REFERENCE: Mackinnon,
C. (2013). Intersectionality as method: A note. Signs, 38(4), 1019-1030.
Mackinnon’s article
serves as an argument for the importance of considering multiple intersections
in the study of different groups as opposed to investigating them separately.
She focuses on Black women specifically to demonstrate how considering Black
women’s race or gender on their own does not accurately represent them. Black
women are not the same as white women, or Black men. In Crenshaw’s article,
which I will be discussing in my next blog post, Mackinnon’s ideas are
explained in greater detail and with more examples.
For this post, I have
once again reverted back to my favourite quotation-and-analysis style, with a
few quotations standing alone:
“[Intersectionality] embodies a particular
dynamic approach to the underlying laws of motion of the reality it traces and
traps while remaining grounded in the experiences of classes of people within
hierarchical relations where systems of race, gender, and class domination converge,’
criticizing a rigidly top-down social and political order from the perspective
of the bottom up (Crenshaw 1991b, 1246)” (1020)
“Intersectionality fills out the Venn diagrams
at points of overlap where convergence has been neglected, training its sights
where vectors of inequality intersect at crossroads that have previously been
at best sped through” (1020)
Great analogy! I really have nothing else to
say about it than that.
“All the Blacks were men, all the women were
white, but Dafro Jefferies was brave. Instead of denying the discrimination
against her, seeing only categories of race or sex with invariant internal
content, privileging the white experience of sex and the male experience of
race and thereby precluding Ms. Jefferies’s experience of discrimination from
legal recognition, a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the
combined ground of race-and-sex discrimination to which Ms. Jefferies claimed
she was subjected must be recognized as a legal claim” (1021)
In this example, a Black woman named Dafro
Jeffries claimed that she was being discriminated against in the workplace.
Even though there are women in her workplace as well as Black people, all of
the women were white and all of the Black people were men. So even though her
gender and race were being represented, the experience of a white woman is of
course different from the experience of a Black woman, just as the experience
of a Black man is different from the experience of a Black woman. This is an
excellent reminder for why it is necessary to consider intersectionalities: the
article argues that to understand the concept, we must begin with Black women,
and I can certainly understand why. Not only must Black women bear the burden
of sexism, but they also deal with racism. I think what the concept of
intersectionality argues is that sexism and racism (as the main example in this
paper) should not be investigated separately. In order to truly understand the experiences
of Black women, Aboriginal women, Hispanic women, etc…they need to be
investigated as their own unique group. It’s not just about gender and it’s not
just about race: it’s about how these intersections…well…intersect! Am I making
sense here? I feel like I understand it so I hope that’s coming across in my
explanation.
“The conventional framework fails to recognize
the dynamics of status and the power hierarchies that create them, reifying sex
and race not only along a single axis but also as compartments that ignore the
social forces of power that rank and define them relationally within and
without. In this respect, conventional discrimination analysis mirrors the
power relations that form hierarchies that define inequalities rather than
challenging and equalizing them. No question about it, categories and
stereotypes and classifications are authentic instruments of inequality” (1023)
Woah okay! This is a lot to take in. Here is
where I pause to reflect, and by reflect I mean read this over a few hundred
times and then attempt to write it in my own words to make sure I understand!
Is MacKinnon trying to say that these rigid categories that we designed,
including but not limited to class, race and gender (even just including these
ones and leaving out ability, age and culture, to name a few, is discriminatory!)
are almost discriminatory in themselves because certain categories are
privileged over the others? Like in the example I just used: people tend to
gravitate towards investigating the function of gender, class and race in
society but other intersections such as ability and age tend to not be taken as
heavily into consideration. By creating these categories, even with the
intention to bring to light the discrimination that exists within them, we are
at the same time participating in a form of discrimination by ignoring other
categories. Is that right? I just read the passage over again and I’m still
doubting myself. But this passage to me is yet another reason for why an
intersectional approach is of paramount importance in order to truly get a grip
on the complicated interactions between various social groups. We must not only
investigate how the Black woman’s race and gender impacts her everyday life,
but we must also factor in other aforementioned categories such as culture and
age all at once if we are to see the ways in which multiple oppressions (or
maybe even privileges? Like for example if she’s able-bodied) are operating and
working together and/or against one another. It sounds extremely complicated,
and well…it is. It’s a lot easier to just focus on one category (like I’ve been
doing with my emphasis on gender). But of course what’s easier isn’t often
what’s right, and now I’m attempting to pull my head out of the sand and come
face-to-face with those complicated intersections I’ve been doing such an
excellent job of avoiding up until now.
“Imagining that inequalities are equal as a
method for analyzing…inequality can only deny what needs to be changed…intersectionality
[has become] a method for fitting law to reality, rather than reality to law”
(1024)
Inequalities are not equal! That seems really
weird to say, but it’s true! It all goes back to what I was trying to say in
the rant just about this last passage: inequalities, especially when it comes
to policy and law, are not all dealt with on the same scale. Race and gender
tend to be taken more seriously than the others, and even among those two
categories one could probably argue for one being privileged over the other (I
was going to guess which one it would be, but I had too many arguments for each
one to actually pick…perhaps that’s a good thing though!). I also really like
the second part of this quotation about fitting law to reality as opposed to
the other way around. The reality is that people are not just made of their
class, race and/or gender, and the law must account for the countless other
factors that play into what makes us who we are.
“In the absence of this intersectional way of
thinking, the rape of African American women has often not been seen as the
assault on the Black community that it is (1273), nor have the specifically
gendered dimensions of the lynching of Black men generally been grasped” (1027)
Reading this part of the article made me think
of Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull,
which is a non-fiction novel chronicling the proceedings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-Apartheid South Africa. Chapter Sixteen
of the novel, entitled “Truth Is A Woman” is by far the most horrific part of the
entire book, as the crimes against the Black women of the community are
described in disturbing detail. The female prisoners endured the worst possible
treatment imaginable: “‘Then things happened that could not happen to a man.
Your sexuality was used to strip away your dignity, to undermine your sense of
self’…You had to strip in front of a whole range of policemen making remarks
about your body. Women had to do star-jumps naked, breasts flying, Fallopian
tubes were flooded with water until they burst; rats were pushed into
vaginas…‘Women have been made to stand the whole day with blood flowing down
and drying on their legs. Did they gain strength from looking at their blood?
From asking you to drink your own blood?’ asks Mthintso [one of the black
female victims of Aparteid]. It is only when the men in prisons are forced by
sodomy to behave like women that they realize how it is to live with a constant
awareness of your body and how it can be abused and ridiculed” (Krog 235-236).
In this excerpt, the importance of what it means to not only be a Black or
female body, but rather a Black female body, is made extremely evident. The
Black male prisoners of South Africa were not treated this way, and of course
the white women of the nation were not treated this way. Neglecting the
combined intersections of sexuality, gender and race when researching these
women’s experiences would be a completely fruitless exercise. Taking into
account intersections of race alone, or gender alone, would not be an accurate
representation of these women’s positionalities. They are not just Black, and
they are not just women: they are Black women. Black women, not Black men or
white women, were the victims of this gut-wrenching abuse, and if any of these
intersections had been altered, they would not have been treated this way.
“‘Black women sometimes experience
discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they
share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double
discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the
basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience
discrimination as Black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but
as Black women’ (Crenshaw 1989, 149)” (1028)
This quotation from Kimberlé Crenshaw (as cited
in Mackinnon) is a simple and straight-forward reason for why intersectionality
is so important. Black women are victimized for both their gender and their
race: sometimes for one or the other, sometimes for both. A researcher can
investigate the implications of gender over race, or the other way around in a
paper, but if she or he hopes to get to the root of the Black woman’s
experience, one cannot take precedence over the other.
In terms of how this information impacts the approach
I’ve been taking to my research, I certainly understand now how closed-minded
(if that’s the right term?) it can be to deal with feminist issues without
considering intersections outside of gender. There is a lot more to a woman
than just the gender she identifies with, and other intersections can seriously
influence how she is treated in society. As a white, upper-middle class,
twenty-two-year-old, able-bodied woman, my everyday life is different from a
Black, lower class, fifty-two-year-old, disabled woman. While our gender might
bring us together in many respects, these other intersections socially separate
us and give us our unique identities and positionalities. It would be ignorant
to generalize mine and this woman’s experiences in a paper as the same merely
because we have the female gender in common.
No comments:
Post a Comment