Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a theory developed by the American black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s addressing the specific types of multi-level discrimination – racial and gendered – faced by black women in the U.S., and the difficulty for the U.S. legal system to view these two types of discriminatory experiences as interconnected rather than separate. The theory was also a crucial response to American second wave, white, liberal and middle-class feminists who adopted a universalist concept of sisterhood (see Feminism). By only focusing on gendered oppression and patriarchy and at the same time claiming equal sisterhood in fighting it, white liberal feminism masked racial difference and racial inequality among women. A similar unequal power dynamic continues to exist in several forms of transnational feminism, wherein white European and North American feminists as well as their governments use universal women’s rights as a common cause to justify imperialist policies, including military intervention in so-called developing countries such as in the pro-war discourses in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Intersectionality as a tool that demonstrates intersecting axes of oppression continued to develop beyond its original race and gender intersection. Academically, “an intersectional perspective recognizes the complex interplay between multiple axes, such as gender and ethnicity, and analyzes the specific effects produced by their interaction”. Thus, intersectionality can be used to show the interaction between gender, race, class and other categories such as age, sexuality or disability in individual and social lives. These multiple identities shape people’s individual and collective experiences but also demonstrate how social identities are constructed in relation to wider power interactions. For example, academic Leslie McCall calls for an “intracategorical” approach to intersectional studies because of the importance of social structures such as “subjects”, domination, and subordination and highlighting the way in which such categories act in conjunction. Yet, intersectionality has been critiqued for an overreliance on seemingly “stable” analytical categories (race, gender, class) which has the potential of missing other forms of intersected oppressions that do not fall into such clearly-defined axis, but rather are shaped by conditions such as time and space.

This term quickly became a buzzword, and a useful concept for both practitioners and academics, specialists and generalists. The term is used among feminists and activists in Beirut and in academic productions. However, its import can sometimes be inadequate. For example, engaging in the intersectional question of racial and gendered discrimination against migrant women in Beirut has often come at the price of ignoring labour as a major intersecting dynamic in these women’s lives.

The mainstream use of the intersectional approach to gender, race and class has also been transposed to the UN system. UN reports recently called for the necessity to consider gender-related dimensions of racial discrimination, and to take an intersectional approach to violence against women. Nevertheless, the UN “culture of indicators”, simplifying complex connections and failing to highlight the structural causes of violence, could lead to a misrepresentation of women’s experiences. Some critiques of the concept fear that, if the concept is used as an umbrella term encompassing many issues and used in many different contexts, it may miss the opportunity to disrupt categories of identification and power and rather reaffirms them.  Focusing on analyzing the experiences of groups identified as “marginal” or “minorities” is a way of reproducing essentialist ideas about such identities – for example, “Muslim woman” becomes a coherent general category even though such a category includes millions of women with various living conditions that are impossible to generalize.