11 Theory of Intersectionality

Debjani Chakravarthy

epgp books

 

 

 

 

Introduction: Intersectionality may be defined as an approach to analyze how social and cultural roles, identities, and categories intertwine to produce multiple axes of oppression. What does this mean? Simplistically, if you think about individual identities—perhaps your own—you know that the answer to the question ―who are you?‖ is complex. You cannot describe yourself completely and effectively in a sentence; neither can your gender, religion, social class, or political affiliation tell the whole story of your life and self. Just as your identity constitutes of your social roles, social status, personal history and future aspirations— any individual or group identity has a similar multifaceted composition. Intersectionality is used as an important theoretical paradigm in sociology, women and gender studies, and critical race theory. The complexity and compounding of social roles, social processes, and their histories that create various outcomes, such as oppression and privilege cannot be understood by concentrating on one analytical category (such as gender), or one source of oppression (such as powerful men in a heteropatriarchal society). We have to understand identity categories as entwined, and social processes as intersecting.

 

Identity categories such as ―male,‖ ―female,‖ ―Brahmin,‖ ―Muslim,‖ ―middle-class,‖ or ―differently abled‖ are not merely labels; they have long, sometimes painful histories of social construction and suppression of desires and rights. Identities have associated social and signifying practices; they are located in various socio-economic hierarchies. Patriarchy in a heteronormative society—sometimes known as heteropatriarchy— is such a hierarchical order that accepts and rewards people‘s gender expression/identity and sexual orientation. To be ―normal,‖ you are expected to be straight, cisgender, i.e. identifying with the gender given at birth, married at a ―suitable‖ age and raise a family. Thus, social acceptance is contingent on not just gender expression and sexuality, but also age, and economic status. Having a career, giving children a good and stable home, being a good citizen, being healthy—these are not merely issues of character, will-power and morality, they are also dependent on one‘s socio-economic status. Within a patriarchal system, social expectations placed on men and women are different by gender and men are supposed to dominate women in terms of wielding power within the family and society. This system of domination is not merely contingent on a man‘s gender, but on other aspects of his identity. You might notice that not all men dominate women, not all women are oppressed, not all men are breadwinners, and not all women are stay-at-home mothers. The overarching theory of intersectionality helps us understand not just how social structures operate, but also how we exercise our agency within given social structures. It helps us think critically and see clearly beyond stereotypes and helps us understand not just oppression, but also privilege. This in turn helps us be better scholars, activists, and better stakeholders in a continuously changing society. Intersectionality teaches us that identities are not monolithic, and that social realities have multiple, intersecting and sometimes hidden facets that we must pay attention to.

 

Intersectionality as a concept emerged from Black Feminist Legal Studies. Black feminist tradition studies marginalization from the perspective of race relations and racial domination; it studies current social processes as rooted in African American history and the lived experience of marginalized races. In the next section we will take up the intellectual legacy and current theoretical work on intersectionality and learn about Black Feminist thought in the process.

 

Section 1: History, Development, and Some Major Theoreticians: The term ―intersectionality‖ was coined by the feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw. Crenshaw wrote an article in 1989 titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” where she attempted to understand how a single categorical axis of oppression/discrimination (race) erases Black women as a theoretical category, and imports such erasure to legal reforms and activism. She showed, like other Black feminists before her, that Black women are systematically excluded from feminist theory and sometimes anti-racist politics.

 

Being a legalscholar, Crenshaw made her arguments through analysis of three court cases. She outlined the problem of a doctrinal response to discrimination, where the experience of racism must be aligned to Black men‘s experiences— and the experience of sexism, to white women‘s. Therefore, Black women were protected only to the extent that their experiences coincided with the experiences of either of the two groups. In DeGraffenreid vs. General Motors, the court refused to recognize that there is compounded discrimination against black female employees. They analyzed the claims of the plaintiff by using records of white female employment as the ―historical base‖ for conditions of female employment in the organization. The experience of white female employees did not demonstrate the very specific forms of discrimination suffered by Black female employees. In Moore vs. Hughes Helicopter, Inc.for a woman who claimed to have been discriminated as a Black woman was not allowed to use overall sex disparity statistics in the company. The experience of sexism of a Black woman was not considered sexism at all, no matter what the statistics projected. In Payne vs. Travenolthe court held that Black women could not represent an entire community of blacks ―due to presumed class conflicts in cases where sex additionally disadvantaged Black women. As a result, in the few cases where Black women are allowed to use overall statistics indicating racially disparate treatment Black men may not be able to share in the remedy (Crenshaw 1989, 148).‖

 

What does this mean? Black women‘s Blackness or femaleness continues to place their needs and perspectives at the margin of feminist and Black civil rights agenda. The singularity of the burden (one‘s race, OR sex OR class) becomes THE defining factor in rights, theorization, jurisprudence and justice.

 

This kind of monolithic thinking about identity places the most vulnerable in society at precarious positions, from a policy as well as public opinion perspective. When you think about a poor village of mostly Dalit people— as an activist or policymaker— will you focus on the villagers‘ caste oppression? Their abject poverty?Their segregation despite untouchability being illegal in India?The lack of educational and civil amenities in the village? Why not everything all at once? You might have to participate in solving one problem at a time, but if you see the problems as entwined and intersecting— and it is likely that the people will tell you it is so, always a good idea to work with people rather than for them based on your own pre-conceived assumptions—chances are you will have a clearer understanding of the situation. This is exactly what Crenshaw advocated.

 

The problem of social justice, Crenshaw averred, is not a lack of political will, but a disturbing, uncritical acceptance of the dominant paradigm of discrimination, which adopts a single issue framework. The parameters of discrimination are tightly defined so as to make the process simplistic. This marginalizes people whose experiences cannot be explained through a singular axis of oppression. Crenshaw wrote about marginalized women in the United States. The theoretical framework however, has universal applicability.

 

Let us take a few steps back and understand the Black feminist tradition that intersectionality emerges from. Patricia Hill Collins, eminent sociologist and theorist of Intersectionality states that, ―Black feminist thought demonstrates Black women’s emerging power as agents of knowledge. By portraying African-American women as self-defined, self-reliant individuals confronting race, gender, and class oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought speaks to the importance that oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought speaks to the importance that knowledge plays in empowering oppressed people (Collins 1990, 221).‖

 

Thus, Black Feminist standpoint is all about expanding the boundaries of feminist theories and activism and including multiple experiences, perspectives, and standpoints in it. Feminist theory is not merely the domain of middle-class White women (notice the intersectional categories) or upper class academicians. Everyone‘s voices must be included lest we start believing in only one form of oppression, sexism— affecting one identity category, white women who wrote about their experience that circulated in academia and media as feminist consciousness.

 

Patricia Hill Collins (1990, 3) emphasized the need for looking at race, class, and gender as ―interlocking systems of oppression.‖ This meant a radical re-visioning of how we understand oppression and privilege collectively and individually. We all exist, Collins theorized, in a matrix of domination where structures of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, religion determine our experiences. It is difficult to pry one structure apart and label it as most or least oppressive.

 

Kimberle Crenshaw has argued that mainstream feminist thought derives a lot of theoretical and dialogical strength from Black women‘s history and experiences. Yet lessons from power oratory or writings (such as Sojourner Truth‘s ―Ain‘t I a Woman?‖) are never fully assimilated or applied in feminist intervention. The challenges to patriarchy embedded in Black feminist writings could be, and is useful to feminist theory, but feminist theory per se couldn‘t be useful to Black women because, written from a privileged white feminine perspective, the claims and premises were inapplicable and unresponsive to women of color. The authoritative universal voice of the white woman is quite similar to that of ―non-racial‖ ―non-gendered‖ ‗objective‖ white man‘s. The feminist voices arising from a similar socio-cultural context, concentrate only on gender, but never race. There is no understanding of ―different‖ social, historical, economic and political contexts that shape lives within the Black community where notions of ―men‖ ―women‖ ―power‖ and ―patriarchy‖ are differently understood and applied. Another example where myopic thinking operates in feminist theory is in the discourse on rape that is understood as male control over female sexuality, never as an instrument of racial terror or economic domination. That explains why prosecution of a white male for raping a Black female—this was common in the era of slavery— was historically unheard of. Yet the protection of white female sexuality was often the pretext for terrorizing the Black community. In the United States, till date, Black men are seen as a threat and are arrested and incarcerated regularly and unfairly. They are often the target of police brutality.

 

Neither Black liberation politics nor feminisms that came together during the civil rights struggle of the 50s and 60s America can ignore ―the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents (1989, 166).‖ There must be an understanding that the sources of oppression are multiply fused, often not clearly identifiable or explicable by prevailing singular paradigms. Crenshaw believed that a more effective language and framework needs to develop that recognize the ―intersection‖ and those that are impaired by their location within. The issue is not so much of a political will than of limited understanding of life experiences shaped by various forms of disadvantaged roles and identities. The existing discourse on discrimination needs to be revised and re-centered, which would lead to more effective politics, policies and legislations. Till date, she is promoting the usefulness of intersectionality as a powerful tool of sociological/legal analysis.

 

In recent years, scholars such as Leslie McCall and Jennifer Nash have written about the complexity and significance of Intersectionality. McCall (2005) has delineated three approaches to address the methodology of Intersectionality. ―Anticategorical complexity‖ is based on a methodology that deconstructs analytical categories, because social life is too complex ―overflowing with multiple and fluid determinations of both subjects and structures—to make fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences. This approach has its roots in feminist writings of 1980s ―when hegemonic feminist theorists, poststructuralists, and antiracist theorists almost simultaneously launched assaults on the validity of modern analytical categories (McCall 2005, 1776).‖ Deconstruction of categories such as women, gender, Black was akin to deconstruction of inequality. Language was seen to create categorical reality, not the other way around. The second approach, intracategoricalcomplexity takes marginalized intersectional identities as an analytic starting point ‘…in order to reveal the complexity of lived experiencewithin variously disadvantaged groups. This approach usually utilizes the case study method. The third method, intercategorical complexity “requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions (ibid. 1773)‖ Relationships and interactions between groups and categories are more importance than (the futility or importance) of the categories themselves. Starting from traditional categories of identity this approach appreciates that ―no single dimension of overall inequality can adequately describe the full structure of multiple, intersecting, and conflicting dimensions of inequality (ibid. 1791).‖ This approach uses quantitative techniques and large data sets, as well as methodological triangulation. The distinction between qualitative and quantitative method and their philosophical underpinnings often create barriers for research on intersectionality. Quantitative method can be used successfully to conduct research on intersectionality taking the intercategorical approach.

 

Jennifer Nash (2008) has taken the discussion on intersectionality beyond methodological discussions to rethink its theoretical importance. She believes that intersectionality subverts race/gender binaries in the service of theorizing identity in a more complex fashion. The destabilization of race/gender binaries is particularly important to enable robust analyses of cultural sites. Intersectionality trains scholarship to come to terms with the legacy of exclusions of multiply marginalized subjects from feminist and anti-racist work, and the impact of those absences on both theory and practice. Intersectionality, by focusing on the ways in which the differences between various social groups and categories are constructed, is useful to understand how these differences become relevant to politics confronting simultaneity of oppression. Intersectionality argues for the new conceptualizations of categories and their role in politics, ―rather than seeking an abolition of categories themselves.‖

 

How can the categories of identity and history be re-conceptualized? In the next section we discuss three basic concepts within the theory of Intersectionality that sheds light on this. If you are using intersectionality in your own analyses, activism, and research—regard this section as a conceptual toolbox.

 

Section 2: Basic Concepts

 

You can use these concepts like tools to reveal the hidden, often largely invisible nature of oppression. Add these to your intellectual/conceptual toolbox for actively understanding issues of a gendered society. These concepts give names to some issues we actively experience but sometimes have no name or expression for.

 

Intersection:Intersectionality is the notion that individual and community lives are located at a social location of intersecting identities. These identities can be race/ethnicity; gender; social class; religion; age; (dis)ability status; nationality; geo-political location and linguistic abilities. Feel free to add to that list; as you know, social/political/individual identities are numerous. Due to these intersections, our identities are composite and contingent.

 

Crenshaw explained the notion of intersections with her analogy of a traffic intersection, or what is commonly known as a traffic junction in India. She explains:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic though 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. Judicial decisions which premise intersectional relief on a showing that Black women are specifically recognized as a class are analogous to a doctor‘s decision at the scene of an accident to treat an accident victim only if the injury is recognized by medical insurance. Similarly, providing legal relief only when Black women show that their claims are based on race or sex is analogous to calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified. But it is not always easy to construct an accident: sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In this case the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered and the involved parties simply get back in their cars and zoom away (1989, 149).‖

 

Thus focusing on ONE aspect of identity means creating a simplistic notion of singularity of the burden of oppression and taking an either/or approach. A both and approach could work better. Applying intersections as a visual clarifies issues of intersectionality and signifies feminist theories‘ moving away from the difference/similarity approach towards an explanation of relational and interlocking processes. To understand identities at an intersection is to focus on the ways in which the differences between various social groups and categories are constructed as well as to understand how these differences become relevant to politics confronting simultaneity of oppression.

 

Interlocking Axes of Oppression: This expression means that oppression is constantly being supported by systems of privilege, and that multiple identities entwine to produce this oppression and/or privilege. For Patricia Hill Collins, this concept is a way to understand how race, gender and class intersect to produce oppression at individual and institutional levels. This is concept is a move away from additive models of oppression that rank the identities as more or less marginalized. She states:

 

Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities for new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity. Race, class, and gender represent the three systems of oppression that most heavily affect African-American women. But these systems and the economic, political, and ideological conditions that support them may not be the most fundamental oppressions, and they certainly affect many more groups than Black women. Other people of color, Jews, the poor white women, and gays and lesbians have all had similar ideological justifications offered for their subordination. All categories of humans labeled Others have been equated to one another, to animals, and to nature(1990, 225).

 

Interlocking axes of oppression also account for the fact that each individual or community is located in a matrix of domination whereby they derive some reward and penalty for being located in various intersections, sometimes complying, sometimes resisting, and sometimes undecided/immobile/neutral. Intersectionality sensitizes one to the hegemonic moves that legitimize the concept of a self-referencing, unified subject of modernity by emphasizing ―that different dimensions of social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 76).‖

 

Identities within the Matrix of Domination:Interlocking systems of racism, sexism, classism etc. strengthen the larger and complex systemsof oppression such as patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. Patriarchy, as you know, is a social system whereby males wield power and control in society. Therefore, the system of patriarchy is contingent of people fulfilling social expectations tied to their gender and sexuality. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, social class is also central to one‘s appropriate patriarchal performance. Since patriarchy and heterosexism, or heterosexuality as the only normal way of being goes hand in hand, scholars and activists use the term heteropatriarchy often. Capitalism as we all know is about free markets and perfect competition that thrives on the labor of the unfree—the slaves, the low-wage workers, the lower caste. Capitalism is a system of domination that creates and encourages discrimination in the form of racism, sexism, and ageism. Capitalism perpetuates classism. Colonialism, defined as power and control over people and spaces by making them economically dependent and drained counts on the support for patriarchy, its motives being deeply capitalist. Profit motive drives not just capitalism, but colonialism also, and colonizers try to hide that logic by talking about the colonies‘ ―barbaric‖ religious and gender practices.

 

Notice how systems of oppression intersect? Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, Black feminist scholars explain this phenomenon by the term ―matrix of domination‖ and ―politic of domination‖ respectively. Varied forms of oppression, for bell hooks, come together ―…like a house, they share the foundation, but the foundation is the ideological beliefs around which notions of domination are constructed (2015, 175).‖

 

Section 3: Intersection of Gender, Caste,Religion, and Class in India.

 

As you know, issues of religion and state, nationalism and democracy can rarely be separated in India. Issues of women‘s rights are inextricably connected with issues of social class and developmental paradigms, the caste system and caste politics, religion and religious fundamentalisms, and issues of gender and globalization. Let us look at the issues of Uniform Civil Code (henceforth UCC), affirmative actions, and women‘s movements in India intersectionally.

 

How can we use intersectionality to analyze the non-implementation of the civil code? UCC has organized and unified two kinds of social movements in India, the women‘s movement and the religious fundamentalist or the Hindutva movement. Another stakeholder is the changing ruling regime at the center. It is interesting to note that while feminist legal activists in India have been demanding a UCC— a demand that brought various factions of women‘s movements in India together in rare moments of consensus, contemporary feminist legal activism has distanced itself from the UCC debate. In the 1950s, feminist demands for more egalitarian laws led to the secularization of various Hindu laws resulting in Hindu Code Bill and the Hindu Marriage Act. The state continued to make changes in Hindu Laws and there is a history of case laws that attempts to balance between the fundamental right of religious expression and freedom and issues of women‘s rights and human rights. However, in spite of feminist leanings towards a UCC that will standardize civil laws and eliminate traditional oppression of women in all religious communities, no ruling regime attempted to actually go down the path of introducing a bill and amending the constitution to make UCC a reality. The barriers are enormous. The simplistic idea that the best legal practices from various religious laws are to be codified as one common body of law applicable to all citizens is clearly problematic. Religious groups, spiritual practices, and belief systems in India are deeply heterogeneous. Our uneven democracy is marked by irresoluble diversity. Uniform Civil Code if often posited as an issue of gender and religion, but what about regional variations in gender relations and religious practices? How can we unify those?

 

Hindu nationalist political parties and fundamentalist organizations aimed to make minority communities subject to Hindu laws, which before some of the secularist reforms were extremely gender/class/caste unjust, and still can be interpreted that way. Actually all religious laws, all over the world, taking into account the intersectional matrices of gender/class/caste/religion/sexualities/formal citizenship are usually unjust in varying degrees. They serve the purposes of propertied, high caste heterosexual males well, completely ignoring the rights of women and other marginalized social groups.

 

Historically in India, Women‘s groups and feminist activists have recognized gender injustice in these laws and have demanded secular and uniform laws. However, since the groundbreaking Shah Bano case in 1986, the women‘s movement has had to shift its position because Hindu right lobbied for the imposition of the uniform code and linked this demand with majoritarian politics of Hindu fundamentalist domination. 1With that, the broad ideological consensus that the women‘s movement had achieved in the 1970s and early 80‘s broke down. While a section of the movement (including Muslim women‘s organizations) denounced the outcry arguing that Muslim Personal Law was indeed oppressive in nature, another section denounced the judgement itself as anti-Muslim rather than pro-women.

 

This stirred up the existing debate that waged right from the independence about personal laws being the site of constitutional contradictions between fundamental rights to religious communities (and minorities) and fundamental rights of women as citizens. Intersectionality can problematize the binaries and essentialist identity categories in the UCC debate namely gender/religious affiliation/class/caste and as it become clear in the Shah Bano case—notions of age and motherhood. Shah Bano finally did not accept the maintenance the court awarded her;it seems that she publicly retracted from the Supreme Court Judgment for the cause of being a sincere Muslim first. Thus she chose poverty over excommunication.

1The bare facts of the Shah Bano case are: Shah Bano, a poor divorced Muslim woman in her 60s approached the courts to make her husband pay maintenance, which he had since their divorce in 1978 refused to. On April 23, 1985, in the Mohamed Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and ors) case, the Supreme Court pronounced a landmark judgement compelling the husband to provide maintenance to the ex-wife. This dismissed the appeal Ahmed Khan had made: he had claimed that since Shah Bano was no longer his wife (after the triple talaq), and since he had already paid her maintenance for the iddat period, under Islamic personal law he was not supposed to do anything else. The Madhya Pradesh High Court had in 1979 ordered Ahmed Khan to pay a monthly maintenance to Shah Bano as per section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Ahmed Khan in his appeal asserted that section 125 conflicted with his religious rights. He had fulfilled the obligation of paying the mehr in accordance with section 127 (3) (b) of the Islamic Personal Law. The Supreme Court upheld the M.P High Court‘s decision reasoning that section 127 (3) (b) did not indemnify the Muslim husband against a maintenance order under section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, if the ex-wife was in need of maintenance. In such cases the provisions of the Criminal Procedure code would take precedence over Islamic personal law. The court supported its judgement by detailed citations from relevant ayats and suras of the Koran that instruct the husband to provide for their divorced wives, if the wife was unable to provide for herself, till her remarriage or death. This led to a huge outcry amidst sections of the Muslim community all over India, and it catapulted to a national controversy. Reactionary Muslim pontiffs and their supporters challenged the right of the judiciary to interfere in their personal laws and interpreted the judgement as an attack to their religious identity. To pacify the segment of Muslims enraged by the Shah Bano judgement, a hastily drafted bill named The Muslim Women‘s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) was moved in the parliament on 25th February 1986. The Bill was passed with a resounding majority. This bill (Act) was criticized by the women‘s organizations on several grounds.

 

Recent movements against gender-violence in India focus not just on gender, but also location, caste and class. Every cause taken up by women‘s movements in India: anti-price rise, anti-dowry and violence, anti-rape culture, to name a few, were rarely ever just about women or just about gender. In terms of affirmative action embodied in the Women‘s Reservation Bill, there have caste-based opposition as well as support. Some people who were seemingly opposed to the Mandal Commission are enthusiastic about women‘s reservation –a step towards inclusion and representation of women in Indian democracy. During Mandal Commission, many people seemed opposed to it from standpoints of caste, meritocracy, and social class. Some people including sociologists, such as G.S. Ghurye found reservation to be antinationalist and patronizing, a move reminiscent of colonial divide and rule.2Sociologist Sujata Patel noted how caste as a crucial identity category of analysis was glossed over in the social science literature on the Mandal Commission. Patel(1995) has argued how the violent, fatal, suicidal protests against the reservations manifest a crisis of social formation in India; where agents are juxtaposed and pitted against the ―other‖ by the state or people in power. This crisis has its roots in anti-colonial nationalist mobilization whereby religion, caste and class become salient identities and they are connected sociologically through theories of communalism, casteism, and reservation; yet economics and theories of development are legitimized as the focus of the Indian nation state, and the aforementioned identities are legitimized in political ideology and mobilization. This theoretical and embodied instability can be analyzed through the theory of intersectionality. Sometimes it is difficult to separate politics, standpoints, and identities, and intersectionality points at the possibility of studying them as a compounded crisis of a democracy with many colonial features intact. The next time you hear about an issue on the media or in academia, notice whether one identity or ideology takes precedence over the other.3 Perhaps intersectionality will inspire you to dig deeper under the surface to see who are the real stakeholders and social actors, and whose voice remains silenced.

 

Conclusion: What Intersects in and Around You?

2Nicholas Dirks (2001) has argued that ―Ghurye may not have been the first to argue against the policy of reservation nd its effects of politicizing caste, but he made the most eloquent, academically sound critique of the contemporary relationship of caste and politics in the decades surrounding independence. Further Ghurye was perhaps the first serious scholar to suggest that the politicization of caste was not merely a natural outgrowth of the traditional institution but a conscious design of British colonial policy (2001, 249).‖ Notice how caste intersects with colonialism to erase its traditional history of oppression and become re-historicized as a colonial apparatus of divide and rule.

 

3SharmilaRege (2011), while making a strong case for intersections of identity, language and sociology, states that: ―The language of ‗good sociology‘ continues to be structured by the binaries of body/mind, tradition/modernity, social/political, social world/knower, experience/knowledge, objectivism/subjectivism, and theoretical Brahman/empirical Shudra. Language of good sociology and those of sociologies emerging from disruptions of narratives of the national-modern stand as if on two sides, talking past each other or at each other.‖ Have you experienced this as a student of sociology? If so, imagine how the theory of intersectionality can address the issue of binary thinking/speaking.

 

 

Intersectionality teaches us to consider how systems of oppression mutually constitute each other; that colonialism strengthens capitalism, capitalism pushes certain kinds of lifestyles and privileges one identity over the other; that democracy simultaneously encourages and discourages inclusion and equity; that feminist movements can be simultaneously unjust and equitable. Women‘s movements are rarely only about women: such movements often recognize that the very idea of a ―woman‖ is co-created by connected processes of colonialism, casteism/colorism/racism, heteropatriarchy, and religion.

 

Look carefully around you. How do identities and communities form? What about your own identity? Have you ever felt uncomfortable on the first day of class or during a quick conversation with a stranger where you had to introduce yourself or describe who you are in just a sentence, may be two? We are complex human beings and social actors with multiple identity categories rolled into one ―self,‖ fulfilling multiple social roles and overlapping, sometimes contradictory social expectations. Our complex realities, experiences and aspirations are hard to capture in so few words and impossible to be reduced to unitary references. When we say ―I am a student,‖ or ―I am from Mumbai,‖ or ―I am working towards a degree in sociology and want to be in politics someday,‖ we are highlighting some aspects of our lives that we are proud of or feel comfortable sharing with others. When we talk about ourselves, we usually do not refer to our basic visible or invisible identities such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, and religious beliefs (or lack thereof). This dilemma you face while describing who you are is one of intersectionality at a personal, individual, micro-level. Due to underlying assumptions and stereotypes about identity categories and the fact that they intersect in our lives, it is difficult to express who we are and how our realities are formed by trying to decide on which one identity takes precedence. This problem is also true of communities and often tied inextricably to civil rights and social justice. Have you ever felt that you are not absolutely oppressed or privileged—that you are both simultaneously? Think about whether the theory of intersectionality offers an explanation for that. Intersectionality also helps us see beyond our differences and find common grounds—however conditionally— to create social justice and social movements.

you can view video on Theory of Intersectionality

Bibliography:

  • Brah, A. and Phoenix, A. 2004.Ain‘t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality. Journal of International Women‘s Studies, 5 (3): 75-86.
  • Collins, P. H. 1998. It‘s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation. Hypatia 13(3): 62–82. _______ 1990.Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
  • Crenshaw, K. W. 1989.Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.University of Chicago Legal Forum 14: 538–554.
  • Crenshaw, K. W. 1991.Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299.
  • Dirks, N. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Ghurye, G. S. 2008. Caste and Race and India. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.
  • Hooks, Bell. 2015. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. New York: Routledge. ___ 2000.Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End Press.
  • McCall, L. 2005. ―The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30.3:1771-1800.
  • Nash, J. C. 2008. “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89, 1-15.
  • Patel, S. 1995. ―The Ideological and Politcial Crisis of Early Nineties: On Mandal, Mandir and Communal Tensions,‖ in Savur, M. andMunshi, I.( Ed.) Contradictions in Indian Society. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
  • Phoenix, A., and P. Pattynama. 2006. Editorial: Intersectionality. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 187–192.
  • Rege, S. 2011. ―Exorcising the Fear of Identity: Interrogating the ‗Language Question‘ in Sociology and Sociological Language,‖ in S. Patel (ed.) Doing Sociology in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  • Shields, S. A. 2008.”Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective,” Sex Roles 59: 301-11. Walby, S. 2007.Complexity Theory, Systems Theory, and Multiple Intersecting Social Inequalities.Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37(4): 449–470.