories, identities, and subject positions" of lesbian
and gay studies and depends on maintaining and presupposing patterns of
Black women and Black lesbian sexualities' invisibility and absence
(Hammonds, 128).
2000, Alice Walker: "In Search of Our Mothers Garden" This
articulation is directly linked to Hammonds' concern about the
visibility and audibility of Black queer sexualities, since Black
women's sexualities are perceived as always invisible or absent, then
lesbian and queer Black women and authors must follow as doubly
invisible. While White sexuality as the normative sexuality has been
challenged by other writers, Hammonds frames her intervention as
reaching beyond the limits of this familiar critique. To effectively
challenge the hegemony of Whiteness within Queer theory, Hammonds
charges lack feminists with the major projects of reclaiming sexuality
so that Black women and their sexualities may register as present and
power relations between White women and Black women's expression of
gender and sexuality becomes a part of theory making within Queer
studies (Hammonds, 131).
2000, in her introduction to the 2000 reissue of the 1983 Black feminist anthology Home Girls,
theorist and author Barbara Smith states her opinion that "to this day
most Black women are unwilling to jeopardize their 'racial credibility'
(as defined by Black men) to address the realities of sexism." Smith also notes that "even fewer are willing to bring up homophobia and heterosexism, which are, of course, inextricably linked to gender oppression."
2011, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 by Cheryl Higashida
looks at Black women writers and their contributions to the feminist
movement. Higashida "illustrates how literature is a crucial lens for
studying Black internationalist feminism because these authors were at
the forefront of bringing the perspectives and problems of black women
to light against their marginalization and silencing." Included in her
work are writers such as Rosa Guy, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and
Maya Angelou.
2014, On Intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw. A collection of essays and articles that expand on defining the concept of intersectionality.
Call to Action:
Angela Davis
Angela Davis: An Autobiography Random House; 1974
Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis (1981) writes
about the history of Black women in the United States, and the
intersection of women, race, and class.
Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (2015)
discusses the significance of prison abolition intersecting with
feminism and racism. Davis explains the importance in being an active,
lifelong activist.
Audre Lorde
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (speech) (1977).
Lorde discusses that speaking is a way to reclaim the racism that has
been imposed upon Black women. This acknowledges the topic of direct
activism, as Lorde advocates that when we actively communicate with
different groups of people, we are actively fighting oppression.
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power'' (1978). Lorde writes that
channeling love and power within ourselves is important since this will
allow individuals to better connect with other people. Then, this will
in turn bring people together and fight oppression, such as the
oppression facing Black women.
Welfare Activism:
In 1972, "Welfare Is a Women’s Issue" in Ms. Magazine. Johnnie
Tillmon writes their experiences as being a Black woman on welfare and
critiques the current welfare policies and welfare politics at the time,
mentioning Ronald Reagan and the Aid to Dependent Children Program
(ADC).
Misogynoir:
Other theorists and writers who have contributed to the literature of Black feminism include Moya Bailey and Trudy of Gradient Lair, who both write about the anti-Black and/or racist misogyny against Black women, also known as misogynoir,
a term coined by Bailey in 2008. In 2018, both these women wrote an
article named "On Misogynoir: Citation, erasure and plagiarism", which
talks about the works of Black feminists often being plagiarized or
erased from most literary works, also implicitly and sometimes
explicitly linked to gender oppression, particularly for women of color.
Misogynoir is grounded in the theory of intersectionality.
Modern-day Black activists, such as Feminista Jones, claim that
"Misogynoir provides a racialized nuance that mainstream feminism wasn't
catching" and that "there is a specific misogyny that is aimed at Black
women and is uniquely detrimental to Black women."
More Topics in Black Feminist literature:
1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of
Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine,
Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. This legal forum paper is
regarded as where Kimberlé Crenshaw is the first person to officially
coin the term intersectionality.
"Mow to Now: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of
Modern Feminism" (2018) by Carol Giardina explores Black women and
their involvement with the organizing of the 1963 March on Washington
(MOW). Particular focus is given to how this was pivotal to the shift of
feminist organizing of the 1960s. Many activists are noted, including
Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Facing powerful
male figures from the church, they established feminist protest models
that they subsequently used to inform the establishment of the National
Organization for Women in 1966.
The involvement of Pat Parker in the Black feminist movement was reflected in her writings as a poet. Her work inspired other Black feminist poets such as Hattie Gossett.
The Encyclopedia of African-American Women Writers (2007) and the
Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature (2006) list influential Black
Feminist Literature.
Critics
Critics of
Black feminism argue that divisions along the lines of race or gender
weaken the strength of the overall feminist and anti-racist movements.
An
intersectional analysis considers a collection of factors that affect a
social individual in combination, rather than considering each factor
in isolation, as illustrated here using a Venn diagram.
The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. She describes how interlocking systems of power affect those who are most marginalized in society. Activists and academics use the framework to promote social and political egalitarianism.
Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of
oppression in isolation. In this framework, for instance, discrimination
against black women cannot be explained as a simple combination of misogyny and racism, but as something more complicated. Intersectionality engages in similar themes as triple oppression, which is the oppression associated with being a poor or immigrant woman of color.
Criticism includes the framework's tendency to reduce individuals to specific demographic factors, and its use as an ideological tool against other feminist theories. Critics have characterized the framework as ambiguous and lacking defined goals. As it is based in standpoint theory,
critics say the focus on subjective experiences can lead to
contradictions and the inability to identify common causes of
oppression. An analysis of academic articles published through December
2019 found that there are no widely adopted quantitative methods to
investigate research questions informed by intersectionality and
provided recommendations on analytic best practices for future research.
An analysis of academic articles published through May 2020 found that
intersectionality is frequently misunderstood when bridging theory into
quantitative methodology. In 2022, a quantitative approach to intersectionality was proposed based on information theory, specifically synergistic information:
in this framing, intersectionality is identified with the information
about some outcome (e.g. income, etc.) that can only be learned when
multiple identities (e.g. race and sex) and known together, and not
extractable from analysis of the individual identities considered
separately.
Historical background
The concept of intersectionality was introduced to the field of legal studies by black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who used the term in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991.
Intersectionality originated in critical race studies
and demonstrates a multifaceted connection between race, gender, and
other systems that work together to oppress, while also allowing
privilege in other areas. Intersectionality is relative because it
displays how race, gender, and other components "intersect" to shape the
experiences of individuals. Crenshaw used intersectionality to denote
how race, class, gender, and other systems combine to shape the
experiences of many by making room for privilege.
Crenshaw used intersectionality to display the disadvantages caused by
intersecting systems creating structural, political, and
representational aspects of violence against minorities in the workplace and society.
Crenshaw explained the dynamics that using gender, race, and other
forms of power in politics and academics plays a big role in
intersectionality.
However, long before Crenshaw, W. E. B. Du Bois
theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation
might explain specific aspects of the black political economy. Collins
writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal
identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped
African-American access to status, poverty, and power." Du Bois nevertheless omitted gender from his theory and considered it
more of a personal identity category. In the 1970s, a group of black
feminist women organized the Combahee River Collective
in response to what they felt was an alienation from both white
feminism and the male-dominated black liberation movement, citing the
"interlocking oppressions" of racism, sexism and heteronormativity.
In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), Emma DeGraffenreid and four other black female auto workers alleged compound employment discrimination against black women as a result of General Motors' seniority-based system of layoffs.
The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination
separately, finding that the employment of African-American male factory
workers disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white
female office workers disproved gender discrimination. The court declined to consider compound discrimination, and dismissed the case.Crenshaw argued that in cases such as this, the courts have tended to
ignore black women's unique experiences by treating them as only women or only black.
The ideas behind intersectional feminism existed long before the term was coined. For example, Sojourner Truth exemplifies intersectionality in her 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, in which she spoke from her racialized position as a former slave to critique essentialist notions of femininity. Similarly, in her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office", Anna Julia Cooper
identifies black women as the most important actors in social change
movements because of their experience with multiple facets of
oppression. Patricia Hill Collins has located the origins of intersectionality among black feminists, Chicana and other Latina feminists, indigenous feminists
and Asian American feminists between the 1960s and 1980s. Collins has
noted the existence of intellectuals at other times and in other places
who discussed similar ideas about the interaction of different forms of
inequality, such as Stuart Hall and the cultural studies movement, Nira Yuval-Davis, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. She noted that, as second-wave feminism receded in the 1980s, feminists of color such as Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Angela Davis
entered academic environments and brought their perspectives to their
scholarship. During this decade, many of the ideas that would together
be labeled as intersectionality coalesced in U.S. academia under the
banner of "race, class and gender studies".
As articulated by author bell hooks, the emergence of intersectionality "challenged the notion that 'gender' was the primary factor determining a woman's fate".
The historical exclusion of black women from the feminist movement in
the United States resulted in many black 19th- and 20th-century
feminists, such as Anna Julia Cooper, challenging their historical
exclusion. This disputed the ideas of earlier feminist movements, which
were primarily led by white middle-class women, suggesting that women
were a homogeneous category who shared the same life experiences.
However, once established that the forms of oppression experienced by
white middle-class women were different from those experienced by black,
poor, or disabled women, feminists began seeking ways to understand how
gender, race, and class combine to "determine the female destiny".
The concept of intersectionality is intended to illuminate
dynamics that have often been overlooked by feminist theory and
movements.
Racial inequality was a factor that was largely ignored by first-wave
feminism, which was primarily concerned with gaining political equality
between white men and white women. Early women's rights movements often
exclusively pertained to the membership, concerns, and struggles of
white women.
Second-wave feminism worked to dismantle sexism relating to the
perceived domestic purpose of women. While feminists during this time
achieved success in the United States through the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX, and Roe v. Wade, they largely alienated black women from platforms in the mainstream movement. However, third-wave feminism—which emerged shortly after the term intersectionality
was coined in the late 1980s—noted the lack of attention to race,
class, sexual orientation, and gender identity in early feminist
movements, and tried to provide a channel to address political and
social disparities. Intersectionality recognizes these issues which were ignored by early social justice movements. Many recent academics, such as Leslie McCall,
have argued that the introduction of the intersectionality theory was
vital to sociology and that before the development of the theory, there
was little research that specifically addressed the experiences of
people who are subjected to multiple forms of oppression within society. An example of this idea was championed by Iris Marion Young,
arguing that differences must be acknowledged in order to find unifying
social justice issues that create coalitions that aid in changing
society for the better. More specifically, this relates to the ideals of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).
The term also has historical and theoretical links to the concept
of simultaneity, which was advanced during the 1970s by members of the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts.
Simultaneity is the simultaneous influences of race, class, gender, and
sexuality, which informed the member's lives and their resistance to
oppression.
Thus, the women of the Combahee River Collective advanced an
understanding of African-American experiences that challenged analyses
emerging from black and male-centered social movements, as well as those
from mainstream cisgender, white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists.
A crowd of people in a Black Lives Matter protest in 2015. The main focus is four black women, one holding a sign.
Since the term was coined, many feminist scholars have emerged with
historical support for the intersectional theory. These women include Beverly Guy-Sheftall and her fellow contributors to Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought,
a collection of articles describing the multiple oppressions black
women in America have experienced from the 1830s to contemporary times.
Guy-Sheftall speaks about the constant premises that influence the lives
of African-American women, saying, "black women experience a special
kind of oppression and suffering in this country which is racist,
sexist, and classist because of their dual race and gender identity and
their limited access to economic resources." Other writers and theorists were using intersectional analysis in their work before the term was coined. For example, Pauli Murray
used the phrase "Jane Crow" in 1947 while at Howard University to
describe the compounded challenges faced by black women in the Jim Crow
south.
Deborah K. King published the article "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple
Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology" in 1988, just
before Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality. In the
article, King addresses what soon became the foundation for
intersectionality, saying, "black women have long recognized the special
circumstances of our lives in the United States: the commonalities that
we share with all women, as well as the bonds that connect us to the
men of our race." Additionally, Gloria Wekker describes how Gloria Anzaldúa's work as a Chicana
feminist theorist exemplifies how "existent categories for identity are
strikingly not dealt with in separate or mutually exclusive terms, but
are always referred to in relation to one another". Wekker also points to the words and activism of Sojourner Truth as an example of an intersectional approach to social justice. In her speech, "Ain't I a Woman?",
Truth identifies the difference between the oppression of white and
black women. She says that white women are often treated as emotional
and delicate, while black women are subjected to racist abuse. However,
this was largely dismissed by white feminists who worried that this
would distract from their goal of women's suffrage and instead focused
their attention on emancipation.
Feminist thought
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women
in her essay "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A black
Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics". Crenshaw's term has risen to the forefront of national conversations about racial justice, identity politics, and policing—and over the years has helped shape legal discussions. In her work, Crenshaw discusses Black feminism,
arguing that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood
in terms independent of either being black or a woman. Rather, it must
include interactions between the two identities, which, she adds, should
frequently reinforce one another.
In order to show that non-white women have a vastly different
experience from white women due to their race and/or class and that
their experiences are not easily voiced or amplified, Crenshaw explores
two types of male violence against women: domestic violence and rape.
Through her analysis of these two forms of male violence against women,
Crenshaw says that the experiences of non-white women consist of a
combination of both racism and sexism.
She says that because non-white women are present within discourses
that have been designed to address either race or sex—but not both at
the same time—non-white women are marginalized within both of these
systems of oppression as a result.
In her work, Crenshaw identifies three aspects of
intersectionality that affect the visibility of non-white women:
structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and
representational intersectionality. Structural intersectionality deals
with how non-white women experience domestic violence and rape in a
manner qualitatively different from white women. Political
intersectionality examines how laws and policies intended to increase
equality have paradoxically decreased the visibility of violence against
non-white women. Finally, representational intersectionality delves
into how pop culture portrayals of non-white women can obscure their own authentic lived experiences.
Within Crenshaw's work, she delves into a few legal cases that
exhibit the concept of political intersectionality and how
anti-discrimination law has been historically limited. These cases
include DeGraffenreid v Motors, Moore v Hughes Helicopter Inc., and
Payne v Travenol. There are two commonalities, amongst others, that
exist between these cases with the first being each respective court's
inability to fully understand the multidimensionality of the plaintiff's
intersecting identities. Second is the limited ability that the
plaintiffs had to argue their case due to restrictions created by the
very legislation that exists in opposition to discrimination such as
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as used against the plaintiffs
in the DeGraffenreid v Motors case.
The term gained prominence in the 1990s, particularly in the wake
of the further development of Crenshaw's work in the writings of
sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. Crenshaw's term, Collins says,
replaced her own previous coinage "black feminist thought", and
"increased the general applicability of her theory from African American
women to all women".
Much like Crenshaw, Collins argues that cultural patterns of oppression
are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the
intersectional systems of society, such as race, gender, class, and
ethnicity. Collins describes this as "interlocking social institutions [that] have
relied on multiple forms of segregation... to produce unjust results".
Collins sought to create frameworks to think about
intersectionality, rather than expanding on the theory itself. She
identified three main branches of study within intersectionality. One
branch deals with the background, ideas, issues, conflicts, and debates
within intersectionality. Another branch seeks to apply
intersectionality as an analytical strategy to various social institutions
in order to examine how they might perpetuate social inequality. The
final branch formulates intersectionality as a critical praxis to
determine how social justice initiatives can use intersectionality to bring about social change.
One writer who focused on intersectionality was Audre Lorde, who was a self-proclaimed "Black, Lesbian, Mother, Warrior, Poet".
Even in the title she gave herself, Lorde expressed her multifaceted
personhood and demonstrated her intersectional struggles with being a
black, gay woman. Lorde commented in her essay The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, that she was living in "a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable". Here, Lorde outlines the importance of intersectionality, while acknowledging that different prejudices are inherently linked. Lorde's formulation of this linkage remains seminal in intersectional feminism.
Though intersectionality began with the exploration of the
interplay between gender and race, over time other identities and
oppressions were added to the theory. For example, in 1981 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published the first edition of This Bridge Called My Back.
This anthology explored how classifications of sexual orientation and
class also mix with those of race and gender to create even more
distinct political categories. Many black, Latina, and Asian writers
featured in the collection stress how their sexuality interacts with
their race and gender to inform their perspectives. Similarly, poor
women of color detail how their socio-economic status adds a layer of
nuance to their identities, ignored or misunderstood by middle-class
white feminists.
Asian American women often report intersectional experiences that set them apart from other American women.
For example, several studies have shown that East Asian women are
considered more physically attractive than white women, and other women
of color. Taken at face value, this may seem like a social advantage.
However, if this perception is inspired by stereotypes of Asian women as
"hyperfeminine", it can serve to perpetuate racialized stereotypes of
Asian women as subordinate or oversexualized.
Robin Zheng writes that widespread fetishization of East Asian women's
physical features leads to "racial depersonalization": the separation of
Asian women from their own individual attributes.
According to black feminists such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins,
experiences of class, gender, and sexuality cannot be adequately
understood unless the influence of racialization is carefully
considered. This focus on racialization was highlighted many times by
scholar and feminist bell hooks, specifically in her 1981 book Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Patricia Hill Collins's essay "Gender, black feminism, and black political economy" highlights her theory on the sociological crossroads between modern and post-modern feminist thought.
Black feminists argue that an understanding of intersectionality is a
vital element of gaining political and social equity and improving the
societal structures that oppress individuals.
Chiara Bottici
has argued that criticisms of intersectionality that find it to be
incomplete, or argue that it fails to recognize the specificity of
women's oppression, can be met with an anarcha-feminism that recognizes "that there is something specific about the oppression of women and that in order to fight it you have to fight all other forms of oppression."
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
expands on this by pointing out the value of centering on the
experiences of black women. Joy James takes things one step further by
"using paradigms of intersectionality in interpreting social phenomena".
Collins later integrated these three views by examining a black
political economy through the centering of black women's experiences and
the use of a theoretical framework of intersectionality.
Collins uses a Marxist feminist
approach and applies her intersectional principles to what she calls
the "work/family nexus and black women's poverty". In her 2000 article
"Black Political Economy" she describes how, in her view, the
intersections of consumer racism,
gender hierarchies, and disadvantages in the labor market can be
centered on black women's unique experiences. Considering this from a
historical perspective and examining interracial marriage laws and
property inheritance laws creates what Collins terms a "distinctive
work/family nexus that in turn influences the overall patterns of black
political economy". For example, anti-miscegenation laws effectively suppressed the upward economic mobility of black women.
The intersectionality of race and gender has been shown to have a
visible impact on the labor market. "Sociological research clearly
shows that accounting for education, experience, and skill does not
fully explain significant differences in labor market outcomes."
The three main domains in which we see the impact of intersectionality
are wages, discrimination, and domestic labor. Those who experience
privilege within the social hierarchy in terms of race, gender, and
socio-economic status are less likely to receive lower wages, to be
subjected to stereotypes and discriminated against, or to be hired for
exploitative domestic positions. Studies of the labor market and
intersectionality provide a better understanding of economic
inequalities and the implications of the multidimensional impact of race
and gender on social status within society.
Forms: structural, political, representational
Kimberlé Crenshaw, in "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color",
uses and explains three different forms of intersectionality to
describe the violence that women experience. According to Crenshaw,
there are three forms of intersectionality: structural, political, and
representational intersectionality.
Structural intersectionality is used to describe how different
structures work together and create a complex which highlights the
differences in the experiences of women of color with domestic violence
and rape. Structural intersectionality entails the ways in which
classism, sexism, and racism interlock and oppress women of color while
molding their experiences in different arenas. Crenshaw's analysis of
structural intersectionality was used during her field study of battered
women. In this study, Crenshaw uses intersectionality to display the
multilayered oppressions that women who are victims of domestic violence
face.
Political intersectionality highlights two conflicting systems in
the political arena, which separates women and women of color into two
subordinate groups.
The experiences of women of color differ from those of white women and
men of color due to their race and gender often intersecting. White
women suffer from gender bias, and men of color suffer from racial bias;
however, both of their experiences differ from that of women of color,
because women of color experience both racial and gender bias. According
to Crenshaw, a political failure of the antiracist and feminist
discourses was the exclusion of the intersection of race and gender that
places priority on the interest of "people of color" and "women", thus
disregarding one while highlighting the other. Political engagement
should reflect support of women of color; a prime example of the
exclusion of women of color that shows the difference in the experiences
of white women and women of color is the women's suffrage march.
Representational intersectionality advocates for the creation of
imagery that is supportive of women of color. Representational
intersectionality condemns sexist and racist marginalization of women of
color in representation. Representational intersectionality also
highlights the importance of women of color having representation in
media and contemporary settings.
Key concepts
Interlocking matrix of oppression
Collins refers to the various intersections of social inequality as the matrix of domination. These are also known as "vectors of oppression and privilege".
These terms refer to how differences among people (sexual orientation,
class, race, age, etc.) serve as oppressive measures towards women and
change the experience of living as a woman in society. Collins, Audre Lorde (in Sister Outsider), and bell hooks point towards either/or thinking as an influence on this oppression and as further intensifying these differences.
Specifically, Collins refers to this as the construct of dichotomous
oppositional difference. This construct is characterized by its focus on
differences rather than similarities.
Lisa A. Flores suggests, when individuals live in the borders, they
"find themselves with a foot in both worlds". The result is "the sense
of being neither" exclusively one identity nor another.
Standpoint epistemology and the outsider within
Both Collins and Dorothy Smith have been instrumental in providing a sociological definition of standpoint theory.
A standpoint is an individual's world perspective. The theoretical
basis of this approach views societal knowledge as being located within
an individual's specific geographic location. In turn, knowledge becomes
distinct and subjective; it varies depending on the social conditions
under which it was produced.
The concept of the outsider within refers to a standpoint encompassing the self, family, and society.
This relates to the specific experiences to which people are subjected
as they move from a common cultural world (i.e., family) to that of
modern society.
Therefore, even though a woman—especially a Black woman—may become
influential in a particular field, she may feel as though she does not
belong. Her personality, behavior, and cultural being overshadow her
value as an individual; thus, she becomes the outsider within.
Resisting oppression
Speaking from a critical standpoint, Collins points out that Brittan and Maynard say that "domination always involves the objectification of the dominated; all forms of oppression imply the devaluation of the subjectivity of the oppressed". She later notes that self-valuation and self-definition are two ways of resisting oppression, and claims the practice of self-awareness helps to preserve the self-esteem of the group that is being oppressed while allowing them to avoid any dehumanizing outside influences.
Marginalized groups often gain a status of being an "other".In essence, you are "an other" if you are different from what Audre Lorde calls the mythical norm. Gloria Anzaldúa, scholar of Chicana cultural theory, theorized that the sociological term for this is "othering", i.e. specifically attempting to establish a person as unacceptable based on a certain, unachieved criterion.
Intersectionality and gender
Intersectional
theories in relation to gender recognize that each person has their own
mix of identities which combine to create them, and where these
identities "meet in the middle"
therein lies each person's intersectionality. These intersections lie
between components such as class, race, religion, ethnicity, ability,
income, indignity, and any other part of a person's identity which
shapes their life, and the way others treat them. Stephanie A. Shields
in her article on intersectionality and gender
explains how each part of someones identity "serve as organizing
features of social relations, mutually constitute, reinforce, and
naturalize one another."
Shields explains how one aspect can not exist individually, rather it
"takes its meaning as a category in relation to another category."
Practical applications
Intersectionality has been applied in many fields from politics,education healthcare, and employment, to economics.
For example, within the institution of education, Sandra Jones'
research on working-class women in academia takes into consideration
meritocracy within all social strata, but argues that it is complicated
by race and the external forces that oppress.
Additionally, people of color often experience differential treatment
in the healthcare system. For example, in the period immediately after 9/11 researchers noted low birth weights
and other poor birth outcomes among Muslim and Arab Americans, a result
they connected to the increased racial and religious discrimination of
the time. Some researchers have also argued that immigration policies can affect health outcomes through mechanisms such as stress, restrictions on access to health care, and the social determinants of health. The Women's Institute for Science, Equity and Race advocates for the disaggregation of data in order to highlight intersectional identities in all kinds of research.
Additionally, applications with regard to property and wealth can
be traced to the American historical narrative that is filled "with
tensions and struggles over property—in its various forms. From the
removal of Native Americans (and later Japanese Americans)
from the land, to military conquest of the Mexicans, to the
construction of Africans as property, the ability to define, possess,
and own property has been a central feature of power in America ... [and
where] social benefits accrue largely to property owners."
One could apply the intersectionality framework analysis to various
areas where race, class, gender, sexuality and ability are affected by
policies, procedures, practices, and laws in "context-specific
inquiries, including, for example, analyzing the multiple ways that race
and gender interact with class in the labor market; interrogating the
ways that states constitute regulatory regimes of identity,
reproduction, and family formation";
and examining the inequities in "the power relations [of the
intersectionality] of whiteness ... [where] the denial of power and
privilege ... of whiteness, and middle-classness", while not addressing
"the role of power it wields in social relations".
Intersectionality in a global context
Intersectionality at a Dyke March in Hamburg, Germany, 2020
Over the last couple of decades in the European Union
(EU), there has been discussion regarding the intersections of social
classifications. Before Crenshaw coined her definition of
intersectionality, there was a debate on what these societal categories
were. The once definite borders between the categories of gender, race,
and class have instead fused into a multidimensional intersection of
"race" that now includes religion, sexuality, ethnicities, etc. In the
EU and UK, these intersections are referred to as the notion of
"multiple discrimination". Although the EU passed a non-discrimination
law which addresses these multiple intersections; there is however
debate on whether the law is still proactively focusing on the proper
inequalities. Outside of the EU, intersectional categories have also been considered. In Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts,
the authors argue: "The impact of patriarchy and traditional
assumptions about gender and families are evident in the lives of
Chinese migrant workers (Chow, Tong), sex workers and their clients in
South Korea (Shin), and Indian widows (Chauhan), but also Ukrainian
migrants (Amelina) and Australian men of the new global middle class
(Connell)." This text suggests that there are many more intersections of
discrimination for people around the globe than Crenshaw originally
accounted for in her definition.
Chandra Mohanty discusses alliances between women throughout the
world as intersectionality in a global context. She rejects the western
feminist theory, especially when it writes about global women of color
and generally associated "third world women". She argues that "third
world women" are often thought of as a homogeneous entity, when, in
fact, their experience of oppression is informed by their geography,
history, and culture. When western feminists write about women in the
global South in this way, they dismiss the inherent intersecting
identities that are present in the dynamic of feminism in the global
South. Mohanty questions the performance of intersectionality and
relationality of power structures within the US and colonialism and how
to work across identities with this history of colonial power
structures. This lack of homogeneity and intersecting identities can be seen through feminism in India,
which goes over how women in India practice feminism within social
structures and the continuing effects of colonization that differ from
that of Western and other non-Western countries.
This is elaborated on by Christine Bose, who discusses a global
use of intersectionality which works to remove associations of specific
inequalities with specific institutions while showing that these systems
generate intersectional effects. She uses this approach to develop a
framework that can analyze gender inequalities across different nations
and differentiates this from an approach (the one that Mohanty was
referring to) which, one, paints national-level inequalities as the same
and, two, differentiates only between the global North and South. This
is manifested through the intersection of global dynamics like
economics, migration, or violence, with regional dynamics, like
histories of the nation or gendered inequalities in education and
property education.
There is an issue globally with the way the law interacts with
intersectionality. For example, the UK's legislation to protect workers'
rights has a distinct issue with intersectionality. Under the Equality
Act 2010, the things that are listed as 'protected characteristics' are
"age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership,
pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual
orientation".
"Section 14 contains a provision to cover direct discrimination on up
to two combined grounds—known as combined or dual discrimination.
However, this section has never been brought into effect as the
government deemed it too 'complicated and burdensome' for businesses."
This demonstrates systematic neglect of the issues that
intersectionality presents, because the UK courts have explicitly
decided not to cover intersectional discrimination in their courts.
This neglect of an intersectional framework can often lead to dire consequences. The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) describes a certain example where immigrant women's lives are threatened by their abusive citizen spouses. In A primer on intersectionality,
the authors argue that earlier immigration reform (which required
spouses who immigrated to the US to marry American citizens to remain
properly married for two years before they were eligible to receive
permanent resident status) provided "no exceptions for battered women
who often faced the risk of serious injury and death on the one hand, or
deportation on the other." They continue to argue that advocates of
several kinds hadn't originally considered this particular struggle many
immigrant women face, including advocates for fairer immigration
policies and advocates for domestic violence survivors.
Marie-Claire Belleau argues for "strategic intersectionality" in
order to foster cooperation between feminisms of different ethnicities. She refers to different nat-cult (national-cultural) groups that produce different types of feminisms. Using Québécois
nat-cult as an example, Belleau says that many nat-cult groups contain
infinite sub-identities within themselves, arguing that there are
endless ways in which different feminisms can cooperate by using
strategic intersectionality, and that these partnerships can help bridge
gaps between "dominant and marginal" groups.
Belleau argues that, through strategic intersectionality, differences
between nat-cult feminisms are neither essentialist nor universal, but
should be understood as resulting from socio-cultural contexts.
Furthermore, the performances of these nat-cult feminisms are also not
essentialist. Instead, they are strategies.
Transnational intersectionality
Postcolonial feminists and transnational feminists criticize intersectionality as a concept emanating from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) societies that unduly universalizes women's experiences.
Postcolonial feminists have worked to revise Western conceptualizations
of intersectionality that assume all women experience the same type of
gender and racial oppression.Shelly Grabe coined the term transnational intersectionality
to represent a more comprehensive conceptualization of
intersectionality. Grabe wrote, "Transnational intersectionality places
importance on the intersections among gender, ethnicity, sexuality,
economic exploitation, and other social hierarchies in the context of
empire building or imperialist policies characterized by historical and
emergent global capitalism."
Both Postcolonial and transnational feminists advocate attending to
"complex and intersecting oppressions and multiple forms of resistance".
Vrushali Patil argues that intersectionality ought to recognize
transborder constructions of racial and cultural hierarchies. About the
effect of the state on identity formation, Patil says: "If we continue
to neglect cross-border dynamics and fail to problematize the nation and
its emergence via transnational processes, our analyses will remain
tethered to the spatialities and temporalities of colonial modernity."
Social work
In the field of social work,
proponents of intersectionality hold that unless service providers take
intersectionality into account, they will be of less use for various
segments of the population, such as those reporting domestic violence or
disabled victims of abuse. According to intersectional theory, the
practice of domestic violence counselors in the United States urging all women to report their abusers to police is of little use to women of color due to the history of racially motivated police brutality, and those counselors should adapt their counseling for women of color.
Women with disabilities encounter more frequent domestic abuse
with a greater number of abusers. Health care workers and personal care
attendants perpetrate abuse in these circumstances, and women with
disabilities have fewer options for escaping the abusive situation.
There is a "silence" principle concerning the intersectionality of
women and disability, which maintains an overall social denial of the
prevalence of abuse among the disabled and leads to this abuse being
frequently ignored when encountered.
A paradox is presented by the overprotection of people with
disabilities combined with the expectations of promiscuous behavior of
disabled women.
This leads to limited autonomy and social isolation of disabled
individuals, which place women with disabilities in situations where
further or more frequent abuse can occur.
Situated intersectionality
Expanding
on Crenshaw's framework, migration researcher Nira Yuval-Davis proposed
the concept of situated intersectionality as a theoretical framework
that can encompass different types of inequalities, simultaneously
(ontologically), but enmeshed (concretely), and based on a dialogical
epistemology which can incorporate "differentially located situated
gazes" at these inequalities. Reilly, Bjørnholt and Tastsoglou note that "Yuval-Davis shares Fineman's
critical stance vis-à-vis the fragmentising and essentialising
tendencies of identity politics, but without resorting to a universalism
that eschews difference."
Implementation within organizations
Practices
referred to as intersectionality may be implemented in different ways
in different organizations. Within the context of the UK charity sector,
Christoffersen identified five different conceptualizations of
intersectionality. "Generic intersectionality" was observed in policy
areas, where intersectionality was conceptualized as developing policies
to be in everyone's universal interest rather than being targeted to
particular groups. "Pan equality" was concern for issues that affected
most marginalised groups. "Multi-strand intersectionality" attempted to
consider different groups when making a decision, but rarely viewed the
groups as overlapping or focused on issues for a particular group.
"Diversity within" considered one main form of identity, such as gender,
as most important while occasionally considering other aspects of
identity, with these different forms of identity sometimes seen as
detracting from the main identity. "Intersections of equality strands"
considered the intersection of identities but no form of identity was
seen as more relevant. In this approach it was sometimes felt that if
one dealt with the most marginalised identity the system would tend to
work for all people. Christoffersen referred to some of these meanings
given to intersectionality as "additive" where inequalities are thought
to be able to be added to and subtracted from one another. .
Remediation
To provide sufficient preventive, redressive and deterrent remedies, judges in courts and others working in conflict resolution mechanisms take into account intersectional dimensions.
Criticism
Lisa
Downing argues that intersectionality focuses too much on group
identities, which can lead it to ignore the fact that people are
individuals, not just members of a class. Ignoring this can cause
intersectionality to lead to a simplistic analysis and inaccurate
assumptions about how a person's values and attitudes are determined.
Some conservatives and moderates believe that intersectionality
allows people of color and women of color to victimize themselves and
let themselves submit to special treatment. Instead, they classify the
concept of intersectionality as a hierarchy of oppression determining
who will receive better treatment than others. American conservative
commentator Ben Shapiro
stated in 2019 that "I would define intersectionality as, at least the
way that I've seen it manifest on college campuses, and in a lot of the
political left, as a hierarchy of victimhood in which people are
considered members of a victim class by virtue of membership in a
particular group, and at the intersection of various groups lies the
ascent on the hierarchy".
Barbara Tomlinson, of the Department of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, has been critical of the applications of intersectional theory to attack other ways of feminist thinking.
Critics include Marxist historians and sociologists, some of whom
claim that the contemporary applications of intersectional theory fail
to adequately address economic class and wealth inequality. Additionally, philosopher Tommy Curry
recently published several works charging intersectional feminism with
implicitly adopting, and thereby perpetuating, harmful stereotypes of
Black men. In so doing, Curry argues that the intersectional feminist concept "Double Jeopardy" is fundamentally mistaken.
Rekia Jibrin and Sara Salem argue that intersectional theory
creates a unified idea of anti-oppression politics that requires a lot
out of its adherents, often more than can reasonably be expected,
creating difficulties achieving praxis.
They also say that intersectional philosophy encourages a focus on the
issues inside the group instead of on society at large, and that
intersectionality is "a call to complexity and to abandon
oversimplification... this has the parallel effect of emphasizing
'internal differences' over hegemonic structures".(See Hegemony and Cultural hegemony.)
Darren Hutchinson argues that "it is impossible to theorize about
or study a group when each person in that group is 'composed of a
complex and unique matrix of identities that shift in time, is never
fixed, is constantly unstable and forever distinguishable from everyone
else in the universe."
Brittney Cooper approaches Crenshaw's original idea of intersectionality with more nuance. In Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch's The Oxford Handbook of feminist theory,
Cooper points to Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument that the "failure to
begin with an intersectional frame would always result in insufficient
attention to black women's experiences of subordination." Cooper's main
issue lies in the converse of Crenshaw's argument, where she feels that
Crenshaw does not properly address intersectionality as a framework that
is both "an effective tool of accounting for identities at any level
beyond the structural," and a framework that would "fully and wholly
account for the range or depth of black female experiences."
Methodology
Generating testable predictions from intersectionality theory can be complex; postintersectional critics of intersectional theory
fault its proponents for inadequately explained causal methodology and
say they have made incorrect predictions about the status of some
minority groups. For example, despite facing centuries of persecution and antisemitism
rising across the globe, Jews are often excluded from intersectionality
movements on the grounds that they are not sufficiently oppressed. Kathy Davis
asserts that intersectionality is ambiguous and open-ended, and that
its "lack of clear-cut definition or even specific parameters has
enabled it to be drawn upon in nearly any context of inquiry".
A review of quantitative studies seeking evidence on
intersectional issues published through May 12, 2020 found that many
quantitative methods were simplistic and were often misapplied or
misinterpreted.
Intersectionality and education
Different methods of teaching/accessibility
Laura
Gonzales and Janine Butler argue that intersectionality can be helpful
to provide an open perspective that helps study multiple inclusive
learning processes, formalities, and strategies in order to decrease the
risk of academic disadvantages/inequity because of anyone's social,
economic, or class level. Inclusivity in education is a direct product
of intersectionality, as it takes into consideration elements of
peoples' identity. Different, more inclusive styles of teaching have
gained traction as teachers continue to work towards accessibility for a
wider range of students, specifically those affected by disability.
These teaching styles also embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and
accessibility.
As Laura Gonzales and Janine Butler explain in their article, when
common language is unable to be reached, students may need to use other
methods of communication such as gestures, visuals, or even technology.
The research conducted on these students by both authors promote the
strengths of bilingual education and disability in writing. Teachers in
their classrooms also incorporate pedagogical methods for multimodal
composition, which create safe and productive learning environments for
students while also promoting intersectional methods of learning.
Both Gonzales and Butler incorporate their social justice movements for inclusion in their own classrooms.
Gonzales explains an introduction writing course to English
majors where students were able to compile and film short videos of
interviews with Indigenous people and interpreters. The purpose of the
project served as a form of representation for an underrepresented group
of people. In many instances, such as medical consultations, Indigenous
people are not offered interpreters, even when they are supposed to.
Gonzales uses this course as an example and opportunity for community
engagement where multiple forms of language were utilized, including
digital media, readings, and conversations.
Another example is Butler's pedagogical approach to incorporating
intersectionality, focusing on letting her disabled students
communicate through a variation of assignments. Examples of these
variations are video reflections or an analysis of digital spaces. The
video reflections are more geared towards mindful interactions. The
students first must consider their own environment and methods of
communication and either work with individuals who use the same methods
of communication or explore a new genre of communication from a
different community. After, the student must create a multimodal and
multilingual reflection of the interview in order to interpret and
process their own experiences and takeaways.
Next is the analysis of digital spaces, where students must take into
consideration how their publications or organizations properly reach
their target audience. Students are able to use their own identities as
inspiration for picking an organization/publication. Then, they must
write an in-depth report on Medium (a social platform) on how the
digital platform communicates with their audience, or doesn't. If published, this creates "an online audience" where students and other peers can directly interact and discuss with one another.
Both of these examples are ways Gonzales and Butler incorporate
their research into their own classrooms in order to engage with their
communities and incorporate intersectionality.
Writing programs on race and gender
Inclusion
of intersectionality is meant to "Trouble the Boundaries" and pave the
way for a more diverse writing program in Predominantly White
Institutions (PWI). Writing programs are very closely linked by the
influence of race and gender. Both of the authors Collin Lamout Craig
and Staci Maree write about their experiences in writing program's as
administrators in a predominantly white midwestern institution. One big
culture shock to them was the underrepresentation of people of color and
minorities in the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA)
meetings. The CWPA oversee the evolution of the program, introduce
revisions, implement university writing standards etc. Therefore,
reprogramming and the addressing of issues must first and foremost go
through the CWPA.
That is not to say any of the council members are at fault, it is a
mere observation to shed light on the issue at hand, power dynamics and
how they affect writing programs.
Dominant and minority relationships serve as a dimension that pushes
for change in order to reach common language. Consequently, a broader
composition in understanding helps construct identity politics in order
to reach an agreement. Craig then goes on to share her story when a well known professor approaches her and takes on an "It's not my problem" or "I can't teach these people"
attitude when he has an issue with another black RA. The professor then
goes on to say "He might take constructive criticism better from a
pretty woman like you than an old white guy like me."
Her example is one of many given in the article that address the issue
at hand with power dynamics within writing programs and PWI's. It
doesn't allow room for advice or consultation from those of other races
or gender. Instead, it simply passes on one problem from one demographic
to another.
In these cases taking into consideration intersectionality and how
prevalent they are in academia can help set up a system of
acknowledgment and understanding.
Researchers in psychology have incorporated intersection effects since the 1950s.
These intersection effects were based on studying the lenses of biases,
heuristics, stereotypes, and judgments. Psychologists have extended
research in psychological biases to the areas of cognitive and
motivational psychology. What is found, is that every human mind has its
own biases in judgment and decision-making that tend to preserve the
status quo by avoiding change and attention to ideas that exist outside
one's personal realm of perception.
Psychological interaction effects span a range of variables, although
person-by-situation effects are the most examined category. As a result,
psychologists do not construe the interaction effect of demographics
such as gender and race as either more noteworthy or less noteworthy
than any other interaction effect. In addition, oppression can be
regarded as a subjective construct when viewed as an absolute hierarchy.
Even if an objective definition of oppression was reached,
person-by-situation effects would make it difficult to deem certain
persons or categories of persons as uniformly oppressed. For instance,
black men are stereotypically perceived as criminals, which makes it
much more difficult for them to get hired for a job than a white man.
However, gay black men are perceived as harmless, which increases their
chances of getting employed and receiving bonuses, despite the fact that
gay males are also socially disadvantaged. The stereotype of gay men as
harmless helps black men transcend their reputation for criminality.
Several psychological studies have likewise shown that possessing
multiple oppressed or marginalized identities has effects that are not
necessarily additive, or even multiplicative, but rather, interactive in
complex ways.
One of the main issues that affects the research of
intersectionality is the construct problem. Constructs are what
scientists use to build blocks of understanding within their field of
study.
It is important because it gives us something to measure. As mentioned
previously, it is incredibly difficult to define oppression and,
specifically, the feeling of being oppressed and ways that different
kinds of oppression may interact as a construct. As psychology grows and changes its ability to define constructs, this research will likely improve.
