Intersectionality

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)

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)