Intersectionality in Social Work

Activism and Practice in Context

Suryia Nayak, Rachel Robbins, Suryia Nayak, Rachel Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351810807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

This ground breaking book is an innovative, passionate and provocative exploration of intersectionality. The sustained emphasis on activism and practice reasserts the potency of intersectionality borne out of Black feminism. The rare and pioneering international reach of this book crosses four continents. In this book context matters: there is no intersectionality without context!

Resting on the premise that we cannot work for the liberation of individuals, communities and societies without intersectionality, this book asks: How does intersectionality challenge the structures and discourses of social work education, management and organisation? What is the revolutionary potential of intersectionality? Intersectional in its method and content, the blend of practice, activism, research and theory troubles geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries. The range of topics include: Islamophobia, immigration, feminist movements, social work education, violence against women and girls, gender, sexuality, race, disability, age, religion, nationality, citizenship policy and legal frameworks.

This book will appeal to activists for social justice, social work practitioners, researchers, lecturers, students and those working in the field of Black feminist thinking. The focus on the activism of intersectionality provides a clear pathway into Black feminist thinking and its application to social work internationally and to emancipatory collective political activism worldwide.

Part 1
Understandings of intersectionality

1
Textual practice as intersectional practice

Situated caste and gender knowledge in India

Suryia Nayak and Rekha Sethi

Literary texts are marked with multi-layered, interdependent sensibilities that challenge binary positions of social conditioning. Literary texts, both in terms of composition and content, are intersectional. Thus, the practice of writing and reading literary text is a practice of intersectionality, opening up questions about the politics of knowledge production that correspond with unequal intersecting power relations. If, as ‘social beings, women [and clients of social services] are constructed through effects of language and representation’ (De Lauretis, 1984: 14), then the role of text in this construction is rudimentary to intersectionality. Using the lens of intersectionality to think about the production and analysis of literary texts in terms of social work has both an international reach and holds the specificity of diverse social work practice contexts. This analysis of intersectionality, reaching across India and the UK, intersects a diversity of disciplinary fields, including social work, Black feminism and literary textual analysis, and as such, both the content and the method are intersectional. In the spirit of the Black feminist theory of intersectionality, this transgression of geographical and disciplinary borders reflects intersectionality as a theory of the deconstruction of borders (Nayak, 2015: 101–103).

The questions being asked are: what can social work learn from the literary works of Indian women, and more specifically, Dalit and Adivasi women poets, writing about their experience of intersectional oppression in the Indian context? How might social workers and service users take up ‘strategies of writing and reading [as] forms of cultural resistance’ (De Lauretis, 1984: 7)? Can the example (examined in this chapter) of the Indian Adivasi activist Nirmala Putul, who uses poetry to record/transcribe her work with women and girls that have been trafficked, offer a different method of social work documentation? How can social work occupy an insider-outsider position within and through the very texts that frame the profession and practices? How might the creation of literature form social work interventions for recovery and empowerment? The subversive potential of Dalit and Adivasi women texts is that:

[n]ot only can they work to turn dominant discourses inside out (and show that it can be done), to undercut their enunciation and address, to unearth the archaeological stratifications on which they are built; but in affirming the historical existence of irreducible contradictions for women in dis course, they also challenge theory in its own terms, the terms of a semiotic space constructed in language, its power based on social validation and well-established modes of enunciation and address. So well established that, paradoxically, the only way to position oneself outside of that discourse is to displace oneself within it.

(De Lauretis, 1984: 7)

It is of significance to note that the meaning of the word ‘text’ is ‘a tissue, a woven fabric’ (Barthes, 1977: 159). This chapter performs an intersection or weave of apparently unconnected field of practice. It is not usual for literary textual analysis to form a core component of social work education. For example, how many social work books direct students to the work of Roland Barthes? Indeed, the situation of social work and the situation of social service users are not ‘self-contained systems’ but are constituted in terms of relational socio-political, historical and cultural structures/contexts that mirror intertextuality:

There are always other words in a word, other texts in a text. The concept of intertextuality requires, therefore, that we understand texts not as self-contained systems but as differential and historical, as traces and tracings of otherness, since they are shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structures.

(Martínez Alfaro, 1996: 268)

Social work is a prime example of a professional practice based on the relationality of texts, where no piece of documentation exists in isolation. Thus, ‘[m]eaning becomes something which exists between texts and all other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext’ (Allen, 2000: 1). In accord with Crenshaw’s proposition that ‘intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 539), intertextuality as intersubjectivity ‘operates in an equation whereby the sum of the parts [text(s)] is greater than the individual elements [for example, words, grammar and spaces], as in intersectionality’ (Nayak, 2015: 57). Proposing the idea of intertextuality as intersubjectivity (1980), Kristeva, explains that:

each word (text) is an intersection of word (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read … [as] the absorption and transformation of another … The word as minimal textual unit thus turns out to occupy the status of mediator, linking structural models to cultural (historical) environment, as well as that of regulator.

(Kristeva, 1969: 37; parentheses and emphasis in original)

The texts of social work, including the array of documentation about service users, are mechanisms whereby the ‘absorption’ and, as such, the ‘transformation’ of the problem of the service user is translated into words; these words link ‘structural models’ of socially constructed representations, positions and discourses about service users ‘to cultural (historical) environment[s]’. In other words, the ‘spatialized’ materiality of words reflects the ‘spatialized’ materiality of subjects (as social workers, activists, service users and poets). Application of intertextuality as intersectionality enables scrutiny of social work’s regulatory function, particularly, in regards to documentation as a ‘mediator’ that regulates recognition of the importance of the social contexts that produce service users. Conversely, in the tradition of Dalit and Adivasi women poets in India, perhaps the application of intertextuality as intersectionality is the revolutionary potential of social work, to enable ‘new strategies, new semiotic contents and new signs … a habit change in readers, spectators, etc.’ (De Lauretis, 1984: 186). The point is, that, the concept of ‘textuality does not mean a reduction of the world to linguistic texts, books, or a tradition composed of books’ (Spivak, 1998: 104).

The politics of knowledge production

The application of intertextuality as intersectionality exposes the power/knowledge relationship, whereby ‘subjugated knowledges’ are relegated. Foucault explains:

By ‘subjugated knowledges’ I mean two things. On the one hand, I am referring to historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functional coherence or formal systemization…. By ‘subjugated knowledges’ one should understand something else … namely a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to the task or insufficiently elaborated; naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.

(Foucault and Collin, 1980: 81–82)

This chapter demonstrates ‘a politics of close reading practice’ (Nayak, 2015: 24–50) of ‘a set of knowledges’ ‘disqualified as inadequate’ due to the intersection of caste, gender and poverty. The focus is on the work of contemporary female poets of India including Dalit and Adivasi women poets, as a feminist praxis of intersectionality ‘resolutely, political, directly involved in effecting social change’ (Locke Swarr and Nagar, 2010: 55). This chapter demonstrates that warranted critiques of ‘the invocation of praxis as code word for an ‘activist knowledge’ (ibid.) are transcended by the situated knowledge of intersectional subjugation articulated in the work of contemporary Indian feminist poetry. Situated knowledge as ‘activist knowledge’ is feminist praxis in poetry; not a ‘code word’ (ibid.). It is clear that for Indian women poets including Dalit and Adivasi women poets, that:

poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought…. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.

(Lorde, 1984: 37–38)

The situated knowledge of Dalit and Adivasi women poet-activists give ‘name to the nameless’ so that the particularity of gender and caste ‘can be thought’ as a production of the particularity of situated meanings:

the experience of a Dalit migrant woman accessing health services cannot be understood simply by her gender experience and her experience of being dalit. The experience of being a woman itself differs for dalits and non-dalits, i.e. gender (and prescribed norms and behaviours) can be constituted differently by cultural meanings, policies and institutional practices and aspects of historical violence and discrimination … In essence, the simultaneous operation of structures of oppression make the experience at the intersection of these structures qualitatively distinct.

(Kapilashrami and Ravindran, 2016: 181)

The point is that all movements, sectors, and/or services that purport to empower, support, protect and advocate for those violated by oppression must do so on a foundation of situated knowledge of situated intersectionality.

The relevance to social work of reading literary text as a practice of intersectionality

Social work involves the construction, analysis and utilisation of a diverse range of texts, including: case notes, assessment forms, files about services users, court reports, minutes of meetings and referral documentation (Ames, 1999; Kagle, 1991, 1993, 1995; Monnickendam, et al., 1994; Cormican and Cormican, 1977). The enduring importance of text as ‘a product and a process’ within social work (Fox and Gutheil, 2000) is pivotal to concepts of evidence-based practice and co-production involving multi-disciplinary working and service user participation. The production of texts to document narrative processes of phronesis through critical reflection, clinical supervision, social work education and qualitative social work research are fundamental to non-defensive human rights-based social work and social policy practice principles (Robbins, 2013).

The social work practices of life story and reminiscence work are examples of the therapeutic potential and impact of (auto) biographical memory work. Social work research and scholarship is undisputed in identifying, either explicitly or implicitly, that the therapeutic benefits of narrative textual work with service users lies in the production of the text as a process of intersecting the past with the present, the social with the psychological, discursive practices with representation of self-identity (Barnardos, 2013; Baynes, 2008; Burnell and Vaughan, 2008; Cook-Cottone and Beck, 2007; Goddard, et al., 2010; Habermas and Bluck, 2000; Horrocks and Goddard, 2006; Humphreys and Kertesz, 2012; Murray, et al., 2008; Nelson and Fivush, 2004; Rose and Philpot, 2006; Ryan and Walker, 2007; Shotton, 2010, 2013). The question is: how can the therapeutic textual practices within social work be a force for a mutual activism of resistance between those who use social services and those who provide social services, where the therapeutic potential rests in turning ‘dominant discourses inside out’ (De Lauretis, 1984: 7)?

Intersectionality in the matrix of gender, caste and class within the context of India

Hindi literature has a tradition that dates back to the eighth century but women poets who have registered a significant presence are numbered to the likes of Mirabai and Mahadevi Varma. Kumkum Sangari identifies a strong streak of protest in the poetry of bhakti poet Mirabai (Sangari, 1990). Mahadevi Varma’s collection of essays written, between 1931 and 1937 (published in 1941) and entitled Shrankhla ki Kadiyan, translated as Links in the Chain (Varma, 2003), speak for the economic independence and citizen rights of women. Mahadevi Varma highlights the necessity of women understanding their judicial rights and examines the processes of subject formation within patriarchy in relation to women’s identity, representation and position. Within postcolonial Indian feminist literature, the emphasis on the assertion of feminist voice as an assertion of self-existence is evident in the work of Kirti Chaudhary, Snehmayi Chaudhary and Indu Jain (Anamika, 2015). Since the nineties there has been resurgence in women’s writing owing to the spread of education and assertion of identity discourses globally, including the socio-political locale of the country. Many Indian women writers face intersectional marginalisation because of their gender and caste or class and their poems carry images of the intersectionality of women as the subject of their poetry and emphatically denounce all kinds of oppression and violence. The situated poetic knowldege of Indian women in this chapter testifies that: ‘socio-spatial embeddedness of village-level activists places them in a unique position to analyse the multiple webs of power in which their everyday lives, struggle, and aspirations are inserted’ (Sangtin Writers and Nagar, 2006: 151).

The writings of contemporary female poets, from the field of Hindi literature, including: Gagan Gill (2017), Katyayni (1999, 2002), Anamika (2007, 2015), Savita Singh (2013, 2017), Sushila Takbhaure (2011, 2013, 2015), Nirmala Putul (2003, 2014, 2017) and Neelesh Raghuvanshi (1997), are challenging the horizon of their poetic expression and in doing so challenge the horizon and experience of simultaneous multiple structural oppression. The challenge is of ‘recasting ‘women’s’ issues from a plurality of vantage points and an acknowledgement that gender plays out differently depending on one’s many intersecting identities’ (Kapilashrami and Ravindran, 2016: 178). The contextual intersectionality of caste, class and gender translate into the convergence constructions of identity that function in the subjugation of women. Kumar’s (2009) analysis of the counter-hegemonic activist practices of Indian poet-activist women to the multiple oppressions suffered by women and girls is captured in her reference to the power of Katyayni’s poetry. The overtones of her poetry are immensely political. On one hand she condemns the social order that parades an activist bare bodied, to add insult to her being a woman (Katyayni, 2002). Similarly, she is upset at the communal riots in wake of the upsurge in Ayodhya (Katyayni, 1999).

[w]riting in response to an incident in which a girl-activist is paraded naked in Andhra Pradesh by the state’s police, the poet [Katyayni] underlines the urgency of writing direct poetry:

Pushing great religious luminaries in the background Should we postpone poetry? (Kya Sthagit Kar Dein Kavita)

(Kumar, 2009: 352)

It is important to note the deliberate decision to discuss these issues through the writings of contemporary female poets of India, writing in Hindi: the predominant language of an otherwise multilingual country. These are voices from the margins, speaking in a language that is located in a country positioned geo-politically on the margins; it is an intervention to contest the politics of the hierarchies of language. Thus, both the method (in terms of language and location) and the content (literature from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Understandings of intersectionality
• PART 2 Realisations of the activism of intersectionality
• Conclusion: Contextual intersectionality: A conversation
• Index