A problem with intersectionality that I thought you would point out, but I realized while reading the definition is it's attempt to unify the interests of all "oppressed" groups. That's clearly ridiculous. Not all "oppressed" group's interests align and sometimes they even conflict. E.g. the job market for legal immigrants vs the market for illegal ones. Or sex based spaces for females vs the demands of transgender activists.
Nice work. It’s a relief to read a well-considered examination of a concept so widely accepted on one side of the scrum and so reviled on the other. Your unique position affords an illuminating POV and you’ve proven more than equal to the task of laying the cards on the table. It’s deeply ironic that we all have to live with the burden of determining how to live with our individuality while disparate forces drag us toward group identities in a time when we have greater freedom of affiliation than ever and the resulting emptiness and confusion felt by so many begs to be filled by something or anything. For some of us whose family roots were conservative and who migrated leftward years ago for various reasons, the emergence of authoritarian impulses on the left, fortified by half-baked, trendy academicism, has been seriously confounding. It’s a relief to know there are others out there who know better.
Like a lot of modern progressive thought, this seems to be a motte-and-bailey. On the hill, there's "people experience things differently," and down here in reality, it's...well, whatever schizogeneric hot takes are coming out recently. (Hamas are anti-colonial freedom fighters!) The issue isn't the sociology it's the reinvented Manicheism where everyone (and everything) is either good or evil, not based so much on their actions as on their tribal membership and their (assumed) level of power. It's every bit as hierarchical as traditional society, but with the "good" and "evil" axes switched.
The main point we should focus on is less on the intellectual merits of intersectionality and more on the political aims of the ideology:
It is adopted for the same reason class strugge was positive for the communists: it provides members with the holy reason to destroy the out-group and have no piety towards it.
And, as happened with Communism, it will disappear only when the ideology that sustain it, feminism, is vanquished.
Because i do not see, for now, the end of the ever strongee feminism, intersectionality will go on unabated until a reactionary force arise to destroy it.
I have similar feelings, in that I think intersectionality could be useful, but not as typically deployed. One of the biggest things missing in most intersectionality discussion is that the experience of every identity is highly contextual, which is to me the key thing that makes it impossible to make bright line distinctions like “X is always oppressed, Y is always privileged”.
You’re a gay man. That was a disadvantage in the LDS community. On the other hand it would have been neutral to downright positive if you were born into a family of Broadway players.
You’re white - makes you fit in better in LDS and in CS. But not great if you aspire to be in the NBA.
A black woman might face discrimination in some communities. Applying for the top job at Harvard? Definite advantage.
Black and gay in academia? Double Oppression Bonus Score! Black and gay in a lower class urban community? Buckle up for some hardcore homophobia white academics never want to talk about.
And so on. Even within an individual, we aren’t the same person all the time. Work, home, clubs, family, community, we play different roles. And our identities can be benefits or detriments differently in each one. You’d think people that talk about “code-switching” would get this.
If intersectionality wanted to offer a richer look at an individual by expanding the field of view to more than just a single identity label, then we already have that: it’s individualism.
To me intersectionality had always been this corrupted version of individualism: “individualism, but with heavily gerrymandered categories.”
Nice post and I agree with you that intersectionality is no good at describing the complexity of people's lives and the traditions they inherit. But was that the intention? As I understand it, Crenshaw's original paper was about employment discrimination and how group membership can produce add-on disparate impacts. I find that example quite convincing and I'm curious what you think. I agree with you that the spread of the term has made it analytically toothless.
I think you basically hit the nail on the head with a single phrase: "True and useful." The premise of "True Intersectionality" can be easily explained to a five year old, "Players have very little say in some traits from character creation but those traits can greatly influence gameplay."
This is true! So obviously true it doesn't make sense to argue against it. You don't need social theory.
Intersectionality (TM) and the attendant theorists, attempt to make this truth maximally useful. To me this is the great sin. I have seen this do enormous damage to the people I know across nearly every spectrum of things that Intersectionality (TM) cares about. It encourages agreeable "dominant" people to surrender their usefulness, while creating self-doubt in the "oppressed" people who feel they aren't useful enough. It creates institution-sized holes in understandings of usefulness that only geniuses and con artists can fill.
The resulting advice of the Intersectionality (TM) is so obviously attenuated to usefulness that it is distinctly different from, say, someone who is actually attenuated to sub-culture. "Travel more, meet new people, etc. etc." is a huge aesthetic and cultural gain that is left on the table! Maybe only a handful of people have the tact and talent to bring us the goods, but Intersectionality (TM) is on the margin clearly a deterrent to these people.
If you haven't seen it, I cannot recommend Jerrod Carmichael's "8" enough:
When I lost my faith I said I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy, and when I read your phrase "heartbreakingly false common purpose" it really resonated. A beautiful way to put it. ❤️
A problem with intersectionality that I thought you would point out, but I realized while reading the definition is it's attempt to unify the interests of all "oppressed" groups. That's clearly ridiculous. Not all "oppressed" group's interests align and sometimes they even conflict. E.g. the job market for legal immigrants vs the market for illegal ones. Or sex based spaces for females vs the demands of transgender activists.
Nice work. It’s a relief to read a well-considered examination of a concept so widely accepted on one side of the scrum and so reviled on the other. Your unique position affords an illuminating POV and you’ve proven more than equal to the task of laying the cards on the table. It’s deeply ironic that we all have to live with the burden of determining how to live with our individuality while disparate forces drag us toward group identities in a time when we have greater freedom of affiliation than ever and the resulting emptiness and confusion felt by so many begs to be filled by something or anything. For some of us whose family roots were conservative and who migrated leftward years ago for various reasons, the emergence of authoritarian impulses on the left, fortified by half-baked, trendy academicism, has been seriously confounding. It’s a relief to know there are others out there who know better.
Thanks for sharing this one
Thanks for the shout-out! I’m really chuffed. Of course, now I have to try to live up to the compliment, but that’s not a bad problem to have :)
Like a lot of modern progressive thought, this seems to be a motte-and-bailey. On the hill, there's "people experience things differently," and down here in reality, it's...well, whatever schizogeneric hot takes are coming out recently. (Hamas are anti-colonial freedom fighters!) The issue isn't the sociology it's the reinvented Manicheism where everyone (and everything) is either good or evil, not based so much on their actions as on their tribal membership and their (assumed) level of power. It's every bit as hierarchical as traditional society, but with the "good" and "evil" axes switched.
The main point we should focus on is less on the intellectual merits of intersectionality and more on the political aims of the ideology:
It is adopted for the same reason class strugge was positive for the communists: it provides members with the holy reason to destroy the out-group and have no piety towards it.
And, as happened with Communism, it will disappear only when the ideology that sustain it, feminism, is vanquished.
Because i do not see, for now, the end of the ever strongee feminism, intersectionality will go on unabated until a reactionary force arise to destroy it.
I have similar feelings, in that I think intersectionality could be useful, but not as typically deployed. One of the biggest things missing in most intersectionality discussion is that the experience of every identity is highly contextual, which is to me the key thing that makes it impossible to make bright line distinctions like “X is always oppressed, Y is always privileged”.
You’re a gay man. That was a disadvantage in the LDS community. On the other hand it would have been neutral to downright positive if you were born into a family of Broadway players.
You’re white - makes you fit in better in LDS and in CS. But not great if you aspire to be in the NBA.
A black woman might face discrimination in some communities. Applying for the top job at Harvard? Definite advantage.
Black and gay in academia? Double Oppression Bonus Score! Black and gay in a lower class urban community? Buckle up for some hardcore homophobia white academics never want to talk about.
And so on. Even within an individual, we aren’t the same person all the time. Work, home, clubs, family, community, we play different roles. And our identities can be benefits or detriments differently in each one. You’d think people that talk about “code-switching” would get this.
If intersectionality wanted to offer a richer look at an individual by expanding the field of view to more than just a single identity label, then we already have that: it’s individualism.
To me intersectionality had always been this corrupted version of individualism: “individualism, but with heavily gerrymandered categories.”
Nice post and I agree with you that intersectionality is no good at describing the complexity of people's lives and the traditions they inherit. But was that the intention? As I understand it, Crenshaw's original paper was about employment discrimination and how group membership can produce add-on disparate impacts. I find that example quite convincing and I'm curious what you think. I agree with you that the spread of the term has made it analytically toothless.
I think you basically hit the nail on the head with a single phrase: "True and useful." The premise of "True Intersectionality" can be easily explained to a five year old, "Players have very little say in some traits from character creation but those traits can greatly influence gameplay."
This is true! So obviously true it doesn't make sense to argue against it. You don't need social theory.
Intersectionality (TM) and the attendant theorists, attempt to make this truth maximally useful. To me this is the great sin. I have seen this do enormous damage to the people I know across nearly every spectrum of things that Intersectionality (TM) cares about. It encourages agreeable "dominant" people to surrender their usefulness, while creating self-doubt in the "oppressed" people who feel they aren't useful enough. It creates institution-sized holes in understandings of usefulness that only geniuses and con artists can fill.
The resulting advice of the Intersectionality (TM) is so obviously attenuated to usefulness that it is distinctly different from, say, someone who is actually attenuated to sub-culture. "Travel more, meet new people, etc. etc." is a huge aesthetic and cultural gain that is left on the table! Maybe only a handful of people have the tact and talent to bring us the goods, but Intersectionality (TM) is on the margin clearly a deterrent to these people.
If you haven't seen it, I cannot recommend Jerrod Carmichael's "8" enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whd1eheF-nE . Easily one of the best examples of True Intersectionality in the past 20 years, by someone who knows what he is doing.
When I lost my faith I said I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy, and when I read your phrase "heartbreakingly false common purpose" it really resonated. A beautiful way to put it. ❤️