Intersectionality

You can't be reasonably acquainted with Western feminist discourse in 2020 without having come across this term weaving its way through academic essays and Buzzfeed articles alike . As with all buzzwords, its substance is gradually scooped out until we are left with the bare husk, merely representing the rough dimensions of the concept at hand and hollow to invocation, and eventually, anyone who wants to taken seriously does better to distance themselves from it, whilst finding new ways to articulate the same truth. In "Mapping the Margins", Kimberle Crenshaw extensively defends the valence of intersectionality, and identity politics, not as an abstraction of debate, but as a necessary recognition of political/existential reality of minorites and a reasonable framework through which to battle oppression. One of the charges she deals with is the idea that social constructs such as the construction of Blackness and gender should not be valid sourcess of an identity and therefore, an identity politics. Her response to this is eloquent:  "At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for dis-empowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it." This makes sense. Whilst it may appear sound to "vacate" an identity that has been the basis of your oppression, how do you conceptualize your oppression, and therefore tackle it, without naming it first? And will its name not find its home in the identity assigned to you, the cause of your suffering and will your defence not then start there? To deprive the oppressed of the marker of their oppression is to neutralize them, to deprive them of a language through which they can identify their suffering, and alleviate it. Intersectionality then merely becomes the recognition that your identity is informed "polyvalently" numbering morbidly equal to sources of oppression. If you can conceptualize the minority subject as a fortress beseiged on all sides, what is the value of only guarding one?  

This creates a new problem. Audre Lorde famously said, "There is no hierarchy of oppressions". But, one of the major charges leveled against intersectionality from within leftist-feminist circles is the charge that it divides and weakens activism. In a harrowing anecdote from Crenshaw's article, there is an instance where non-English speaking victim of domestic assault is denied shelter and the right of translator because it will "further victimize the victim". This is exactly the kind of pitfall non intersectional liberationism finds itself in: a limited and abstract understanding of victimhood which is not adaptive enough to accommodate those it champions itself for. So the ultimate problem the elite (white/male) sectors of feminism and racism (respectively) confront with intersectionality is not the splintering of the cause, but the audibility of voices among which theirs might be only one. It is ironic that intersectionality is dismissed as divisive when it is, in fact, a call for inclusivity and cohesion. The calls against it merely mirror the racism/sexism that white women and Black men do not want to be forced to confront. Intersectionality means reoccupying and fighting for those very identities that you have been asked to "vacate" by your oppressor, sometimes ally, or both. Moreover, if identities in modern politics are informed by oppression, they exist on either side of each, so for instance, whiteness too is defined by an oppression, but from the side of the oppressor. Intersectionality means not only recognizing the multiplicity of oppressions that intersect to locate you as multiply oppressed, but it is an uncomfortable realization for the Black man and white woman to locate themselves as oppressors too. The matrix grows: race, class, sexuality, gender are some of the better known and ubiquitous markers of discrimination, and taking inventory of one's suffering is a morbid marker of indiviuality, but perhaps we can be hopeful enough to see it as a process of healing. If our myriad oppressions are our wounds, our resistance on all fronts means tending to the wound, and the several identities we reclaim and fight will one day be scars, markers of pain, yes, but more importantly reminders that they are past, and testament to our power to heal.