I notice intersectionality is causing quite a stir. Again.
And like Helen Lewis I too have been reflecting on the nature and
demands of the movement recently.
I personally think Helen’s article is quite well-balanced
piece as it happens. It doesn’t appear to be a vitriol fuelled hatchet job like
some other people we can name.
But I do still agree that it may have been written from a
position of privilege.
It appears to me that the attacks against intersectionality essentially come
from people who are privileged enough not to have experienced multiple forms of
discrimination on a parallel and accumulative basis in their lives. It comes
from a place where you can think about and discuss these things on a
theoretical basis and intellectual basis without engaging with what it means in
practice.
Or there is engagement with what it means in practice, but
only again, from the view of those who enjoy the certain privilege in the first
place.
Think about how hard it is for those organisers of meetings.
Yeah. Why not instead, first think about how hard it is for those
women who go to these meetings.
Everyone has limited time. I agree. I know it takes hard
work and sacrifice and balls to organise things and be actually active as
opposed to sitting around grumbling but continuing with what you have always
done.
But don’t the attendees also have limited time? You want
them to be part of your campaign for feminism but you want them to go elsewhere
to fight racism and yet somewhere else to fight capitalism
and to another meeting to fight transphobia and somewhere else again to fight
homophobia.
Even though we can all agree that actually, all these things are
wrong and that in many cases, all these things spring from the same causes and
the same oppressors.
Let’s divide and replicate our efforts and fight with one
another while we do it. Yeah.
If I am part of an anti-racist campaign group who are
overtly sexist, why must I specifically go to a feminist group to fight the
sexism of the anti-racist group without being able to demand it of the
anti-racist group itself?
Societal injustices that we
have grouped into wider theoretical intellectual headings aren’t representative
of how they affect real people’s lives. I am not affected by racism and sexism
and classism all individually at separate times without them touching upon each
other. People don’t discriminate against me (or anyone else) only because I am a woman at one
time, and I am brown at another and from a working class background at another.
They see me as a whole and discriminate accordingly.
I myself, do not identify as brown, as a woman and as the product of
a working class background independently. I don’t section off parts of me and represent
each part in isolation. (WHO DOES THAT?)
Especially when identifying as one part and fighting for the
rights of what that stands for, means you stand in oppression of what is another
essential part of you.
I cannot, as some may ask of me, break down my very self so I
can sell my politics to my oppressors so that the “liberators” in respect of
each individual aspect of my being can in turn oppress all the other aspects
for the oppressing class, thus keeping me oppressed overall.
The idea of forming exclusive niche groups of people who fit my exact description so we can discuss our intersectional issues there is even
more laughable as the response to calls for intersectionality. That's essentially saying exclusion is ok. Because you can like totes form your own
political circles and engage there outside of our respectable circles because feminism doesn't mean you. And anti-racism doesn't mean you. You can only be affected by one issue at a time to be a part of any of these groups.
You see, it turns out, that to break the chains of
oppression, we do need intersectionality after all.
