A Brief Introduction to Intersectionality

Disclaimer

After spending some time to consider Ms. Barga’s request to write an article on issues of discrimination, I caved and decided to tackle intersectionality. This article is meant to be a very short introduction, so I must apologize for leaving out the details. If there are mistakes in this article, please let me know.

Intersectionality is considered controversial in some branches of academia, but a short introduction will still be helpful in putting the conversations about discrimination many international students attending Western universities will inevitably hold into context. It is probably more advantageous to be introduced to intersectionality now rather than later.

Please note that I will not be offering a critique of intersectionality and/or its methodologies.

Overview

Intersectionality is a means of analysis which denies the possibility of separating class, race, sex, sexual orientation, and so on in any examination of societal oppression.

In a Prager U video from June of 2018, conservative ideologue Ben Shapiro describes intersectionality as “a form of identity politics in which the value of your opinion depends on how many victim groups you belong to.” I am not surprised that such a nonsensical and mal-researched video garnered over 5.6 million views in six months (the thumbs up to thumbs down is approximately 10:1). It is interesting that some internet personalities have such a poor understanding of intersectionality, especially when it can be easily Googled. [1]

Although there is a broader discussion to be had regarding the widespread ignorance of concepts such as intersectionality, this article will not delve into it. In this article, I will attempt a surface-level explanation of intersectionality as an analytical tool often applied in examinations of oppressive cultural or institutional systems (though the two are not always distinguishable). Throughout the article, I will make references back to Shapiro’s video.

My article will first begin with an exploration of intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” Next, I will give a summary of the development of intersectionality theory within the context of race, class, and gender. Then, I will provide practical or potential applications of intersectionality in healthcare. Resources used within this article will be linked at the very end.

By the end of this article, it may be evident that, as an analysis of “interlocking systems of power and oppression,” intersectionality is “not an account of personal identity but one of power.” [2]

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is definitively not, as Shapiro puts it, a mechanism which “takes your victim status and uses it as the basis for creating alliances with other victim groups.” Intersectionality is a means of analysis which denies the possibility of separating class, race, sex, sexual orientation, and so on in any examination of societal oppression. In other words, the methods of analytical categorisation used by the society and the state are interconnected and should not be examined independently of each other. [1][2]

For example, it can be observed that Caucasian Americans often have an economic and social advantage over African Americans who are often bound by their lack of quality living quarters, education, healthcare, and so on, all of which are dependent on the acquisition of capital. Here, a second societal category is introduced: even within the single group of African Americans, we can distinguish another marginalised group where wealthier Americans (in general) may exploit the poorest living in the most deplorable conditions for labour. Within that sector of the poorest African Americans, we can identify a third marginalised group: women are often paid less than men. The discrimination against a poor African American woman can arise from her race, gender, class, or all three combined. The function of intersectionality would then be to analyse the connection between these factors of often-times hierarchical discrimination within the context of the social sciences. [3]

Development

Intersectionality was first introduced within the context of anti-racist policies and feminist theory by the American civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 paper, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. In her paper, Crenshaw states that “[I]n race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women.” In short, Crenshaw calls for a revaluation of the analytical framework used to “translate ‘women’s experience’ or ‘the Black experience’ into concrete policy demands” by recognising the relation between the categories of race, sex, and class which causes one to be at a greater disadvantage rather than treating legal issues within the interests of the privileged group. [4]

Crenshaw does not think, as Shapiro says, that “America is a terrible place full of victim groups, each with their particular set of grievances” and that “these victim groups [should] get together and form a political coalition unified by the belief that the majority society has harmed them.” Instead, Crenshaw intended to close the bridge between discrimination of race, sex, and class in the conduct of the law as multiple forms of discrimination can simultaneously occur. Intersectionality is the result of abandoning the efforts of collectivised groups clustering to compare their victimhood to each other in a pseudo-contest to see who most accurately embodies a single type of struggle. Intersectionality, rather than examining the self, seeks to focus on the relation between different forms of oppression which may be placed on the self. [1][4]

Crenshaw constructs the following analogy for intersectionality: “Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.” [4]

It should not be surprising that intersectionality is one of many components in Marxist feminist theory, which has a more distinct focus on the capitalist political economy in fostering gender hierarchies. Marxist feminist Patricia Hill Collins writes that W.E.B. 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.” Collins notes that Du Bois omits gender as a form of social hierarchy which she incorporates in her 2000 paper, Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy, examining the intersection between race, class, and gender. She observes that the role of segregative marriage laws “work[s] to ensure that property controlled by the Whites would remain within White families,” thereby suppressing the economic freedom of black women. [5]

Even more solidly within the context of feminist theory, social economist Naila Kabeer describes gender inequality as being “more pervasive across societies than any other form of inequality, though it may take different forms in different societies” in her 2015 paper, Gender, Poverty, and Inequality: A Brief History of Feminist Contributions in the Field of International Development. Since “gender inequality is structured into the organisation of social relations in society,” Kabeer considers intersectionality to be crucial since gender inequality “intersects with [racism, classism, and other inequalities] in ways that intensify the disadvantages associated with other forms of inequality.” [6]

Applications

Intersectionality relies on some aspects of standpoint theory in that the acquisition of social knowledge is dependent on the cultural origins of an individual. This can be knowledge of the self, knowledge of family, or knowledge of constructs such as social institutions. For example, a particularly successful essayist of an unspecified minority group may feel alienated in a modern communal group as a result of the discrepancies in social knowledge. In this instance, the researcher cannot find solidarity in the individual, but in the workplace, field, behaviours, or interests he or she shares with the majority group. At the same time, the researcher has an epistemic advantage over the majority group due to his or her understanding of multiple cultural perspectives. Either way, in this scenario, the researcher is called “the outsider within.” [7]

For Shapiro to claim that intersectionality is when “you and I as individuals with our unique experiences, thoughts and ambitions count for nothing; our racial and sexual identity count for everything” is incredibly ignorant. Intersectionality neither denies individual experiences nor does it presuppose that race and sexual identity is the foundation of “everything.” Shapiro’s statement likely originates from a fundamental misunderstanding of standpoint theory. In the case of class, a single labourer’s standpoint does not encompass the entire standpoint of the working class; instead, the standpoints within the working class are subject to similar economic influences, the characteristics of which have multiple distinct manifestations in different socioeconomic pockets across races, genders, and so on. The similarities in these standpoints would provide solidarity, thus undoing the excessive atomisation of the self (i.e. the alienation induced by viewing labourers as units) encouraged by culture, politics, and the economy — but this doesn’t preclude the value of the individual. Intersectionality would be paradoxical without its emphasis on individual experiences to build these standpoints. [1][7]

In practice, intersectionality can be applied in any analysis of minority plight, whether that be related to education, healthcare, economics, laws and policies, and so on. The addition of intersectionality complicates what some people might wish to be a simple issue concerning race or class by introducing other social factors in people’s individual strata. For example, when faced with domestic abuse victims, intersectionality allows counsellors and doctors to take into account the history of racial prejudice in their respective fields which prevents minority groups from actively seeking help. The standpoints of individual minorities as the outsider within enable them to identify characteristics of those in the majority group, such as implicit racism, sexism, or classism which would otherwise be unnoticeable. As such, new approaches arising from intersectionality theory will attempt to subvert the implicit hierarchical social relationships between individual members of our society to uphold a just society.

End Notes

It is only increasingly problematic that the people have so poorly understood analytical frameworks such as intersectionality theory, critical theory, poststructural critique, and so on in spite of their status as valuable tools for dissecting and understanding culture and society. Regardless, these techniques, intersectionality theory included, are not infallible and have received fair criticism from academics within sociology and the humanities. It is crucial that these critiques are, contrary to what Prager U and Shapiro have attempted, done in good faith by informed individuals.

In closing, the intention of this article is not to promote intersectionality as the only correct technique of analysis or to demonize any social group. It is a reminder for individual students to be mindful of each other and to expand their understanding of social functions beyond the limitations of our textbooks.

Resources

The numbers in the list below correspond with the numbers after each paragraph (if there were any). Do not be limited by these links.

1. Ben Shapiro’s Prager U video. The transcript is available.
2. Intersectionality (Oxford Handbooks). A short introduction to intersectionality, especially within the context of feminist theory and ethnic studies.
3. Quick stats (with additional resources in the footnotes). The dates range from 2015 to 2017. Keep in mind that the statistics are not representative of every African American.
4. Crenshaw’s 1989 paper, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.
5. Jstor link to Collins’s 2000 paper for those who are interested.
6. Kabeer’s 2015 paper, published in the journal Taylor & Francis Online.
7. The IEP’s decent overview of the outsider within, as well as general feminist standpoint theory & controversies.