Intersectionality

Description

Michael Rectenwald:

"“Intersectionality” is the axiomatic oppression-ranking framework that establishes a new social justice hierarchy based on the multiplicities of oppression as they may intersect and affect subjects in multiple, supposedly subordinated social categories. It is no less than a scale for weighing oppression. It then inverts the supposedly existing hierarchy on the basis of this intersectional oppression ranking, moving those on the bottom to the top, and vice versa. This is not a temporary feature of social justice but represents a hierarchical inversion that must be maintained to engender the animus and ressentiment necessary to continue fueling the movement.

This ranking system began with the work of the Hungarian and Soviet literary critic and Marxist philosopher György Lukács. In his book, History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács introduced a form of epistemology that has had an outsized impact ever since, serving as a source for postmodern theory and social justice.[2] The social justice notion that each person has their own truth based on their particular type of subordination can be traced to Lukács. He argued that the unique position of the working class within the social order and the relations of production provide the proletariat with a privileged vantage-point for discerning objective truth and called the theory “proletarian standpoint epistemology.” Lukács argued that reality under capitalism is a single objective reality. But the proletarian has a peculiar relationship to objective reality. The objective world strikes the proletarian differently than it does the capitalist. Like the capitalist, the proletarian is a self-conscious subject. However, unlike the capitalist, the proletarian is also a commodity, an object for sale on the market. The proletarian’s consciousness of the commodification of his selfhood contradicts his experience as living subject, a person with a subjective existence. The proletariat’s “self-consciousness of the commodity” (that is himself) explains the working class’s antagonism toward capitalism as Lukács saw it. While the proletariat fully grasps the contradiction of its self-conscious commodification, the class can only come to terms with the contradiction by upending and abolishing existing conditions.

Feminists and postmodern theorists later appropriated standpoint epistemology and siphoned it through various identity filters. It is the root of the contemporary social justice belief in the connection between identity and knowledge. Social justice holds that membership in a subordinated identity group grants members exclusive access to particular knowledge, their own knowledge. Members of dominant identity groups can­not access or understand the knowledge of subordinated others. For example, a white “cishetero” male (a white straight man who accepts the gender that he was “assigned at birth”) cannot have a black lesbian’s experience and therefore can’t access or understand her knowledge. Individuals within subordinated identity groups also have their own individual knowledge. For social justice believers, knowledge is personal, individual, and impenetrable to others. It is “muh knowledge.” I call this notion of knowledge “epistemological solipsism.” Under the social justice worldview, everyone is locked in an impenetrable identity chrysalis with access to a personal knowledge that no one else can reach." (https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/essays/2019/4/10/libertarianisms-versus-postmodernism-and-social-justice-ideology)

Discussion

Kristin Moe:

" “People don’t have one dimensional identities as human beings,” says Brooke Anderson—a Labor Fellow at the Oakland-based nonprofit, the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project—and the issues that affect them aren’t one-dimensional, either.

There’s a word for this kind of thinking: "intersectionality." And while the word has been around for more than 25 years, it’s being used more and more frequently all over in social justice movements today, from climate to reproductive rights to immigration. It’s a way of thinking holistically about how different forms of oppression interact in people’s lives. More recently, it's also led to a more collaborative form of organizing that reflects that, rather than taking on one issue at a time.

“Intersectionality” has become a buzzword in activist circles, at conferences, and in progressive media. Google searches for this term have gone up 400 percent since 2009. Last year’s Power Shift youth climate conference featured a workshop called “Why the Climate Movement Must Be Intersectional.” It’s a trendy word in academia, the subject of countless papers and panel discussions, and in the feminist blogosphere.

But is it more than that? Does adoption of this concept signal a sea change in social movement thinking away from single-issue platforms and toward a more holistic worldview, one that fosters strong alliances and therefore might help build a movement broad and complex enough to take on the myriad forms of economic, racial, and gender oppression we face?

Possibly—but first, it’s important to understand what intersectionality really means. The term has evolved since Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia University, first coined the term in a legal article published in 1989. In the article, she tried to contextualize a 1964 lawsuit against General Motors, in which five black women sued for discrimination. They were prohibited from working in the factory, they claimed, which was reserved for black men. But they were also prohibited from working in the front offices, which were for white women.

The workers' case was dismissed, Crenshaw says, because the discrimination they faced didn’t apply to all women, or all blacks—just to black women. It was a loophole in legal protection. But for Crenshaw, it also revealed a larger pattern: that individuals have multiple identities, and the oppression they experience is the interaction of all of those identities.

Crenshaw was able to articulate what so many black women already knew: You can’t tease these identities apart, or prioritize one over the others. We are all of these things. A “single axis” approach to social change, then—advocating just for women’s rights, or just for racial equality—only addresses part of the problem.

Intersectionality grew out of black women’s lived experience, became a flashpoint in academia (where it is still heavily debated), and has since trickled back out into the world of organizing. The meaning has expanded over the years from a concept specific to black women to something applicable to all types of marginalized identities—Asian, queer, immigrant, trans, low-income, Muslim. Bringing it to the movements

Some call intersectionality "divisive," because they believe it highlights the differences between people rather than the similarities. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The meaning of the term has evolved from a way of describing the problem—the interactions between different forms of oppression—to a way of describing the solution.

The challenge now seems to be to take the complex analysis of those problems, and create a movement that reflects that complexity." (http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/get-intersectional-why-your-movement-can-t-go-it-alone)

Intersectionality as an upper class phenomenom

"It’s true that every day, for example, every Black person faces the possibility of police violence. It’s also true, however, that every day, every Black person faces the definite obstacle of having to acquire money for food, rent, healthcare, and transit, etc. This can be extended in various ways by various analogies to women, the LGBT community, immigrants, and all oppressed groups.

It might sound insensitive to say that the main problem facing most women is actually not sexism. Obviously sexism is a huge problem and it’s not like it shouldn’t be opposed. But it’s actually more intersectional, more feminist, to oppose the problem which is a bigger problem for more women than sexism. The bigger, more immediate life-and-death problem facing most women is economics, money, the standard of living, capitalism. Of course it’s difficult to even separate capitalism and sexism, given that the way capitalism operates is so sexist and the distribution of money can literally be quantified as sexist in the form of unequal pay. Still, the most pressing problems facing most women are the most problems facing most men: how do I eat? How do I pay rent? Do I have a job, how do I get to it? Healthcare? How do I pay the expenses of kids or prevent kids from happening?

This is not to say demographic-specific demands should never be raised. This is to say that the Left should shift its emphasis and core messaging towards a greater imitation of the success achieved by the pivot in emphasis toward class struggle and economic demands undertaken by the Sanders campaign and by socialist Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant. It’s not black-and-white: raise demands, or never raise them. It’s about frequency and proportion — how much do you raise them, how much time and space and focus do you give them? — a question of balance.

A truly more intersectional coalition message would place a primary emphasis on class struggle and economic demands, while still raising demographic-specific demands, precisely in order to reflect the fact that economic problems are the primary, biggest problems of doubly-oppressed groups, and in fact economic problems even affect doubly-oppressed groups more than the rest of the working class in general. There is also a different context for how and where such demands would be raised — rather than waging a rainbow of a million single-issue campaigns, the Left might focus resources on class organizing and fight for diversity, inclusion, tolerance, and against discrimination in the context of the workplace, etc, and then return to trying to affect laws at the political/national level once we have actually built a mass labor base to have a real impact upon them.

What I am trying to do is push back against a de-classed, over-specialized form of intersectionality that displays no interest in building class unity or an ability to work with ordinary people. Who is this type of intersectionality actually geared towards? Is it towards middle-class academic elites of oppressed groups, as have often been proposed? Actually I think the truth is even worse. In truth I think this non-proletarian form of “intersectionality” (is it really intersectionality if it doesn’t include the working masses?) is actually geared towards the upper-middle class demographic of academia and NGOs, and thus rather than being some kind of oppressed comprador bourgeoisie project (though it may sometimes be that), is actually mostly embraced by a white, sometimes male upper-middle class scene. Obviously it is not geared towards the actual working (and non-working) masses of doubly-oppressed groups, who might as well exist on another planet from these effete intra-Left disputes and may literally never hear the word “intersectionality” in their lifetimes.

Against the expectations of moralistic activists, people who focus on class or economic demands may actually develop a much closer relationship with people and communities of doubly-oppressed groups than activists who focus on special demands specific to those communities ever do." (https://imperiumadinfinitum.wordpress.com/2016/11/11/class-is-more-intersectional-than-intersectionality/?)

Examples

"Examples of issue organizing across issues abound: National Nurses United lobbying to stop Keystone XL; The Black Women’s Health Imperative taking on the myriad ways in which the bodies of women of color are put at risk; “Undocuqueers”—undocumented, LGBTQ immigrants—lobbying for citizenship rights for same-sex couples." (http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/get-intersectional-why-your-movement-can-t-go-it-alone)