Intersectionality: an intellectual history, Ange-Marie Hancock , New York : Oxford University Press USA – OSO, 2016
- Intersectional Power
- ‘While recent scholarship afforded Foucault, Judith Butler, and other European poststructuralist scholars a prominent role in the genealogy of intersectionality in Europe (see Lykke 2011), as Vivian May helpfully articulates, “Citational practices … offer a way to mark collectivity, delineate historical precedence, and claim legacies of struggle” (2015, 55). How are we to engage work that explicitly “lifts up” nonintersectional scholarship as an important contribution to intersectional scholarship? Moreover, what, in fact, do we mean by this distinction between intersectional and nonintersectional scholarship?’
- ‘Moreover, how, as theorists of power and identity, are we able to ethically ignore the way in which these choices involve complicated understandings of whose work is worthy of rigorous intellectual engagement as well as what constitutes “genius,” ?’ p.4
- ‘However, if we are to interrogate a preference for Foucault, or an “intersectionality star system,” or the desire to produce knowledge that empowers those without power (as opposed to producing knowledge for one’s own recompense), we must situate intersectionality in an interpretive community that can lay out the parameters of what constitutes the universe of reasonable questions that intersectionality is capable of answering’ p.12
- ‘On the other hand, Wikipedia’s “Intersectionality” page has been viewed 86,734 times in the first quarter of 2015 alone . Thus what Google and Wikipedia might lack among academics in intellectual gravitas is eclipsed by their sheer ubiquity among those with access to the Internet via smartphone or computer. As well, despite haughty attempts to deny such tools legitimacy in the conduct of academic research itself (save as a subject of research), the analytics of scholarship provided by Google Scholar and the open-source access to update Wikipedia pages also enable academic papers about intersectionality to reach a vast audience of lay and academic alike who are looking for twenty-first-century tools to address complex questions of inequality and injustice.’ P.14
- ‘Moreover, Wikipedia’s framing of McCall’s articulation— a specific, sociological articulation— leads to the characterization of intersectionality as a theory located solely in sociology, and done only in the acceptable ways published in Signs . Other disciplines “apply” intersectionality, on these Wikipedia authors’ reading of the literature. This renders the multidisciplinary history of intersectionality nearly invisible. Even within sociology, work by Bonnie Thornton Dill ([1983] 2009) and Maxine Baca Zinn are excluded from this “origin narrative.” There is thus evidence in the Wikipedia entry to support the claims of Crenshaw, Alexander-Floyd, Jordan-Zachery, and Bilge, given the omission of Crenshaw’s approach and the privileging of McCall’s approach. The point is not that McCall isn’t an outstanding scholar; it is that she is framed as a “leading intersectionality theorist,” while “founding theorists” like Crenshaw, Collins, and other Black Feminists are subordinated or completely overlooked.’ P.15
THE MULTICULTURAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF INTERSECTIONALITY
- ‘Over a century later, Chicana poet Ana Montes exhorts us to see with intentionality as well; to not to forget the “Bareheaded girl fighting for equality,” reminding us that “Wherever you turn /Wherever you look / You’ll see her” (1971, in García 1997, 19). Who or what do we see if we look with intentionality in the directions Montes urges? For some theorists the call for visibility is a straightforward response to decades or centuries of invisibility. Here I am alluding to the kind of invisibility analogous to that which occurs behind what W. E. B. Du Bois might call “the veil of race,” where an entire people lives their lives in plain sight. In this vein the theorists discussed here seek to remedy multiple kinds of invisibility— that of mainstream societies and of the subaltern communities they are simultaneously located within. In an effort to make such a case among Chicano nationalists, Adelaida del Castillo explains the reason for an academic journal dedicated to Chicanas in a 1974 issue of La Gente : 2 “[ Encuentro Femenil ] is the first Chicana feminist journal ever published. … You can’t obtain this kind of information anywhere else because nobody has bothered to organize and publish material dealing with the Chicana. … If we don’t have journals which delineate the problems of Chicana women, how are people going to know that Chicana women have problems?” (in García 1997, 45– 46).’ P.74
- ‘Moreover, reading more broadly also allows for connections between the visibility project and questions of epistemology. For example, Lorde again marshals the visual in her speech “When Will the Ignorance End?” by connecting it to action and knowledge: “The ignorance will end when each one of us begins to seek out and trust the knowledge deep inside of us, when we dare to go into that chaos which exists before understanding and come back with new tools for action and for change. For it is from within that deep knowledge that our visions are fueled, and it is our vision which lays the groundwork for our actions, and for our future” (Byrd, Cole, and Guy-Sheftall [1979] 2009, 207). For Lorde, visibility also includes two new acts of sight: (1) seeing difference and diversity as creative and not divisive, and (2) seeing those who insist on remaining invisible on some level with compassion. 8 While Lorde spoke specifically about sexuality, other axes of difference might also benefit from more light than dark, like gender presentation and so-called hidden disabilities.’ P.78
- ‘Beverly Smith, twin sister of the more prolific Barbara Smith, articulates a notion of being two identifications simultaneously that is grounded in lived experience: “Women don’t lead their lives like, ‘Well this part is race, and this is class, and this part has to do with women’s identities,” an ontological position Spelman also endorses for herself as a white female (quoted in Spelman 1988, 133– 134). Chapter 3 explored the ontological and epistemological implications of this assertion.’ P. 126
- ‘Coeditors Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa selected Black Feminist poet Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” as a preface to their volume. The above excerpt from Rushin’s poem captures the challenges discussed in this chapter— how to connect with one’s experience away from and in relationship to others in the world.’ P.126
- ‘Anzaldúa chronicles failed solidarity in response to the question, “why don’t Third World Women come to the Feminist Writers’ Group?”: “What I mind is the pseudo-liberal ones who suffer from the white women’s burden. Like the monkey in the Sufi story, who upon seeing a fish in the water rushes to rescue it from drowning by carrying it up into the branches of a tree” (in Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983, 206).’ P.130
- ‘Sandoval (1991) contends that socialist feminists’ admission that their theory is incomplete without Third World feminists’ experiences is a radically insufficient response. Indeed, in Sandoval’s world, Third World feminists’ experiences are so different they justify “a new category of social identity” (9). On the other hand, Elizabeth Spelman adopts Adrienne Rich’s 1979 concept of “white solipsism,” a “tunnel vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic, impotent guilt reflexes” (quoted in Spelman 1988, 116)’ p.130
- ‘In a similar vein, Puerto Rican feminists Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales argue separately that internalized sexism among their fellow Puerto Rican women militates against their continued participation in solidarity. Aurora Levins Morales puts it this way: How many times has a Latin woman stood up for me in private, then stabbed me in the back when the moment comes for the support that counts. . . . You have forced me to turn out of my own culture to find allies worthy of the name; you have forced me into a room full of Anglo women who nod sympathetically and say: “Latin men are sooo much worse than Anglo men . . . Why the last time I was in Mexico . . . ” And not to betray you in the face of their racism, I betray myself . . . by not saying: It’s not the men who exile me . . . it’s the women. I don’t trust the women. (In Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983, 54; see also Rosario Morales in Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983, 91)’ p.142 ‘Here the experiences many would assume to be identical, that many would assume would produce the same political views and activism, instead emerge as failed solidarity. Thus intersectionality-like thinking is distinct from pure identity politics as well. Through elements of contingency intersectionalitylike thinking can account for these experiences in a way that a “pure” identity politics cannot.’ ‘Both Rosario and Aurora Levins Morales’s comments also reveal the final element of multidirectionality in the visibility project that stems from these personal narratives: internalized oppression and its impact. Barbara Cameron and Gloria Anzaldúa both reveal the results of their own upbringing in the United States as a site of multivalent racism and ethnocentrism.’
Intersectionality as critical social theory, Patricia Hill Collins, Duke University Press, 2019.
- ‘Intersectionality came of age in the twentieth century during a period of Immense social change. Anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; the emergence of a global women’s movement; civil rights movements in multicultural democracies; the end of the Cold War; and the defeat of apartheid in South Africa all signaled the end of long-standing forms of domination. It was clear that deeply entrenched social inequalities would not disappear overnight, nor would the social problems that they engendered. What was different was a new way of looking at social inequalities and possibilities for social change. Seeing the social problems caused by colonialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism as interconnected provided a new vantage on the possibilities for social change. Many people came to hope for something better, imagining new possibilities for their own lives and those of others.’ P.1 Issues of gender , race and class suddenly interconnected in front of the world’s eye.
- ‘Decolonization has morphed into neocolonialism, feminism confronts a deeply entrenched misogyny, civil rights flounders on the shoals of a color-blind racism, Cold War thinking persists in proxy form in undeclared wars, and racial apartheid has reformulated both within and across national borders. Social inequality seems as durable as ever. Within these new social conditions, new social problems complement long-standing ones from the past.’
- ‘Democratic institutions that once offered such promise for realizing ideals of freedom, social justice, equality, and human rights are increasingly hollowed out from within by leaders who seem more committed to holding on to power than to serving the people. Such big ideals can seem less relevant now—quaint notions that were useful during past centuries but perhaps less attainable now. Given the scope and durability of social inequality and the social problems that it engenders, it’s hard not to become disillusioned.’ P.2
- ‘In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, I take the position that intersectionality is far broader than what most people, including many of its practitioners, imagine it to be. We have yet to fully understand the potential of the constellation of ideas that fall under the umbrella term intersectionality as a tool for social change. As a discourse, intersectionality bundles together ideas from disparate places, times, and perspectives, enabling people to share points of view that formerly were forbidden, outlawed, or simply obscured. Yet because ideas in and of themselves do not foster social change, intersectionality is not just a set of ideas. Instead, because they inform social action, intersectionality’s ideas have consequences in the social world.’ P.2
- ‘Intersectionality is well on its way to becoming a critical social theory that can address contemporary social problems and the social changes needed to solve them. But it can do so only if its practitioners simultaneously understand and cultivate intersectionality as a critical social theory. A form of critical inquiry and praxis, intersectionality has not yet realized its potential as a critical social theory, nor has it adequately democratized its own processes for producing knowledge. But the foundation is there.’ P.2
- ‘Intersectionality possesses a knowledge base; a series of ongoing questions; a mass of engaged, interdisciplinary practitioners; and traditions of praxis that collectively inferior its theoretical possibilities. Intersectionality is poised to develop an independent theoretical space that might guide its ongoing questions and concerns. Yet without serious self-reflection, intersectionality could easily become just another social theory that implicitly upholds the status quo.’ P2 Thus the importance of Art and protest in the development of intersecsectionality as self-reflection driven practices.
Marxism and Intersectionality : Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Ashley J. Bohrer
- ‘I watched one of the scholars begin their talk by confessing that they had never heard of intersectionality until one month before the event. Unsurprisingly, the talk proceeded to be riddled with errors, caricatures, and hubristic pronouncements about a large and varied body of literature that the speaker admitted to knowing nearly nothing about. The second scholar continued the trend of bombastic but ungrounded critique, declaring toward the end of their talk that the problem with intersectionality was that it had no account of how oppressions “interacted”; they seem to “bounce off one another like billiard balls” but without any conceptual explanation. This remark was met by a room full of self-satisfied chuckles of derision. The third speaker rattled off a series of criticisms that, while articulated with less derision, were no more accurate; I deal with many of this person’s critiques throughout the manuscript that follows. All three speakers were white, well-respected, and were speaking far outside of their areas of expertise. It showed. The Q&A that followed this panel was itself almost comically bad; the moderator proceeded to call on nearly every white man over 40 in the crowd, while ignoring the hands of the many young people, people of color, and women in the room, some of whom were visibly fuming at the spectacle they had witnessed.’ P.13 Here they point out the same problem highlighted in Ange-Marie Hancock’s book Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. They expose how Academic circles surrounding intersectionality often fail at being truly intersectional by not giving enough exposure to the collectives who most experience the overlap of issues in their everyday life. This is definitely not to be overlooked.
- ‘The fact that numerous militant decolonial and feminist struggles had made use of Marxism was either unknown or discounted in the subtext of this pointed and rhetorical question. Rife with derision, I have found most engagements between these two perspectives (Marxism & Intersectionality) to be grounded more in caricature than in close reading, often discounting in advance that anything useful could come from one or the other framework. And so, after years of defending intersectionality in Marxist circles, and of defending historical materialism in intersectional ones, I became convinced that these conversations would continue to stall without a piece of scholarship that placed the two into actual conversation, leaving behind the various straw persons and scarecrows that too often form a barricade between these two perspectives.’ P.14
- Their definition of Capitalism : ‘Capitalism is the grammar of our world. But for all of its ubiquity, it is a concept and system that is rarely understood. While often capitalism is taken to refer to a purely economic system, marked by markets and exchange, this characterization only begins to scratch the surface. Capitalism is an economic system, one that continually uses violence, brutality, and exclusion to ensure that the relatively few live off the endless labors of the many (…) it is a system that produces and reproduces inequalities at every turn, not only in the economic realm, but in the political, social, academic, intimate, educational, and imaginative dimensions of contemporary life. And this system, which is overall based in the justification of domination and dominion, came into being and continues to exist, in and through a whole series of oppressive practices and discourses. Far from being a single, univocal operation of power, capitalism is a web of institutions, inherited histories, modes of access, strategies of confinement, and tactics of accumulation, with different and varying configurations across history and across the world.’ P.15 Capitalism had to come from somewhere, for instance birthing of Capitalism , as seen on Antonio Benitez Rojo, had everything to do with Colonialism.
The Repeating Island : The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective , Antonio Benitez Rojo, translated by James E. Maraniss, Duke University Press, 1997.
- “because it was the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps, between the encomienda of Indians and the slaveholding plantation, between the servitude of the coolie and the discrimination toward the criollo J between commercial monopoly and piracy, between the runaway slave settlement and the governor’s palace; all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth of the Atlantic: Columbus, Cabral, Cortes, de Soto, Hawkins, Drake, Hein, Rodney, Surcouf … Mter the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.” p.5
- In the Spanish Caribbean happens something that is unthikable in other parts of Latin America , where they hate everything Spanish . Spanish Caribbean “Colonial buildings are regarded there with a rare mixture of familiarity and respect. They have an almost occult prestige, which comes from what lies behind them, something like what’s aroused in children by grandmother’s huge wardrobe.”p.34 . The Spanish Colonial picture is different from that is prevalent in continental Latin America. Carpentier draws emphasis on the architecture , the classical style architecture .
– Everything came with Plantation , “Caribbean peoples themselves, in referring to the ethnological processes that derived from the extraordinary collision of races and cultures thus produced, speak of syncretism, acculturation, transculturation, assimilation, deculturation, indigenization, creolization, cultural mestizaje) cultural cima17onaje) cultural miscegenation, cultural resistance, etc.” p.37
Viaje a la semilla, or the text as spectacle
– “When I mention the spectacular nature of the Caribbean’s narrative, I mean to use the strictest definition of the word spectacle (my Larousse says “public entertainment of any kind”). I say this so definitively because I detect in the Caribbean novel a will to set itself up at all costs as a total performance. This performance (and “something more,” as we saw earlier) can be carried out under the rules of several kinds of spectacles: variety shows, circus acts, dramatic works, radio or television programs, concerts, operettas, carnival dances, or any other kind of spectacle that one can imagine.” p.218
– “But it’s not hard to see, among the veils and in the creases of its trick-bag, the myth’s hidden skin, the ceremonial tattoo, the cords that connect to Mrica, to Asia, and to pagan Europe.” p.220
-“It’s been said more than once that Caribbean novels have protagonists who are excessive, baroque, grotesque, and even that the texts out of which these characters speak are the same way. I think that all this is true, but only when it’s seen from Europe. I mean by this that the masquerade that the Caribbean discourse often puts on is nothing but a concession to the bungling of Christopher Columbus, who took the Caribbean for Asia and the “indios” for Indians. The West’s idea of the Caribbean is a product of these and other mistakes and inventions. Acceptance of certain forms of Caribbean culture-such as music, dance, literature-in the great cities of the Western world owes substantially to these forms’ playing the roles of the “native,” or the “picturesque Indian maiden,” the “blithe Negress,” the “sensual mulatress,” the “baroque creole,” that is, roles belonging in the farcical libretto that Europe has written about the Caribbean for five centuries.” p.220 “behind the words in that libretto, behind the “Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” behind the picturesque steps of the “one-two-three-hop,” there lie codes that the Caribbean people alone can decipher. These are codes that refer us to traditional knowledge, symbolic if you will, that the West can no longer detect.”