Written by Sharda Vishwanathan
As the run to the US Presidential race gains
momentum, dialogue and debate around numerous issues ranging from economic
reforms to migration politics have been the most voted flavor of the season.
And Hillary Clinton’s recent tweet on “intersectionality” brings to the
forefront the overlapping dynamics of gender, race, class and other identities.
Intersectionality as a concept has often been
ascribed various meanings. While some have associated it with identity
politics, there are others who have often used to term to understand identities
and the different institutional barriers that parallelly affect these different
identities. In the recent years, this has in fact become one of the buzzwords
in the context of social justice.
However, intersectionality as a concept can be traced back to the 19th
century when scholars like Anna Julia Cooper and Maria Stewart advocated the
need to understand race through a gendered lens and to explore feminism through
a racial lens. However, it was only in 1989 that the word was coined by
African-American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to illuminate how social
justice movements neglected black women’s issues and struggles.
Often discourses on feminism adopt a ‘one-size-fits-all’
approach. It then becomes imperative to take into consideration the fact that
women as a group are not homogenous. Take for e.g. an immigrant from Asia will
have different experiences from those who are from Mexico. A poor Dalit woman
has to deal with several layers of oppression; one on the lines of gender,
second on the lines of her class and third for belonging to a different caste.
There are other instances.
A woman of colour faces the discrimination
both on the basis of her gender and her race.
Thus, the privilege of being a ‘white-woman’
or an ‘upper-caste’ woman makes her experiences different from what the other
women have to face for not having that same privilege. Identities then become the bedrock that only
further perpetuate discrimination and exclusion. In other words, sexism is
something that all women encounter but casteist sexism, class sexism and
racialized sexism is something that only some women encounter thus, making it
important to provide for different narratives within the feminist discourse.
The popular wage gap statistics, which highlights
that white women make 77 cents to a white man’s dollar, black women make 69
cents for that same dollar and Latinas make a mere 59 cents in comparison
reinforces the need for feminism to be intersectional.
Another classic example of this is the 1976 case brought by a group of black women
against General Motors which highlighted how anti-discrimination movements
failed to confront the intersecting concerns of African-American women:
“Blacks did
one set of jobs and whites did another. According to the plaintiffs’
experiences, women were welcome to apply for some jobs, while only men were
suitable for others. This was of course a problem in and of itself, but for
black women the consequences were compounded. You see, the black jobs were
men’s jobs, and the women’s jobs were only for whites. Thus, while a black
applicant might get hired to work on the floor of the factory if he were male;
if she were a black female she would not be considered. Similarly, a woman
might be hired as a secretary if she were white, but wouldn’t have a chance at
that job if she were black. Neither the black jobs nor the women’s jobs were
appropriate for black women, since they were neither male nor white.
Wasn’t this clearly discrimination, even if some blacks and some women
were hired?”
Thus, feminism ends up perpetuating the discrimination by
subscribing to dominant discourses that relegate minorities and marginalized
groups within the movement.
While Clinton’s tweet has been perceived as an effort on her part reach out to and gain support of the young
women who have embraced the very idea of intersectionality, it is certainly a
welcome change that intersectionality has now begun to occupy space in the
wider framework of politics and political discourse. But what remains to be
seen is if this goes beyond the political jargons to actually designing
concrete solutions at the policy level to address the varied levels of
structural inequalities and barriers affecting the varied communities at every
level.
