Intersectional feminism

[Fauchelevent]

This is my first FWR thread but many of you will know me from the transactivism threads and posts about race and here and there.

On the Rachel Dolezal thread, quite an interesting discussion began about race, feminism and intersectional feminism with Quencher especially raising some very interesting and informed points. But this isn't a TAAT.

The question is intersectionality, intersectional feminism - the movement as it was intended and the movement as it stands.

I'm black, and I feel that discussions with some white women feminists often ignore race or I feel like when race is discussed, there are a lot of issues. Sometimes discussions go down the line of black women setting feminism back by being too hypersexual, muslim/orthodox women seen as backwards and so on. I see on MN a lot of people comparing gender issues to race and saying that if it were race, it would get dealt with but women are on the bottom of the heap. As a black woman i certainly feel shat on for my race as much as my gender. So intersectional feminism seems like the natural destination for women who want and need feminism but feel like mainstream feminism excludes them. Equally, intersectional feminism makes a point to make spaces accessible for disabled people, tackle homophobia and so on.

Yet intersectional feminism has also become a toxic space. It has become a space of stifled debate, regular misogyny and very orwellian. Women who disagree with the party line are blacklisted and sometimes sent death threats. Women who do not toe the party line are also guaranteed to lose any friends in this circle. For example, with student activism becoming increasingly intersectional, it also means there's less room for debate and very little dissent because anyone who disagrees will be ex communicated. So lots of people in their early twenties and younger will have this way of thinking.

I also hear from a lot of feminists who are white that they feel they cannot get involved in intersectional feminist debates because they're shut down as being "White Feminists" even by other (lower case) white feminists.

How do we balance the need for feminism that is aware of racial matters, sexuality, class and so on, because poor women, gay women, and women of colour should not feel shut out of feminism. We have to also understand that women tend to navigate their own cultures and communities differently, we all have different histories and so our feminism may look different and we may need to look outside our experience (making sure disabled feminists can access events and so on)

What we have at the moment is a post modern choice feminism where everyone is included and nothing - including the words woman, female and feminism - has meaning. It means tackling male violence and female oppression takes a back burner and in its place comes discussions of liberating oneself with make up and selfies, whatever you find on everyday feminism, and silencing and violence towards anyone who doesn't agree with absolutely everything in the ideology. Lots of young female feminists are also identifying as non-binary, possibly because they don't have the "feeling like a woman" experience that MTT speak of so assume they must not be women. Occasionally "cis scum" and "white feminists" will be told to shut the fuck up. So its currently full of a lot of issues - but a lot of aspects are it are necessary.

I'm not sure what I hope to get out of this thread really, other than a few thoughts from others. I'm happy to answer any questions - I'm black and early 20s so i have a lot of direct experience with extremely cult like intersectional feminism. Unfortunately I am spartacus though so I get very silenced. Posting on MN is a massive relief. This international womens day was like international virtue signalling day with everyone declaring that its international womens day for everyone who identifies as a woman, non binaries, and all non-cis men and anyone who disagrees should fuck off - so a bit tiresome!

Anyway - no real questions, just hoping for some thoughts and a discussion on intersectional feminism and its issues on the back of the RD thread.

This is fascinating. I don't consider myself a proper feminist. I don't know about all the proper pronouns and approved language to use when discussing intersectional Feminism.

What I find absent from
Intersectional feminism and identity politics is the absence of any discussion of feminism and class. It's disappointing and frustrating.

I worked shifts with women who thought nothing of working a 10 hour night shift, going home, making their children breakfast, taking them to school attending to an elderly relative etc and would only manage a few hours sleep a day - I was one of them. Just to make ends meet.
It pisses me off when feminism gives no platform to a silent workforce of women who are paid so little with no job security and yet are carrying so much on their shoulders - women of all colours and religion. And yet these women are to get to the back of the queue because someone at university who has an MA in gender studies or whatever is less privileged than them and has an impressibe set of pronouns. Maybe I'm showing my privilege but in the real world isn't intersectional feminism a bit of a joke?

Fauche excellent thread, thanks

Intersectional has become a byword for the oppression olympics. Women are told that they should shut up about sexual assault and reproductive rights, mocked for turning out in pussy hats because they are 'white feminists' and other people have it so much harder than they do.
There is a pervasive and wrong idea that white, straight, middle class 'cis' (sic) women of any culture have all they could need in terms of safety and rights and the only people who still need feminism are the black, disabled, poor, non binary and trans women. When you draw the Venn diagram of oppressions you notice that trans women are always at the centre of the most intersections and therefore must be centred in all things.
Social justice as a movement relates to trans people. Trans rights are important. The right to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, relationships etc. In that case I see how taking an intersectional perspective is important.
Feminism though? No. Trans women are simply not the concern of feminism. The needs of trans women are not the same as the needs of women and where they intersect is where feminism needs to stand up for the needs of women, but intersectionality as it is currently understood does not alllow this.

Intersectional feminism is a meaningless buzzword, featured heavily on American social justice sites. They can fuck off. My words and experiences don't count because I'm white? Don't think so mate. It's just a big club of youngsters desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with each other by stretching to ever more hilarious contortions of reality in order to be inclusive.

It's no threat. We can head them off before they enter either the offline world, or the UK.

Feminism isn't a perfect movement but no movement is perfect. However I do feel it is the only movement being criticised for not solving all oppression.
From the intersectionality I see on social media (and I realise it may not be representative) there is a real lack of understanding of the historical context of feminism and also a lack of respect for the reality of other women's lives. Broad brush strokes are used to tar women as 'white middle class feminists' without any appreciation of their class or race.
And as someone who has worked overseas with incredible grass roots women's organisations, I find it perplexing that intersectional feminism does not represent or platform them. Indeed, time and again, I see a complete lack of understanding of any kind of female experience outwith a Western capitalist critique.

This is an excellent thread, thanks for starting it Fauch

Sometimes discussions go down the line of black women setting feminism back by being too hypersexual, muslim/orthodox women seen as backwards and so on

At the bottom of that, is it racism and misogyny disguised as something else? It sounds like the worst of daily fail stereotypes, not a view that should be held by feminists iyswim.

I've avoided intersectionality because I've only came across it online in the last year or so and it made my brain melt. It seemed like more a stick to beat people with than an inspiring cause.

Great points - but it is very much already in the UK morris and the conversations are very US centric ie talking about hispanic racism when we have a very small hispanic population in comparison to the US. It's very big across a lot of movements here.

What confuses me is that women who arent white get called "white feminists" if they don't completely agree with the dialogues of intersectional feminism. Supporting brown women is also being seen as the same issue as supporting trans issues for example. So CNA is being criticised "as black women don't have the same issues or female upbringing as white women but it doesnt mesn they arent women - just like trans women" when fundamentally the issue boils down to male violence against women and female oppression. All women grow up experiencing that, white or brown, but just because trans women feel unhappy with their gender it does not equate to being the same as experiencing female oppression." And various other ways - the pussy hats and other depictions of vaginas in feminism being considered white feminist because they ignore the differences between white vaginas and brown (what ???!!!!), and trans penises and vaginas... so it is in fact not just white women who are considered white feminists! Logic is not a tenet of intersectional feminism.

Agree with aplace again i'd love to hear from overseas grassroots groups but you won't because its really not about organising or activist work. Just point scoring and never offending anyone ever

Flavia in the end I think we can all have our prejudices, feminist or not, and some - many even - feminists can be guilty of biases.

But i've seen, for example, black women being pounced on for critiquing islam, muslim women being pounced on for asking questions re: black issues, i - as a bisexual woman have been pounced on for saying i think that bisexuals in a heterosexual relationship (like me) should remember we have a very privileged position in the community in that we're never going to be beat up with our partners and we can show our partners affection, talk about them in public without fear. I was told that a bisexual in a het relationship is not in a heterosexual relationship, they are always always oppressed and it's oppression that they don't get abused because it's erasing the fact they're bi ??? Like, what??!? It's ridiculous and completely distracts from real issues and real oppression. Likewise, white women are silenced for being white - not for any real act of implied supremacy or racism (which certainly does exist but not just for the act of bloody speaking!)

Going back to the bisexual thing, I do think that it's so tied up with identity. For example, you hear a lot that just existing whilst black, trans, gay etc is radical and an act of protest. So it relieves them of any responsibility to do any organising aside from calling people out and stuff - whatevers easy.

With that line of thinking, where the identity is premium and you ignore things like power structures and who really has the power to oppress, it means anyone who hurts your feelings is committing an act of violence because they're denying your identity. A person who is non-binary but could honestly just be read as a butch female got very upset and called a postman bigoted and oppressive for saying "thanks madam" because he denied her non-binary identity that he could not have possibly known about. Equally, when someone sees me out and about with my male partner they cannot possibly know I am bisexual unless I say "I am bisexual" but apparently i am biphobic for saying my struggle is not as tough as someone with a female partner who would face abuse. Just identifying is enough for people to enact horrific acts of violence since people are mindreaders. Which is why a man who was a man for thirty five years before transitioning will have always faced horrific acts of transphobia and misogyny.

Or some shite

tbh you won't hear from overseas grassroots groups because their experience of life and feminism doesn't intersect much with intersectional feminism's understanding of oppressions.
Women overseas are trying to get prosecutions for mass rapes or working to set up sexual health programmes. Who has the right to write about Beyonce's latest video just isn't high on their list of priorities.
Intersectional feminism is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And it's not because they can't see the boat is sinking; it's because ultimately, deep down, they know they are incredibly privileged. They know they will get airlifted to safety and think those not chair arranging deserve to sink beneath the waves.

BogQueen - I so totally get you. I've not been personally in your shoes, but I lived in that world once and I know where you are coming from. It totally fucks me off that class (about boring shit like work, fatigue and poverty) and not about sexy stuff (like sex, identity, fashion, who one fucks) is totally forgotten in this brave new world. Yet, class is still fundamental, even if it has changed in essence. It's not exciting enough for the current SJWs, though, even if they accuse women of being middle class just like most of them are.

This is a great thread, Fauche, and I think I'll have to reread a couple of times as I've been turning these ideas over in my mind lately and now I've got a lot more to think about.

I understood intersectionality to have come about due to the way discrimination law is only built to tackle single instances of discrimination, so let black women down as the issues they were fighting couldn't be 'proven' in the legal sense as they weren't experienced by white women or black men, so their arguments failed along both sex and race lines individually, despite the discrimination being real.

It's contemporary use seems to be a lot more about identity politics and validation. It's all a bit 'teenage' for me and it reminds me of the 'alternative' group at school, who were mainly middle class kids with angst who felt 'different' and were very vocal about that, and set great importance on how they dressed etc.

I feel like I'm intersectional on a personal level. I've often talked about the frustration of people explaining issues of sexism away with non-white men friends, who have experienced the same with race issues. The issues aren't the same at all, but we can both understand that feeling and it has probably made us both more understanding.

The identity stuff I just can't get on board with. I don't think we have complete control over how we're perceived, and I don't feel the need to have my vision of myself validated by anyone else.

Place - I think you've expressed something I've been struggling to recently, in that intersectional feminism cannot see that it's very Western, and actually American in its understanding. The US has a very specific understanding of slavery, for example - and the criticism of the Pankhurst quote 'I'd rather be a rebel than a slave' seemed to be based on the fact that slavery means black slavery in the US and nothing else.

I think most women who have experienced pregnancy, birth and looking after a baby can probably relate to each other, even if we're on the other side of the world and in completely different circumstances, we could have a conversation about this and a lot of the experiences will be the same because they are primal human experiences. It's this kind of thing that I think the idea of 'the sisterhood' is based on, and it's something I've only understood since having a baby as I felt quite individual before then. However, to say this is unacceptable as 'are you saying women who can't have children or don't want to have children aren't women?' OF COURSE IM NOT BLOODY SAYING THAT.

I wonder whether the focus on identity as power is also a response to the collapse of traditional left wing politics and past ideas about class solidarity.

I think there are so many positives in the way young people support each other to be themselves and be happy.

But in the end - we all know what 50% of the population is good for wiping arses etc

I have just seen this thread and I don't know where to start.
@Fauch i think we are in similar age group and I applaud you for starting this thread. The comments though yikes! I can see why womanism appealed to me more and more when I stated getting involved in feminism.

The conclusion, I have come up with is that I must have a very sheltered way of reading my materials and groups I communicate with. The focus mainly being black women. Trans encroaching on female space didn't even come into my radar before Mn. For me the trans debate blew up after Caitlin Jenner and started noticing it more and more.

I agree with what Catharine MacKinnon says in her essay "From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway?"

www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/from%20practice%20to%20theory.htm

It is common to say that something is good in theory but not in practice. I always want to say, then it is not such a good theory, is it?

Unlike other women, the white woman who is not poor or working class or lesbian or Jewish or disabled or old or young does not share her oppression with any man. That does not make her condition any more definitive of the meaning of "women" than the condition of any other woman is. But trivializing her oppression, because it is not even potentially racist or class-biased or heterosexist or anti-Semitic, does define the meaning of being "anti-woman" with a special clarity. How the white woman is imagined and constructed and treated becomes a particularly sensitive indicator of the degree to which women, as such, are despised.

I am in a political job and have been called a white feminist three times recently by male colleagues. I have found it really upsetting and confusing - firstly that they are clearly using the term as an insult and secondly because most of my work is intersectional (or at least I think it is) I find it really confusing. I actually don't think that these colleagues are interested in what I do or don't do in my work - I think they just want to express disgust at some intangible middle-class whiteness that I apparently embody. Sometimes it just feels like thinly disguised misogyny to me.

Personal identity does seem to be the 'unit of power' as it were, rather than class. I think there's also an assumed middle class guilt, which I don't feel as I'm not from that background.

Fauche on the subject of 'if this was racism it would be dealt with' I think that to a lot of white men in particular, racism is something they've actively been made aware of through education, so with thugs like racist terms they are able to spot them very easily, quite possibly as they've grown up in a non-diverse area so have a more 'academic' understanding. However, sexism is part of their lives and beliefs, part of their families and they don't see it, and they feel very threatened by it, when they 'know' they're not racist, because they don't ever really have to face that.

Thugs = things

Just place marking - might not add anything as I'm not clued up on this as those who have already posted & want to learn more.

Me too. 😀

I had never even heard of intersectional feminism.

my male partner they cannot possibly know I am bisexual unless I say "I am bisexual" but apparently i am biphobic for saying my struggle is not as tough as someone with a female partner who would face abuse

I find the attitude to bisexuality interesting (and personally challenging) too. I'm attracted to men and women however have been in a het relationship with the same man for almost 20 years. I feel like to label myself "bisexual" would be pretty meaningless really. Because in reality and to all intents and purposes at the moment I'm straight and have been for yonks.
I don't really feel comfortable talking about my sexuality because it feels to me like talking about fantasies at this point - better kept private. I don't feel oppressed by it at all because it is not a material thing - materially I'm in a her marriage with kids. How would my sexual attraction oppress me? I could potentially use the bisexual label in a game of privilege bingo but what would be the point?
Maybe I have entrenched biphobia or maybe I'm just realistic. It's a headfuck though

Beachcomber you and Catharine MacKinnon are right. I think female socialisation means I feel obliged to say 'good effort; poor execution'. When in actuality, I find intersectional feminists unwilling to make any effort that would cause them to look too closely at the experiences of women outside their immediate intersectional cohort.
Where I struggle to deny its value completely is that someone somewhere may be reaching a feminist understanding through it. It may be a gateway. But the intersectionality I see in practice on social media is not for me.

Possibly APlaceonthecouch. Although I think it does more harm than good.

For me intersectionality is no more than a fancy word identity politics concept. It doesn't do anything and it's not a movement. It is the very opposite of collective, there can only be division and individualism. Which of course is toxic to class action / struggle / movements (like feminism) and the result is the status quo remains untouched and unchallenged.

Plus it cuts us off from our history. The women's rights movement is being cut off from its history and is turning it's back on the hard work and heavy lifting that has been done by our predecessors. At that is foolish.

And that is foolish

Great thread.

Bog your experiences remind me so much of listening to my grandmother's generation talk about their lives as young women. And reminds me of an argument I had as a student with one of my lecturers who was a historian of technology. She was arguing the then trendy thesis that domestic appliances (the washing machine, the hoover etc) hadn't actually made women's lives any easier because people's standards of cleanliness just got adjusted so that women's days were still filled. This was so much at odds with what my relatives - working class women - had told me of their lives. Carrying pails of water to heat in the boiler, carrying buckets of coal to fire it up, pounding the washing by hand, hauling heavy wet sheets out and running them through the mangle - all absolutely back-breaking manual labour, and in my grandmother's case on top of a 9-5 job in a shop because her husband had done a runner and hers was the sole income. The lecturer simply refused to believe me, because didn't I know that women of that generation sent their sheets out to the laundry. (I dunno who she was basing her oral history on - Mrs fucking Minniver perhaps?)

Bit of a digression, but this supposedly feminist lecturer was so wedded to the idea that her version of domestic history had to be such that women's lives could not have got easier in any material way that she simply refused to admit any evidence to the contrary.

We know there is a whole section of society -mainly women - who are plugging the gaps left by cuts to services. They are in a caring role at work and at home. Why are they so easily dismissed?

I look at the gender pay gap and all the chat is about 'the boardroom.' And yet inlook st our public sector and see traditionally male jobs which were/are heavily unionised are paid much better than traditionally female roles. No one gives a toss. And yet this type of work is done by women of all ethnicities and is low paid and insecure.

For me, intersectional feminism doesn't provide an adequate explanation nor solution for this situation. To me it seems like a way if looking at society which brings important factors into focus. But it's not the whole of feminism. Feminism should also be about winning economic and political power for those women who don't have it because they are too busy holding everyone else's shit together.