JimW
支那暗杀团
Says the man with an unlimited supply of leg room wherever he goes
Intersectionality
- Thread starter TopCat
- Start date
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
And tailism.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Ooo good pointSays the man with an unlimited supply of leg room wherever he goes
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
Unfortunately Bushell's name is ‘Garry’, whereas Gadd was a ‘Gary’.
I found this, i like it.
Perspectives:
Tell me about the origins of your concept of intersectionality.
Crenshaw:
It grew out of trying to conceptualize the way the law responded to issues where both race and
gender discrimination were involved. What happened was like an accident, a collision. Intersectionality simply
came from the idea that if you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you are likely to get hit by
both. These women are injured, but when the race ambulance and the gender ambulance arrive at the scene, they
see these women of color lying in the intersection and they say, “Well, we can’t figure out if this was just race or
just sex discrimination. And unless they can show us which one it was, we can’t help them.”
http://www.americanbar.org/content/...ctives_Spring2004CrenshawPSP.authcheckdam.pdf
It does seem to be different to the views attributed to self-called intersectionalists in this thread.
Perspectives:
Tell me about the origins of your concept of intersectionality.
Crenshaw:
It grew out of trying to conceptualize the way the law responded to issues where both race and
gender discrimination were involved. What happened was like an accident, a collision. Intersectionality simply
came from the idea that if you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you are likely to get hit by
both. These women are injured, but when the race ambulance and the gender ambulance arrive at the scene, they
see these women of color lying in the intersection and they say, “Well, we can’t figure out if this was just race or
just sex discrimination. And unless they can show us which one it was, we can’t help them.”
http://www.americanbar.org/content/...ctives_Spring2004CrenshawPSP.authcheckdam.pdf
It does seem to be different to the views attributed to self-called intersectionalists in this thread.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It's the so-called intersectionalists reffed on this thread who are putting views and methods forward that differ from the above. You should be aiming your confused fire at them.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
You're displaying a great talent for missing the point on this thread.
What, when the first post was, tell me what this (intersectionality) is about? Keep on with the digs about me being confused, I really appreciate them.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
The Crenshaw piece you quoted above is about "intersectionality", her legal studies concept. "Intersectionality", the political outlook, while it draws from Crenshaw goes much further than that. The twitter intersectionalists and the American campus left liberals are not simply saying that under discrimination laws, people who are potentially being discriminated against in more than one way can fall through legal cracks. Are they?
Also, you are attracting snide comments because of the way you are arguing - avoiding being explicit about what you actually think intersectionality is, while doggedly insinuating that others have it wrong. If you want to defend intersectionality, you'll get a better response doing so openly, rather than relying on vague claims that everyone else had it wrong in unspecified ways.
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frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
that is the best post i have ever read
TruXta
tired
Tell that to anyone over six feet forced to fly for more than 2 hours.
Aaar beaten to it.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
The point is that it doesn't really matter what 'intersectionalist' academics have written. What is being criticised here is, if you like, actually existing intersectionality. I couldn't give a rat's arse what some academic has written about it because even if I agreed with it completely that wouldn't change the fact that the way those who claim to be using the intersectional method interpret it - in other words intersectionality as it is applied in the real world - is every bit as vulgar and simplistic as people here are saying.
Does the fact that Milton Friedman and co never said massive government subsidies for banks and allowing multinational corporations to get away with openly flouting tax law is a good thing mean that we can't use these as examples when we're criticising neoliberalism? Or should neoliberalism only ever be discussed as an abstract theory rather than a political process that actually exists in the real world as well?
love detective
there's no love too small
Fuck it - orientate towards the working class where it is, as it is
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
That would kind of depend on how many intersecting oppressions she was hit by, and if one of them was "poor, so has no health insurance", at least in Crenshaw's homeland.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I just get annoyed that people use the word as a general insult when actually I think that the perspective on diversity which it displays is generally a good one and that within the left etc I do think there are problems around other things than just class.
But, is intersectionality used to take politics away from the working class as usual, yes probably. So I appreciate why people don't like it. If that makes sense, without being dogged or vague.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
But people's hostility to intersectionality here isn't because it points to diversity or says that there are other issues apart from class. That's common ground between pretty much everyone here and the intersectionalists. The bones of contention are around the other things that intersectionality proposes or assumes - what the relationship is between different forms of oppression, how oppressions work, how we should respond to them.
If intersectionality really was just the statement of the bleeding obvious that there are multiple forms of oppression and that they can't simply be boiled down to class, nobody would be arguing against it. And equally nobody would be endlessly spouting slogans about how their feminism has to be intersectional or it would be bullshit. It would be just one more true but not particularly insightful observation amongst billions.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
As someone of average height I am doubly oppressed. First from those who are taller and so block my vision when standing in front o fme, and second from those who are shorter and save money by being able to buy kids shoes. I win the round, differently-heightened oppressors.
I agree with what you're saying but the danger is people then go looking around on Tumblr and Twitter for "intersectionalism" and end up (perhaps unintentionally) cherry-picking the most eye catchingly stupid things possible, and basing a critique of those ideas around that.
Cos it's not hard to do that really, I've definitely been guilty of it, and it's a bit unfair. It's easy to end up critiquing a strawman caricature of intersectionality instead of doing it justice.
I remember being on twitter and in my better moods I used to ask people's views on intersectionality, only to get get bashed over the head with banal truisms that got nowhere near answering any of my thoughts or questions. And that any misgivings about those banal truisms must be a sign of oppressive tendencies and clinging onto my privileges.
I've just come to the conclusion that this is the form political dissent takes in amongst a generation of people socialised and brought up in post-class neo-liberalism. Attaching labels to it like intersectionality is almost missing the point, because the type of politics that's isn't all that closely related to "intersectionalty" of Crenshaw et al in practise, I think of it as what happens when people grow up in an "End of History" type environment where the material and economic system is not up for question or debate any more, and political action, liberation and social justice movements, are just there to deal exclusively with "social" issues around identity groups, mopping up all the civil rights issues now that the politics is sorted once and for all. Which is how you end up with classism as just one marginalised component of the Kyriarchy, one spoke of the wheel of oppression, and not something fundamental to all types of oppression.
Class and material politics has a unique set of relationships to these supposedly free-floating autonomous oppression categories that gets totally overlooked coz it looks a bit like dinosaur leftism. The economic system is the primary way in which all oppressions are expressed, mediated and embedded. And many of other oppression that aren't overtly embedded in capitalism still take for granted the material conditions they're contigent on. In reality to be oppressed or privileged, to even have an identity in this sense at all, presupposes that you can put food in your mouth, clothes on your back and a roof over your head. You've got to be alive and to have surived your childhood to be actually able to formulate that kind of identity in the first place. And a white cisgender hetero man who is unable to fulfill the basic material requirements to surive is not privileged in any meaningful sense, they're starving and destitute. Unity of the graveyard innit, if you can't eat you're equally fucked.
Aye its how you end up with idea's like what is keeping the Red Man down is "whitey" dressing up in silly costumes and getting "ethnic" haircuts, rather than say lack of clean water*,poor housing stock, corporation exploitation of natural resources,tribal council corruption, Residential School Syndrome, Drugs, Alcoholism, High youth mortality rates, all i would say more pressing class issues that are not exclusive to native american concerns.
In a word divide and rule 2.0
*eta in a first world country the fact 13% of native american households lack access to basic sanitation should be a national scandle
In a word divide and rule 2.0
*eta in a first world country the fact 13% of native american households lack access to basic sanitation should be a national scandle
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It's also the narcissism of it. That by making tiny alterations in their personal brand, by choosing their fashion trends in a more culturally sympathetic way, they're striking blows against the Kyriarchy. As if oppression can be fought against in a meaningful way by just making better informed consumer choices.
The sort of life of first world luxury and material wealth they live in, a level of wealth that is a direct product of the attempted extermination of the native americans, isn't going to be threatened by your decision to not wear faux indian jewellery and clothing. Whatever minor changes in appearance someone might make are pretty negligible compared to the privileges they've accrued simply by being first world and presumably white in America.
The other thing is that in a lot of cases I don't disagree with the issue itself, just the logic that underpins some of it. Like I don't like the logo for Washington Redskins for example, it is offensive on a whole host of levels, I fully support the people who are campaigning for them to change it. But let's not kid ourselves that even the best changes on that level are somehow going to alter centuries worth of systemic exclusion. At some point there has be to changes on a fundamental economic and political level, but in some situations when you try emphasising that you can be dismissed as a dinosaur manarchist clinging onto crude economic determinism, an argument that merges quite nicely with the Popper-ish liberal critique of Marxism.
The sort of life of first world luxury and material wealth they live in, a level of wealth that is a direct product of the attempted extermination of the native americans, isn't going to be threatened by your decision to not wear faux indian jewellery and clothing. Whatever minor changes in appearance someone might make are pretty negligible compared to the privileges they've accrued simply by being first world and presumably white in America.
The other thing is that in a lot of cases I don't disagree with the issue itself, just the logic that underpins some of it. Like I don't like the logo for Washington Redskins for example, it is offensive on a whole host of levels, I fully support the people who are campaigning for them to change it. But let's not kid ourselves that even the best changes on that level are somehow going to alter centuries worth of systemic exclusion. At some point there has be to changes on a fundamental economic and political level, but in some situations when you try emphasising that you can be dismissed as a dinosaur manarchist clinging onto crude economic determinism, an argument that merges quite nicely with the Popper-ish liberal critique of Marxism.
Even something like the history of native american indian mascots in sports franchises and Ivy League universities has a clear basis in class politics through social exclusion though when you* consider that when these names and costumes were chosen native americans would have actually been excluded from enrolment and participation in said university teams, and through segregationist policies in the NFL at the time {edit 2 add although doing some bg William Henry "lone star" Dietz did have some colourful if fraudulent background history when the braves switched their name to the redskins in his honour)
*not you natch,
some early morning fact checking has thrown up a couple of colourful early Native American Football teams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indians_football
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oorang_Indians
*not you natch,
some early morning fact checking has thrown up a couple of colourful early Native American Football teams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indians_football
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oorang_Indians
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butchersapron
Bring back hanging
You make some good points here, but i want to pick up on this idea of this being a result of post-class narratives. Similar approaches - albeit with different emphasis deriving from the conditions of the time - existed in the 70s and the 80s well before those narratives became a) the political reality and b) one of the central legitimating myths of the political management of the system.
They were tied materially to different elements/functions of that management: in the 80s they were tied to the post-riots development of identity politics, top-down multi-culturalism and the construction of a mediating layer in/through local councils building up a client/patron relationship with self-selected community leaders on the basis of identity; in the 70s it was tied to collective struggles within what existed at that point of the labour movement for formal equality and outside for legal equality - i.e the management of immigration/effects of immigration. Top down and bottom up.
What is this new stuff materially related to? The expansion of university education and the problems individuals (rather than collectives or whole social layers) face in playing a part in that expansion is what has produced the potential for it which is then extended by the use of social media. Yet this stuff still only means anything for a tiny % of the people at university - though they manage to amplify their voice through dominance of elected or bureaucratic roles - and i still have not met a single person who spouts any of it (and i do political stuff with a whole load of people in the 16-30 age range). This suggest to me that this stuff serves no social function - either for capital or for those its supposed to benefit - in the ways that previous concentrations on oppression did (albeit very problematically) and as such doesn't really mean very much. Not because of it taking place in a post-class context - as similar stuff did take root in previous periods, and the lack of the disciplining effect of a labour movement will have an effect - but because they've missed the boat socially and politically and so occupy only a niche and need to be noisy to make it appear as if they are an expression of and an answer to social wider issues.
Which is a really long-winded way of saying irrelevant and in history's dustbin.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
i think the higher income you have and the more control you have over your work the more chance you have of escaping the effects of discrimination personally
in my last job i had anti-semitism from a manager, i was a temporary worker and if i'd have complained to the agency i probably would have been the one to lose my job, if i had been a manager or had owned the business then i would have both been able to get another job very easily, i wouldn't suffer that much from the effects of losing my job because i'd have more money, and i wouldn't be in that position anyway because it would be secure
in my last job i had anti-semitism from a manager, i was a temporary worker and if i'd have complained to the agency i probably would have been the one to lose my job, if i had been a manager or had owned the business then i would have both been able to get another job very easily, i wouldn't suffer that much from the effects of losing my job because i'd have more money, and i wouldn't be in that position anyway because it would be secure
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
but intersectionality completely ignores it, it reduces the effects of capitalism to "classism" ie prejudice based on accent, background etc, whereas its possible that you could have a manager from a working class background treating someone who seems more middle class like shit
and it's not to do with individual experiences, it's an entire economic system
and it's not to do with individual experiences, it's an entire economic system
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
i read a good piece a while back by an american trot written in the 1940s which was about conspiracy theories but made a really good point on this as well
he saidthat under a fair economic system racism, while it may exist, would be meaningless because they would both be unable to enact the effects of their racism on the population and the conditions that lead people to look for scapegoats would no longer exist so whoever was trying to spread such messages would fall on deaf ears and be unable to hurt anyone in practice
he saidthat under a fair economic system racism, while it may exist, would be meaningless because they would both be unable to enact the effects of their racism on the population and the conditions that lead people to look for scapegoats would no longer exist so whoever was trying to spread such messages would fall on deaf ears and be unable to hurt anyone in practice
