How (Not) to Misapply the Concept of Intersectionality

[osteophage]

As best I can figure, the reason people end up misapplying the concept of intersectionality is because the end up absorbing a decontextualized version of it as just... the abstract concept of combinations of identities. If that's all it were, then frankly it would be kind of pointless—so generic as to be politically insignificant and unremarkable. By contrast, if you actually understand its original context, then you can understand that intersectionality is shorthand for a particular counterargument, and in order to really grasp that counterargument, you have to understand what kind of argument it's responding to in the first place. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort.

For a detailed account of what intersectionality is meant to critique, you can turn to "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" by Kimberlé Crenshaw. In this piece Crenshaw analyzes a widespread and hemmed-in "single-axis" approach to conceptualizing discrimination. The single-axis approach, or "the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis," frequently involves (or encourages) prioritizing some group members over others in a way that replicates wider societal heirarchies. Crenshaw is explicit about this: 

With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women. 

This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.

To argue as much, Crenshaw presents the rulings and reasoning from three legal case studies: DeGraffenreid v General Motors (the GM Case), Moore v Hughes Helicopter (the helicopter case), and Payne v Travenol (the pharmaceutical case). The first two out of the three are cases where the plaintiffs lost because of single-axis reasoning. The third one is presented as a kind of compromised victory whose full significance needs to be read in light of the first two. Together they illustrate how single-axis reasoning ends up hampering anti-discrimination efforts in the court of law. 

In the GM case, five Black women were suing GM for discrimination in how it carried out a mass layoff. The facts of this case, as recounted by Crenshaw, are relatively straightforward. GM did not hire any Black women prior to 1964. Then GM conducted a seniority-based layoff, which meant that GM fired employees who were more recently hired. Because "employees more recently hired" made up such a significant portion of the employees who were Black women, this layoff disproportionately affected Black women. On this basis, the plaintiffs accused GM of discrimination. 

The plaintiffs lost the GM case because of single-axis reasoning. According to the judge, the plaintiffs could have brought suit for either race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both. When the axes are separated out in this way, GM has a perfectly good defense: GM was already hiring [White] women prior to 1964, which rules out sex discrimination. This case illustrates the principle of isolating the axes and assessing discrimination on the basis of otherwise-privileged group members.

In the helicopter case, the Black female plaintiff, Moore, was suing Hughes Helicopters for discrimination in job promotions. To prove the point, Moore presented statistical evidence to show both a gender disparity in promotions between men and women and a racial disparity between Black and White men. This evidence would seem to straightforwardly prove a pattern of discrimination. 

Moore lost the case because of single-axis reasoning. Essentially the court objected that Moore needed to pick one axis of discrimination or the other to focus on, not both. Bizarrely, a direct quote from the Ninth Circuit also points out that Moore claimed discrimination "as a Black female" and that this "raised serious doubts as to Moore's ability to adequately represent white female employees." This reasoning inverts yet parallels the reasoning used in the GM case, in which the experiences of White women were used as the stand-in and the measuring stick for Black women. Yet here in the helicopter case, a Black woman emphasizing that she's a Black woman supposedly disqualifies her from representing the interests of other women. This case illustrates the principle of assessing discrimination in a way that deprioritizes the testimony of the multiply-marginalized, while also insisting on treating discrimination as something that can only be approached single-file, one at a time.

In the pharmaceutical case, two Black female plaintiffs were suing Travenol for race discrimination. The court found their case compelling enough to insist on back pay and constructive seniority for Black female employees. On the face of it, this sounds like a success story. 

Here's where it gets more complicated: the court refused to allow the plaintiffs to represent the larger demographic of Black employees more generally. Even with having proven extensive race discrimination, Black women were barred from representing Black men, comparable to how a Black woman in the helicopter case was barred from representing the interests of other women. On the basis of this choice, the court refused to extend the remedy (backpay and seniority) to any Black men. 

Crenshaw explains what this means for intra-community dynamics among marginalized people: 

Even though [this case] was a partial victory for Black women, the case specifically illustrates how antidiscrimination doctrine generally creates a dilemma for Black women. It forces them to choose between specifically articulating the intersectional aspects of their subordination, thereby risking their ability to represent Black men, or ignoring intersectionality in order to state a claim that would not lead to the exclusion of Black men. When one considers the political consequences of this dilemma, there is little wonder that many people within the Black community view the specific articulation of Black women's interests as dangerously divisive.

Taken together, the three cases illustrate a double bind faced by multiply-marginalized people. The collective implication is that an otherwise-privileged demographic category (White women) are supposed to stand in for a multiply-marginalized category (Black women), but the multiply-marginalized (Black women) are barred from representing an otherwise-privileged category (White women or Black men). In light of this, the multiply-marginalized may have little recourse to address experiences not already shared or fully accounted for by those other demographics—or they risk being partitioned off from the rest of their class as unrepresentative. 

This is the context for bringing forward the counterargument of intersectionality. These counterarguments are a response to the specific harms and distortions of single-axis reasoning. We use intersectionality as a shorthand for the idea that discrimination and oppression are not so tidy as to only ever proceed single-file, the idea that multiply-marginalized people still deserve to get to testify on behalf of the larger classes they're a part of, and the idea that excessively narrow single-axis reasoning is a hurdle and a threat to anti-discrimination efforts. This counterargument we call intersectionality has emerged specifically in response to these roadblocks that Black women have faced in addressing sexist-racist discrimination.

Unfortunately, in its watered-down, twitterfied form, intersectionality seems to have been misunderstood as something else. For example, that's what we saw in the post-Tumblr-to-Cohost migration debate, with some people telling others to go look up intersectionality because "you are arguing for a unique intersection of oppression between being trans, and being a man," met with other people saying yes, they're theorizing "the unique intersection between being transgender and being a man [...] through intersectional and queer liberationist lenses." And so people end up talking past each other because they're using the same word to mean two different things—only one of them true to its origins.

The original theoretical background of the term "intersectionality" entails not just an intersection of identities, but an intersection of oppressive forces. So if you are not talking about the intersection of two different compounding forms of oppression, then what you are talking about is not intersectionality. If you are not talking about how conventional anti-discrimination efforts have prioritized the most otherwise-privileged, what you are talking about is not intersectionality. If what you are talking about is how one axis of oppression impairs or impedes or negates or undermines what might be otherwise bethought of as an axis of privilege, what you are talking about is not intersectionality. That is the regular stuff that conventional approaches to discrimination are already made of. 

So my theory, if you will permit me some speculation, is that people are learning this concept second- or third- or fourth- hand, oversimplified and decontextualized. The term "intersectionality" has been buzzworded into oblivion. Divorced from its context, divorced from its purpose, divorced from its role as a rebuttal to a deficient mode of reasoning as demonstrated in anti-discrimination case law, it gets watered down into a general notion of "unique combinations," i.e. holding two or more identities as a marginalized person. 

This superficial buzzwordification cycle is a nuisance with sociopolitical consequences. At best, people end up misunderstanding each other or talking past each other. At worst, people can end up misappropriating a term in a way that runs contrary to its purpose, not just in a coincidental linguistic drift kind of way, but in a way that tramples on its utility.