Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries

Vivian M. May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136497544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries offers a sustained, interdisciplinary exploration of intersectional ideas, histories, and practices that no other text does. Deftly synthesizing much of the existing literatures on intersectionality, one of the most significant theoretical and political precepts of our time, May invites us to confront a disconcerting problem: though intersectionality is widely known, acclaimed, and applied, it is often construed in ways that depoliticize, undercut, or even violate its most basic premises. May cogently demonstrates how intersectionality has been repeatedly resisted, misunderstood, and misapplied: provocatively, she shows the degree to which intersectionality is often undone or undermined by supporters and critics alike. A clarion call to engage intersectionality's radical ideas, histories, and justice orientations more meaningfully, Pursuing Intersectionality answers the basic questions surrounding intersectionality, attends to its historical roots in Black feminist theory and politics, and offers insights and strategies from across the disciplines for bracketing dominant logics and for orienting toward intersectional dispositions and practices.

1 What Is Intersectionality?

Matrix Thinking in a Single-Axis World

On the cusp of discussing intersectionality definitions, I hesitate. Since intersectionality is a complex concept with growing impact across disciplines, policy formulations, and sites of political struggle, much time has been spent defining the concept or delineating typologies (e.g., McCall 2005). Yet while definitional work might clarify, it can also distort by disarticulating key intersectionality ideas that fundamentally link. Definitions can flatten in other ways as well. For instance, mapping out intersectionality via linear time can treat its political/intellectual origins, in Black and women of color feminisms, as (implicitly or explicitly) passé or naïve. Even if cited, earlier intersectionality texts may not be given nuanced readings but treated casually or deemed theoretically underwhelming.¹ This dynamic can also be relatively subtle: today, for instance, the secondary intersectionality literatures often are more widely referenced and taught than are many foundational writings and practices.

Time spent defining or classifying intersectionality can also draw critical energies away from asking key questions, such as: Are the examples at hand adequately “intersectional” in nature? Are intersectionality’s groundings and histories, crafted within Black feminist, critical race, and women of color politics/theorizing, attended to meaningfully (and not just nominally)? Does the form align, in terms of philosophy and practice, with intersectionality’s key insights and inclusive social justice objectives? Does the analytical approach or classification system artificially compartmentalize intersectionality’s interrelated premises?

Laying out intersectionality definitions clearly has potential pitfalls, so why embark on this chapter? Though widely recognized, intersectionality also is regularly used or talked about in ways that flatten its complexity, ignore its historical literatures, or depoliticize its approach. Many applications let intersectionality drop or systematize it in ways that may render it more usable as an instrument, but in so doing also obviate key premises. This suggests intersectionality might not in fact be so fully or easily understood. Intersectionality invites us to bracket hegemonic mindsets and resist the lure(s) of oppressive power so as to achieve a more just world: are any of us so fully “liberated” from conventional ways of thinking and being that we need not engage in any further thought about intersectional meanings, practices, and histories? Instead of presuming everyone knows what intersectionality is, (re)turning to its central ideas and orientations is an apt place to begin.

Intersectionality as a Form of Social Action

My approach to intersectionality is oriented toward what it does or can do, not simply toward its definitional status as a noun. This is in keeping with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s emphasis that intersectionality is heuristic in nature: it is akin to a “prism” to be used to “amplify” and highlight specific problems, particularly by drawing attention to dynamics that are “constitutive” but generally overlooked or silenced (Crenshaw 2011c, 229–232). She explains her sensibility thusly: “My own take on how to know intersectionality has been to do intersectionality” (222; see also Guidroz and Berger 2009). A heuristic orientation accentuates its problem-solving capacity, one that is contextual, concerned with eradicating inequity, oriented toward unrecognized knowers and overlooked forms of meaning, attentive to experience as a fund of knowledge, and interrogative (focused on asking questions, incrementally and continuously).

Approaching intersectionality in this way also taps into its longer history. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, Black feminist educator and intellectual Anna Julia Cooper insisted that our work must never just be about “ratiocination,” or knowledge merely for knowledge’s sake: thought and action must be linked to do away with inequality (Cooper 1988, 285–303). During this same era, Ida B. Wells engaged in intersectional journalism and political activism to challenge lynching. Highlighting how hetero-patriarchy and white supremacy functioned together, to rationalize lynching as a tool of nationalist terror and containment during the Progressive era, Wells used a matrix lens to debunk the nation’s claims to democracy (and to lay bare practices of injustice founded in racist gender nationalism, i.e., in the name of “protecting” white womanhood).²

Thinking about intersectionality as a heuristic orientation or disposition also echoes Barbara Christian’s (1990) assertion that Black feminist theorizing, as a larger set of practices, should be conceived of as akin to an active verb, thereby allowing for flexible, nonessentialist understandings both of Black women and of Black feminisms (whereas an object/noun approach suggests stasis as well as commodity status). Many Black feminists have a deep suspicion of objects’ supposed neutrality, since enslaved Black women, for instance, were categorized by the state as nonpersons/as property: the legal designation of raced and gendered property created, in turn, white masculinity as an invisible but nevertheless powerful form of accrued rights and privileges, or property, to be protected by the law (see Harris 1993).

Rather than emulate or animate the subject/object divide used historically to rank persons, Patricia J. Williams (1991) and Barbara Christian (1990) instead emphasize the value of nonlinear and narrative ways of knowing that are difficult to “control” and require interpretive engagement, such as riddles, hieroglyphs, and parables. Black feminist theorizing, they argue, rejects treating knowledge (particularly knowledge forged in and by marginalized communities) as a commodity to be extracted and traded. Approaching theorizing as active, and as engaged in by (variously) situated (and subjugated) knowers, is also a long-standing impetus in Latina and Indigenous feminisms:³ intersectionality connects to (but does not stand in for the whole of) these traditions.

To contest false binaries, reveal links among systems of oppression, and forge political coalitions, intersectionality attends to patterns that cut across scales, focuses on unstated assumptions, and explores the meanings of gaps and absences. By accounting for multiple registers of existence, entangled forms of domination, and the simultaneity of identities, it is “applicable to both the structural level of analysis, and individual-level phenomena, via its domains of power thesis, which recognizes the various terrains on which politics plays out—structural and interpersonal” (Hancock 2007b, 74; see also Collins 1998). This focus on power’s different formations across scales is not simply diagnostic or descriptive: it is oriented toward dismantling oppressive practices and forging a more just world for us all.

In other words, intersectionality is political, philosophical, and pedagogical in nature: it invites us to think from “both/and” spaces and to seek justice in crosscutting ways by identifying and addressing the (often hidden) workings of privilege and oppression. Weaving the structural and the personal, the particular and the universal, intersectional approaches offer a means to think against the grain and bridge false divides. In turn, this leads to asking new questions about power, inequality, and marginalization: intersectionality can be used to disrupt conventional philosophical frames, dislodge the usual explanations, and question default analytic categories. Intersectionality’s interrogatory, antisubordination impetus is crucial and stems from its origins as a form of resistant knowing, one interested in seeking liberation on new terms and in eradicating epistemological, material, and structural inequality.

Intersectionality Is about Matrix Thinking

Intersectionality highlights how lived identities, structural systems, sites of marginalization, forms of power, and modes of resistance “intersect” in dynamic, shifting ways. As Audre Lorde explains, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives” (Lorde 1984, 183). Likewise, Pauli Murray aptly notes that “the lesson of history [is] that all human rights are indivisible and that the failure to adhere to this principle jeopardizes the rights of all” (Murray 1995, 197). Over a century prior, in 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper offered a similar vision at the inaugural meeting of the American Equal Rights Association: “The white women all go for sex,” she remarked, “letting race occupy a minor position.” Instead, we must remember (and act upon the fact that) “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity” (Harper, in Foster 1990, 217–219).

This matrix philosophy has several important implications. First, it dispenses with “add and stir” political strategies, analytical premises, or research methodologies: assimilative strategies are problematic because they simply tinker within status quo frameworks (Mingus and Talley 2013), reinforce the “notion of the dominant group as standard,” presume underlying sameness, and ignore “norm-constructing operations of power” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 137). Intersectionality also is not a cumulative or arithmetical identity formula (race + gender + class + sexuality + disability + citizenship status, and so on, as if these were sequential, separate factors).⁴ Instead, it focuses on simultaneity, attends to within-group differences, and rejects “single-axis” categories that falsely universalize the experiences or needs of a select few as representative of all group members.

Thinking in terms of enmeshed multiplicities (of identity and power), or what Deborah K. King described as “multiple jeopardy,” challenges the premise that “each discrimination has a single, direct and independent effect on status, wherein the relative contribution of each is readily apparent.” It also rejects “non-productive assertions that one factor can and should supplant the other” (King 1988, 47). As Nira Yuval-Davis explains, “social divisions [are] constituted by each other in concrete ways, enmeshed in each other, although they … are also irreducible to each other” (Yuval-Davis, in Guidroz and Berger 2009, 65). In research, a “matrix” approach considers how inequalities intermingle and “span and transform structures and activities at all levels and in all institutional contexts”: this, in turn, “makes it harder to imagine any social process as a singular ‘main effect’ for anyone” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 135). In philosophical terms, matrix logics attend to “thick” members of a group and reject “split-separation” mindsets, instead using “curdled” logics to conceive of, and achieve, liberation on multiple fronts (Lugones 1994). Intersectionality thus aims to account for relationships, collusions, and disjunctures among forms and sites of power.

Linking the structural and experiential, and the material and discursive, it does not approach different identities or systems of power as “non-interactive” or independent (Harnois 2005, 810): instead, intersectionality examines how power and privilege operate on several levels at once (experiential, epistemological, political, and structural) and across (and within) categories of experience and personhood (including race, gender, sexuality, disability, social class, and citizenship). In turn, this requires exploring how we occupy social positions and engage in knowledge practices that, because entwined and interactive, can be understood as sites where both marginalization and privilege play out simultaneously. However, which structures and institutional formations need to be analyzed, which categories are relevant, and how or whether they translate across cultural and historical contexts are not predetermined but are open-ended questions.

Intersectionality’s Matrix Thinking Is “about” All of Us

Though its focus on the (hidden but considerable) “wages” of privilege is often overlooked,⁵ intersectionality scholars and activists repeatedly have shown that privilege and oppression are experienced and structured simultaneously: this means that addressing underprivilege requires identifying and dismantling overprivilege, within and between groups. Overprivilege and underprivilege are relational and are reinforced by social practices, philosophical norms, and structural inequalities. Intersectionality thus invites a complex view of power as multipronged and shifting, operating across different sites and scales simultaneously.

A matrix philosophy also requires studying “unmarked” or transparent categories, where power and privilege constellate on their own terms and in relation to “marked” ones.⁶ This is why Crenshaw emphasizes that no one exists outside of matrices/relations of power, and everyone is socially located in multiple, overlapping ways. In concert with Collins (2008), who underscores that intersectionality is not a fixed analytic, Crenshaw explains that the “implications of this matrix—when certain features are activated and relevant and when they are not—are contextual,” meaning they are not fixed, foreordained, or tied to any one particular group (Crenshaw 2011c, 230).

Uma Narayan, for instance, views intersectionality as pertinent to transnational feminist politics because it offers strategies for thinking “within and across communities” to address the needs of a “range of differently situated women” (Narayan 1997, 153). Narayan does not claim intersectionality, as it moves across worlds, does so without any “baggage” or that it is inherently liberatory due to its radical origins. However, by approaching it as a cross-border, cross-categorical mindset, she creates space for asking why this potential relevance is so often curtailed by binary logics that erroneously pit the transnational against the intersectional and that suppress intersectionality’s both/and, same/different philosophical–political impetus.

In other words, despite its call to attend to privilege and disenfranchisement simultaneously, and notwithstanding its rejection of essentialist group or individual identities, intersectionality frequently is portrayed as narrowly conceived. For instance, it has been seen as focusing only on “oppression” or understood as relevant only to the particular forms of oppression faced by Black women (as if these could be predetermined and as if Black women were an undifferentiated group).⁷ Thus, while McCall rightly underscores how analyzing simultaneous privilege and oppression is fundamental to intersectionality, she risks glossing its historical attention to heterogeneity within and between groups when asserting, “in its emphasis on black women’s experiences of subjectivity and oppression, intersectional theory has obscured the question whether all identities are intersectional” (McCall 2005, 1774).

There is no reason that an emphasis on Black women’s subjectivity should be seen to curtail intersectionality’s relevance or applicability when it comes to insights about simultaneous privilege and oppression, multiplicity, and complex subjectivity, for instance. So, why is a focus on Black women as illustrative of wider dynamics often read as a fairly significant limitation of intersectionality’s foundational writings, or interpreted as an assertion that Black womanhood is the only (or essential, or “paradigmatic”)⁸ intersectional identity (or, further, that no other identities are intersectional)? The implication is that attending to Black womanhood entails some inherent narrowness: it is as if only some parts of intersectionality’s insights about simultaneous privilege and oppression and about the limits and distortions of “single-axis” logics are perceived or taken up.

For instance, many who find Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality overly “narrow,” overlook how, in “Demarginalizing,” she argues in part that white women, or Black men, are as unrepresentative of the larger groups “Women” or “Blacks” as are Black Women (or, conversely, Black women are equally representative). Everyone has intersecting identities and all of us live within interlocking structures of raced and gendered social stratification. Everyone “has” race and gender, though only Black women are perceived by the courts as embodying “both.” White women’s gender comes to the fore while their race falls from view as transparent, making them seem, from single-axis thinking, ideal representatives or case examples of sexism: their intersectionality is denied, though, as Crenshaw (1989) underscores, it is fully operative.⁹

The courts seem to recognize, implicitly, that identities intersect, but only for litigants who make claims about more than one nontransparent identity (e.g., in the cases Crenshaw discusses, for Black women) and only in a limited sense—“their” intersectionality (in this instance, Black womanhood) is seen as detrimental or confusing to the law because neither “their” race nor gender can be disarticulated (though, according to the court’s logics, apparently others’ can be when one factor matches the unstated, privileged transparency norm [whiteness for white women; masculinity for Black men]). However, the courts do not take up questions of injustice, oppression, or redress intersectionally: factors that would allow for analyzing and addressing asymmetrical, structured patterns of harm (and privilege) are treated as epistemologically irrelevant, even harmful, within single-axis frameworks.

The courts thus reinforce transparent race and gender privilege, willfully ignoring the unstated intersectionality of litigants characterized as representative of just one identity and, correlatively, normative benchmarks for understanding harm and discrimination, singularly conceived (e.g., sexism or racism) (Crenshaw 1989; see also Carbado 2013). Here, then, a thorny question arises in terms of intersectionality’s wider reception and interpretat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Case for Intersectionality and the Question of Intersectionality Backlash
• 1 What Is Intersectionality? Matrix Thinking in a Single-Axis World
• 2 Intersectionality’s Call to Break from Single-Axis Thinking: Still Unheard, Still Unanswered?
• 3 Why Are Intersectionality Critiques All the Rage?
• 4 Intersectionality—Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Slippages in Intersectionality Applications
• 5 Being “Biased” toward Intersectionality: A Call for Epistemic Defiance
• 6 Fostering an Intersectional Disposition: Strategies for Pursuing and Practicing Intersectionality
• References
• Index