Intersectionality

Crenshaw’s groundbreaking 1989 article, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’, explored the intertwined nature of marginalization which the black women faced. They belonged to two ‘marginalized’ identities, and neither could, on its own, account for every aspect of marginalization they experienced. What was even more problematic was the fact that anti-racism and feminism presented these women with the dilemma of having to choose a struggle, a question of either this or that, and having to necessarily forego one critique if adopting the other. Written for a legal journal, the article first introduced the concept of intersectionality, which was to gain immense popularity in the upcoming years, both as a legal/policy and a conceptual framework, and a feminist political slogan. This blog aims to explore the ways in which intersectionality has proven itself to be productive. As we will be able to appreciate, intersectionality not only problematized the idea of ‘categories’, but it also helped in pinning down abstract antiracist and feminist rhetoric to reality, thus making the politics more representative and connected to reality.  

The foremost problem which is addressed through intersectionality is that of categories. In this age of identity politics, the debate of what exactly identity is and how they it can be conceptualized is of immense importance and has much bearing on how the politics will work out. As pointed out above, black women happened to belong to two ‘identities’ at the same time. Their marginalization has intertwined implications and roots, since this put them at a location where no one else can be, neither black men nor white women. Yet the politics to mitigate this marginalization had two divergent manifestations; that of feminism (to counter marginalization based on gender) and anti-racism (to counter marginalization based on race and color). If these categories remained to be identified as two divergent one with their own separate politics to react to it, the problems of these black women could hardly be realized and mitigated, since as Crenshaw has shown, their marginalization was intersectional ie racism and sexism in their cases went hand in hand. To really address their problems, foremost the categories had to be reimagined, and the essentialist idea of these categories as being a) mutually exclusive, and b) having internal uniformity, to be discarded. This is exactly what intersectionality succeeded in doing, and not even restricted to this only. Instead it brought categories such as class, age, ability, religion etc into the frame and in question, and sought to explore how a) they were all intertwined both in individual personalities and in social implications, and b) they were internally much diverse, owing from positioning in each category to determine what really did the person face, and how that could be addressed.

What this resulted in doing was also to rethink liberation politics and who gets to set the agenda in it. Formerly, it was being set by the more privileged in the bracket simply because there were little substantial arguments to be found on who was benefitting from such politics, even though certain groups were certainly enjoying the better deal. For feminism it were the white women, for the antiracism it were the men. Black women lost out in getting their agendas to table in both these liberation politics, simply because their intersectional nature of oppression didn’t permit them to have the status to set agenda. With intersectionality and the awareness that such liberation movements based on such blanket categories only benefitted the internally privileged ones, the black women could seek out their own struggle with a praxis which would focus on their marginalization and realities rather than that of an exclusive elite. This can also be read as a way of bringing down abstract conceptual frameworks of liberation to reality, a reality which was being brushed under the rug previously when the categories had been imagined as monolithic wholes with little or no internal diversity of either marginalization or agendas involved. Only by looking at the real effect it had on real people could an effective strategy be formed to address it, and this is what intersectionality succeeded in doing. It is also important to note how intersectionality in its essence is a policy oriented idea, which is to say that it tries to examine who wins and who loses in different circumstances, and craft a solution with awareness of it.

A major criticism leveled at intersectionality is that it divides liberation struggles, forcing people into conceptualizing their marginalization as having such specific roots that no one but themselves can know how that existence feels. While this may be true to an extent, the statement negates two important factors. Firstly, exclusive permutation of marginalization doesn’t mean that a liberation struggle with common goals cannot be established. Instead, it means that the politics would now be crafted with awareness of how the greater number of people experience marginalization and discrimination in their lives. Secondly, it is important to note how the struggle before this awareness wasn’t a fair and representative struggle at all. Instead, it sought to address the concerns of the internally privileged ones, often to the disadvantage of the most marginalized groups. Such division, or rather awareness, is really important if the struggle is to make the world a more egalitarian place, rather than just for the optics of speaking for all while privileging only an small group. By examining these multiple tangents on what intersectionality has done, it is safe to conclude that it has proved much productive in both as a conceptual and a policy framework.