Intersectionality and Feminist Politics
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- KEY WORDS identity politics ◆ intersectionality ◆ social divisions ◆ social positionings.
- I examine some of the analytical issues involved in the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions.
- Towards the end of the article, I assess the attempt to develop a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South.
CONTEXTUALIZING FEMINISM: GENDER, ETHNIC AND CLASS DIVISIONS
- In a recent paper, Alison Woodward (2005) argues that discussions on issues of diversity and intersectionality have ‘arrived’ in European equality policies as a result of the influence of consultants and thinkers from the US.
- In 1983, Floya Anthias and I published an article in Feminist Review1 arguing against the notion of ‘triple oppression’ then prevalent among British Black Feminists (in organizations such as the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent [OWAAD]; see Bryan et al., 1985).
- Ironically, this was exactly the reason black women and members of other marginalized groupings felt the need for what is known today as an intersectional analysis, except that in such identity politics constructions what takes place is actually fragmentation and multiplication of the wider categorical identities rather than more dynamic, shifting and multiplex constructions of intersectionality.
- The discussion on the methodological approach attempted in that forum is presented later.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF DIFFERENCE
- Different social divisions, such as class, race and ethnicity, tend to have certain parameters in common.
- This naturalization operates similarly, if not even more so, in relation to gender and sexuality, ability and age.
- While all social divisions share some features and are concretely constructed by/intermeshed with each other, it is important also to note that they are not reducible to each other.
- ‘Ability’ or, rather, ‘disability’ involves even vaguer and more heterogeneous discourses than those relating to ethnicity, as people can be ‘disabled’ in so many different ways.
WHICH SOCIAL DIVISIONS?
- One of the issues represented, implicitly or explicitly, in much of the literature is how many social divisions are involved and/or which ones should be incorporated into the analysis of the intersectionality process.
- She calls for ‘theory formation and research which accounts for the diverse conditions which gave rise to the constitution of differences as well as their historical interconnectedness’ (Knapp, 1999: 130) – or, using the terminology presented here, the ways different social divisions are constructed by, and intermeshed with, each other in specific historical conditions.
- The construction of categories of signification is, in the last instance, a product of human creative freedom and autonomy.
INTERSECTIONALITY AS A HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY METHODOLOGY
- Beyond ontological questions of how many social divisions there are and whether the authors are dealing with axes of social divisions, dualistic lines of difference or specific forms of discrimination, it is important to note that there is often a conflation between vectors of discrimination and difference and identity groupings.
- This is problematic both theoretically and politically, as it constructs difference per se as automatic grounds for both discrimination and entitlement for defence from discrimination.
- It does not attend to the differential positionings of power in which different identity groups can be located in specific historical contexts, let alone the dynamics of power relations within these groups.
- Nor does it give recognition to the potentially contested nature of the boundaries of these identity groupings and the possibly contested political claims for representation of people located in the same social positionings.
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO INTERSECTIONAL POLICY
- Intersectional analysis has been introduced to human rights discourse as part of gender mainstreaming, for ‘the full diversity of women’s experiences’ to be considered, and in order ‘to enhance women’s empowerment’ (Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 2001).
- As the background briefing paper on intersectionality of the Working Group on Women and Human Rights of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership claims, ‘developing of new and augmenting of existing methodologies to uncover the ways multiple identities converge to create and exacerbate women’s subordination’ is critical.
- The need for desegregated data was highlighted during the WCAR conference in several forums, including by Mary Robinson, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who organized the WCAR conference.
- Instead, the point is to analyse the differential ways in which different social divisions are concretely enmeshed and constructed by each other and how they relate to political and subjective constructions of identities.
- Only when such a contextual analysis is carried out can there be an intersectional review of policy initiatives and systems of implementation.
CONCLUSION
- Intersectional analysis of social divisions has come to occupy central spaces in both sociological and other analyses of stratification as well as in feminist and other legal, political and policy discourses of international human rights.
- There has been a gradual recognition of the inadequacy of analysing various social divisions, but especially race and gender, as separate, internally homogeneous, social categories resulting in the marginalization of the specific effects of these, especially on women of colour.
- The analysis and the methodology of intersectionality, especially in UN-related bodies is just emerging and often suffers from analytical confusions that have already been tackled by feminist scholars who have been working on these issues for longer, outside the specific global feminist networks that developed around the Beijing Forum.
- Wider dialogue and articulation of problems would be useful to both feminist scholars and global feminist networks.
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Citations
2,097 citations
1,984 citations
Cites background from "Intersectionality and Feminist Poli..."
...Should it be primarily concerned with theorizing identity (Staunæs, 2003; Buitelaar, 2006; Prins, 2006) or is the problem that it has been too focused on identity to the detriment of social structures (Yuval-Davis, 2006)?...
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...…debated at length the problem of using categories at all, suggesting that what is needed is a more transversal approach – a thinking across categories (Yuval-Davis, 2006) or focusing on ‘sites’ where multiple identities are performed rather than on the categories themselves (Staunæs, 2003).20…...
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...Controversies have emerged about whether intersectionality should be conceptualized as a crossroad (Crenshaw, 1991), as ‘axes’ of difference (Yuval-Davis, 2006) or as a dynamic process (Staunæs, 2003)....
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...Interestingly, Crenshaw has been implicitly accused of not being ‘intersectional’ enough (Yuval-Davis, 2006)....
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...In order to be a ‘good theory’, it is argued, intersectionality would require more sustained attention to the specific and fundamentally different logics of social divisions and inequalities as well as the different dynamics and outcomes of their intersections (Yuval-Davis, 2006)....
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1,240 citations
Cites background or methods from "Intersectionality and Feminist Poli..."
...…is to be “asking the other question”: that is, taking whatever one identifies as the primary form of oppression in a situation and asking how that dimension of inequality is itself subdivided and crisscrossed with other axes of power and exclusion that are less well articulated (Yuval-Davis 2006)....
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...This echoes a wider move in cultural studies, critical race studies, and gender and women’s studies to treat the formation of political subjects as a contested process of self-creation in a field of power relations (Ken 2008; Staunaes 2003; Yuval-Davis 2006)....
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...On the other hand, sociologists such as Ken (2008), Yuval-Davis (2006), and McCall (2005) and political scientists such as Weldon (2008) and Hancock (2007) try to make the concept more usable for researchers by pointing to how its different meanings reflect different kinds of theoretical concerns....
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...However, if one theorizes intersectionality as a characteristic of the social world in general, intersectional analysis should offer a method applying to all social phenomena, not just the inclusion of a specifically subordinated group (McCall 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006)....
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...Because of its interest in mutually transformative processes, this approach emphasizes change over time as well as between sites and institutions (Yuval-Davis 2006)....
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1,228 citations
Cites background from "Intersectionality and Feminist Poli..."
...Intersectionality has been conceptualized as a perspective (Browne & Misra 2003, Steinbugler et al. 2006), a concept (Knapp 2005), a type of analysis (Nash 2008, Yuval-Davis 2006), or as a “nodal point” for feminist theorizing (Lykke 2011)....
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...Other scholars emphasize intersectionality’s placement in the research process, with some approaching intersectionality as a methodological approach (Steinbugler et al. 2006, Yuval-Davis 2006), a research paradigm (Hancock 2007b), or a measurable variable and a type of data (Bowleg 2008)....
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1,125 citations
References
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Frequently Asked Questions (7)
Q2. What is the meaning of intersectional analysis?
Intersectional analysis of social divisions has come to occupy central spaces in both sociological and other analyses of stratification as well as in feminist and other legal, political and policy discourses of international human rights.
Q3. What is the main point of the debate?
as demonstrated throughout the article, what is at the heart of the debate is conflation or separation of the different analytic levels in which intersectionality is located, rather than just a debate on the relationship of the divisions themselves.
Q4. What is the argument against the triple oppression approach?
Their argument against the ‘triple oppression’ approach was that there is no such thing as suffering from oppression ‘as Black’, ‘as a woman’, ‘as a working-class person’.
Q5. What is the definition of the debate?
This debate can also be constructed as a debate between identity politics and transversal politics2 (Cockburn and Hunter, 1999; YuvalDavis, 1994, 1997) or between the recognition and recognition/distribution models of the politics of difference (Benhabib, 2002; Fraser, 1997).
Q6. What is the point of Butler’s critique?
Judith Butler (1990) mocks the ‘etc.’ that often appears at the end of lists of social divisions mentioned by feminists (e.g. at the beginning of this article) and sees it as an embarrassed admission of a ‘sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself’
Q7. What does she mean by structural intersectionality?
Structural intersectionality pertains to:. . . the ways in which the location of women of colour at the intersection of race and gender makes their actual experience of domestic violence, rape and remedial reform qualitatively different from that of white women.