INEQUALITY

1.
2. Rethinking INTERSECTIONALITY
Intersectionality is the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of
race, gender, class, and sexuality; multidimentionality of marginalized subjects lived
experiences
Purposes of INTERSECTIONALITY
- subverts race/gender binaries in the service of theorizing identity in a more
complex fashion
- aspires to provide a vocabulary to respond to critiques of identity politics; seeks
to demonstrate racial variation within gender and vice versa
- invites scholar to come to terms with the legacy of exclusion of marginalized
subjects from feminist and anti-racist work, and the impact of those absences on both
theory and practice
-> intersectionality focus on the experiences of subjects whose voices have been ignored
Rethinking Intersectionality: 4 points
- the lack of a clearly defined intersectional methodology
- the use of black women as prototypical intersectional subjects
- ambiguity inherent to the definition of intersectionality
- coherence between intersectionality and lived experiences of multiple identities
Three distinct intersectional methodologies:
1.
anticategotegorical complexity: assumes categories are too simplistic to capture
complexity of lived experience
2.
intracategorical complexity: People are multiple marginalized subjects; although
categories are used to sort, they may exclude individuals; uses multiple marginalized
subjects experiences as a way to demonstrate inadequacy of categories
3.
intercategorical complexity: there are relationships of inequality among already
constituted social groups (McCall, 2005); expose relationships between inequality and
categories themselves; use categories strategically to dsiplay linkages between
categories and inequality
Practices of intersectional methodology:
- highlight a tremendous gap between conceptions of intersectional methodology
and practices of intersectional investigations, shows that intersectional projects often
replicate precisely the approaches they critique

Crenshaw and Black Women

- her argument shores up the conception that black womens identities are
constituted exclusively by race and gender

- excludes other factors other than race or gender like sexuality, nationality, class
- Crenshaw offers little attention to the ways in which race and gender function as
social processes in distinctive ways for particular black women in varying historical
oments
- Black womens race and gender are treated as transhistorical constants that
mark all black women in similar ways
Theroetical importance of black women
- used as a wedge to demonstrate the shortcomings of feminist and anti-racist
work
- black women are treated as a unitary and monolithic entity: differences between
black women (like class and sexuality) are mediated by both race and gender and
excludes other factors
- intersectionality recycles black feminism without demonstrating what new tools it
brings to black feminist to help it fashion a more complex theory of identity
Who is intersectional?
- All identities are intersectional?
- Only multiply marginalized subjects are intersectional
Intersectionality
theory of marginalized subjectivity
- black women's experiences
- recovery of the claims and identities of those who are pushed to the margins of racial
discourse because of patriarchal normativity and simultaneously pushed to the
margins of the feminist discourse because of assumptions of racial normativity (Kwan,
1996)

theory of identity
- multiple grounds of identity
- multiple oppressions experienced by nonwhite and poor women in particular but more
generally to all women because differences in sexuality, age, and physical ableness are
also sites of oppression (Zack, 2005)
the 'so what' questions
way in which privilege and oppression can be co-constituted on the subjective
level
- Matsuda's 'ask the other question' demonstrates interconnections of forms of
subordination but ignore the intimate connections between privilege and oppressions
consider race and gender as social processes that inform each other, but which
which operate in distinct and particular ways
- Wacquant's 'logic of the trial' locates the racist and sexist practices that undergird
seemingly neutral and objective sites but ignores the mechanisms through which
domination operates, prolifirates, and entrenches itself
Intersectionality
> The goal of most intersectionality research is to address the ways in which intersecting
identities often create conflict between and within groups in an effort to create a richer and more
thought out transgressive politics and/or a dynamic understanding of the social world.

Modernity
1. Winant - argues that the new world will only be able to constitute itself if it
consists of racisms and give racial identities to all beings
2. Stoler - bourgeois sexuality has emerged on an imperial landscape where the
cultural accoutrements of their distinction were partially shaped
3. Segal - regulation of bourgeois masculinity was constituted in the othering of
the female, the homosexual and the black male
(As Mercer and Julian said, western concept of sexuality already contains
racism)
4.
Feinberg - in his work Transgender Warriors he told that Hostility to transgender,
sex-change, intersexuality, women, and same-sex love became a pattern wherever class
antagonisms deepened.
Heteronormativity
1. Sommerville - attempted to show that heterosexual and homosexual
classification of bodies and US aggresively classifying the boundaries black and white
bodies emerged at the same time
2. Collins - said that White Western normality became constructed on the backs of
black deviance, with an imagined black hyper-heterosexual deviance at the heart of the
enterprise
3. Ferguson - blames Myrdal for forgetting about the liberalism and said that
exclusions serves as consequences to African-Americans for their own nonheteronormativity
Conclusion: Intersectionality as an analytic tool hopes to bring these
contradictions to the forefront in an effort to disable the heteronormative.
Research Paradigm and the Black Family
1. Pathological/Cultural Dysfunction Model - research that follows this model has
made the black familys non-normative structure more concrete which leads to a
multitude of data pathologizing the black family
2. Relativist model - goal is to be strong