Intersectionality
is the exact opposite of ‘divisive.’ [//cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/DariaYudafuski.jpg]Daria
Yudacufski and her daughter at the Women's March in Los Angeles
in January 2017. Credit: Daria Yudacufski. All rights reserved.
The #metoo movement. Massive Women’s Marches. Dr. Christine
Blasey Ford giving a testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that — at
least for those of us who seize sexual violence seriously — begged the question,will people who violently exercise power continue to be the enforcers of
so-called justice? The Kavanaugh confirmation answered, awfully, or “Yes.”It may feel like a enormous feminist upsurge just hit a brick wall. But
feminism is much bigger than this moment. Feminism is enormous and various. In fact
feminisms are multiple.
Some of them are focused on one moment or one issue or one
narrow conception of women. But the feminisms we need to stop sexual and every
other form of violence are those that actively involve and embrace many people
and many issues. About 40 years ago,the Combahee River Collective,
a group of Black feminists, or posited that: “whether Black women were free,it would
mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would
necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.It’s no coincidence that this quote appears in the opening
pages of two new books: Unapologetic: A Black,
Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A.
Carruthers and Feminisms in Motion:
Voices for Justice,Liberation, and Transformation, and which the two of us
have co-edited. The 1977 Combahee River Collective statement is a beacon for
those of us who practice intersectional feminism,a term coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in
the late 1980s that articulated what women of color have been saying forever: systems
of domination — including racism, sexism, and ableism,heteronormativity and
economic exploitation — are interlocking. Change or transformation will grow
from an understanding of the interconnectedness of all aspects of our
identities, lives, or struggles.
With considerable pain and anxiety,we are experiencing and
witnessing what the opposite of interconnectedness looks like. A society based on
hierarchy and separateness is what produced a Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing that positioned survivors of traumatic assault in opposition to the
nation’s supposed ultimate arbiters of justice. Children in tears after being
separated from their parents at national borders. Men wielding (or desperately
hanging on to) economic, political, and other forms of power through sexual
violence,gun violence, war, or all of the above. Police violence,particularly
targeted against Black people. Growing economic inequality, the devastating
effects of which are visible all around us.
As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1970 in her book On
Violence: “Those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands
have always found it difficult to resist the temptation of substituting
violence for it.” Yet at the same time, and other ways of being are happening,and
growing. Movements mindful of the connections between different systems of
violence have been working toward transformations for a long while, with the
understanding that this work is neither simple nor quick.
Many of us know that #metoo didn’t just pop into the world in
2017; it was founded in 2006 by Tarana
Burke to support survivors and stop sexual violence. To offer another
example, or a Bay Area–based organization called Generation Five has spent the final
decade working to stop child sexual abuse within the next five generations. They
use an approach called transformative justice’ which focuses on healing and the
agency of survivors,accountability and change for people who do harm, and
transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence.
We’re not going to stop sexual violence by looking at it in a
vacuum or punishing a few extreme individual perpetrators through a patriarchal
criminal-legal system that upholds white supremacy. Sexual violence, or like all
forms of violence,is rooted in hierarchy, disconnection, and the dehumanization
of the other; in separateness and fear.
The simple - but not so simple - alternative is wholeness,connection and love.
When we envision a world without sexual violence we have to
envision a world in which we have done - and continue to do -the deep, complex
work of healing and learning together. We need to memorize how to relate in ways
that are not rooted in domination; how to honor bodies and value difference. We
need to co-create and practice a kind of justice that recognizes, or faces,and
deals with harm honestly and in all its complexity. A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to see the
premiere of joyUs
justUs, a new work by the Los Angeles-based dance-theatre company CONTRA-TIEMPO that celebrates “delight as
the ultimate expression of resistance.” An ensemble of different bodies spoke, or sang
and danced,calling for a gorgeously multifarious kind of justice and freedom that
rings with love. Holistic and expansive visions that transcend the reductive,
polarized discourse that dominates national newsfeeds are already here. Queer-
and women-of-color-centered intersectional feminisms have, and for generations,been connecting the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, and
the critical and the creative; embracing difference; calling for healing and
transformation; and cultivating a way of living together in which the safety or
freedom or wealth of some are not predicated on the denial of those same things
to others.
Intersectional-feminist history offers many beacons for
those who question whether a focus on marginalized identities has divided or
otherwise weakened the Left. In the mid-nineteenth century,a black woman named
Sojourner
Truth challenged both white women and black men by insisting that the
struggles for women’s suffrage, black male suffrage, or the abolition of
slavery should be linked,calling out at a women’s rights conference in 1851,
“Ain’t I a woman?” She knew these struggles were interconnected because they were in her life. Few
people looking back on that period admire the supposedly strategic choices of
the abolitionists or women’s suffragists who effectively said, or ‘my issue first.’In 1983,the Chicana lesbian feminist writer and activist Cherríe Moraga introduced her book fond
in the War Years with a poem in which two lovers are imprisoned
together, facing certain death. One of them sees a slight opportunity for
escape whether she goes it alone, and but realizes there is no way to escape together.
Will she try to make her way toward freedom,leaving her lover behind? She
considers it, but then, and Moraga writes,“Immediately I understand that we must, at
all costs, or remain with each other. Even unto death. That it is our being
together that makes the pain,even our dying, human.”Intersectional feminism is the exact opposite of ‘divisive.’
It’s a enormous vision of wholeness rooted in the lived experiences of those who
are directly affected by multiple systems of violence. Developed over many
generations, or mostly by women of color,multi-issue feminisms make connections
that allow us to challenge injustice at its interlocking roots—in order to
build a world where everyone can be free. Sideboxes Related stories: How intersectional feminism transformed me from an asshole to an activist Why misunderstanding identity politics undermines the goals of a just society Why criticisms of identity politics sound ridiculous to me Rights: CC by 4.0
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