Intersectionality

Losses can be grouped into two broad categories in terms of their tangibility and temporality. It is the kind of losses that are impalpable and eternal that are harder to acknowledge, navigate, and heal. Loss of representation in discourse, both historical and contemporary, is an example. It is the loss of your identity being recognized with all its dimensions, your problems being addressed with all their specificities, your origins being chronicled with all their richness, and your stories being told with all the depth your lived experiences have. Of all the devastation colonization left in its wake, one of the most enduring is on the prevalence of Eurocentric ways of conceptualizing the world and its elements. For the white colonizers, everything was binary: savages and civilized, developed and developing, virtuous and base. By reducing all the non-whites as others and categorically disparate from the white, it became easier to discard the others. The category in power would subjugate the other into accepting the case without argument.

We have inherited the binary lens and subsequent understanding of the world as neatly cleaved into categories, each one as distinct from another. In doing so, we have discarded and subjugated into silence not just the others but those that cannot be as neatly classified into either groups or those that can be classified into more than one group. We have barely recognized genderfluid people and women of color as lives worth peering into and mapping. It is a glaring yet conveniently dismissed result that human lives cannot be reduced to dated, mechanical constructs useful for analyzing carbohydrates; they perhaps more nuance to them that, at least now, should be accommodated for. Lack of recognition perpetuates manifolds of oppression: without integrating the intersecting categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality amongst many others into the mainstream, we have effectively taped them to the margins. Those in the margins neither have a discernable past to repair, a grounded present to claim, nor a definitive future to aspire to. Not only is their marginalization an act of violence but it leads to and sustains other acts of violence: their silence makes them prey to acts of physical, emotional, and mental attack. Not only does marginalization ensure the absence of institutional safeguards to protect them, it creates obstacles for the marginalized to be socio-economically mobile in an upwards trajectory.

No injury is purely structural, though. The marginalized, on a personal level, are incessantly diminished until they internalize their marginality, their dispossession of worth and of home. Turned away from all places for not being the right person of color or woman or poor, they remain perpetually displaced without a sense of belonging or shred of validation or sliver of security. They are burgeoning with trauma of being forgotten and it is with urgent need that they call out for intersectionality, of being embraced with all aspects of their identity without diminishing or dismissing any. Intersectionality is simply, then, a recognition that their existence is valid not our definitions, and that we must broaden our understanding of the social world. Intersectionality is important not just because we have to redress the pain of the marginalized but also, to rectify the injustice we do to ourselves by denying ourselves the world in all its profound variety.