Episode 202: Intersectionality

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes

(because citations are political)

This episode, we’re talking to you about intersectionality — a term that’s both crucial for understanding how identities and oppressions overlap and one that gets misused and misunderstood.  

This episode’s thesis: Intersectionality insists that we pay attention to power and privilege and oppression and how we belong (or don’t) in systems and communities. And religion is a space where we see the messy tangle of race and gender and sex (and more) both inform and be shaped by how we make meaning in and of the world around us.

We had a number of keywords this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

  •  intersectionality, womanism, privilege, oppression, discrimination

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

If religion is what people do, then we’re not understanding religion if we’re not also thinking about race, gender, sex, and all the other ways we’re taught to make sense of our bodies and the bodies of those around us.

Intersectionality is a theory that helps us do this work. Period.

But, what is intersectionality? Glad you asked.

First: the term’s background. Citations are political, remember?

  • Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar of law and pillar of critical race theory, coined “intersectionality” in 1989, in "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In it, Crenshaw argued that people (and communities) cannot be divided up into categories of belonging, like race or sex.

    • In the article, she specifically and explicitly centered Black women. To paraphrase, she discussed how sometimes Black women’s experiences of discrimination/oppression are similar to white women’s experiences of discrimination/oppression, and other times Black women’s experiences of discrimination/oppression are similar to Black men’s experiences of discrimination/oppression. But these categories—(non-Black) women and (non-women) Black men—on their own do not account for the unique experiences Black women face.

  • Crenshaw therefore argued that divvying up Black women’s unique experiences into “woman” and “Black” totally hides the ways that discrimination/oppression works and, frankly, obscures how we exist as people (all of the things at all of the time!). She argued that intersecting oppressions magnify and amplify those oppressions.

  • She also suggested, in this original piece and in her ongoing work, that people are not merely additives—there is no “pure” or “authentic” or “neutral” element of one’s identity that gets added to some other element. So, not only can we and should we not divvy Black women’s experiences, we should also not imagine that “Black” is somehow separable from “woman,” or that “woman” is on its own a meaningful category.

    • Think about it: in order for “woman” to be its own thing, separate from Blackness here, we would have to concede that when we say woman we mean not Black. That’s effed up, right? (Right, you answer.)

  • TL;DR: To rethink discrimination/oppression, we need to think intersectionally, Crenshaw tells us. And we listen.

And second, why do we care?

  • Intersectionality requires us to think not just about difference, but about power. Who is protected? Who is left vulnerable? What parts of us give us privilege (an unearned and unconscious advantage over others)? What parts of us make us more likely to face discrimination (individual bias) or oppression (systemic bias)?

  • The most important things are

Why we care TL;DR: intersectionality insists not only that we acknowledge our different identities, but also and more importantly, that we pay attention to the unequal ways those identities grant us access to privilege or make us vulnerable to discrimination & oppression.

In this episode’s 101, we also talked about how we use Crenshaw’s theory, other critical race theorists/theories, and why we do so. As Ilyse said, theory in the sky with no examples is useless.

  • Ilyse talked about her ongoing, slow-going (thanks, COVID) book project about antisemitism and Islamophobia, where she’s thinking with intersectionality.

  • Megan pointed us to her book, Abusing Religion, and calmly stated that if you’re not using theories of intersectionality you’re not studying religion appropriately.

Primary Sources:

(because we, too, exist in the world we’re describing)

Megan talked about learning from Mary Daly as a “wee little witchlet” and then realizing Daly’s work—and therefore Megan’s sense of witches, radical feminism, and religion—was inherently incomplete because Mary Daly systematically excluded scholars of color and non-white, non-western traditions. You didn’t realize as you were listening, dear nerds, but Megan was cheating, since Mary Daly was also a character in this episode’s Story Time segment.

Ilyse talked about the ways in which well-meaning white women find intersectionality—the kind that’s filtered and watered down through insta-memes and Facebook posts—to be a kind of misery poker: whose oppressions are the most oppressive. She talked about correcting this racist, troubling assertion at public lectures, urged you to never be the Devil’s advocate, and did not name names. You’re welcome to those women.

Story Time:

(citing our theoretical influences)

This episode was chock-a-block theory. Megan was rather pleased at how much we snuck in. But, finally, we arrived at the real scholarly meat of the episode: Audre Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly” (1979).

We claimed that Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly” is an electric example of why intersectional critique is mandatory for religion. Let’s be clear: Crenshaw’s piece came a full decade after Lorde’s, which we think shows both its import (naming a phenomena helps us recognize it elsewhere) and its predecessors. Crenshaw herself later said (2014) that what she wanted to do was create “a metaphor anyone could use.” So she did.

Professor Audre Lorde.

Professor Audre Lorde.

We wanted our Story Time to demonstrate what a pre-Crenshaw critique that we can read as intersectional thinking looked like.

The players in the exchange:

  • Mary Daly was a post-Catholic lesbian academic who insisted that Christianity was irredeemably patriarchal (if god is man, then man is god) and called on all women to create new ways of knowing and being in the world.

  • Audre Lorde was a Black feminist thinker, who called herself “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” We recommend a lot of her work, below; we suggest that none of our educations are complete without reading and rereading Lorde. Period.

In her book Gyn/ecology, Daly celebrated white European goddess-worship as liberatory for all women while lamenting patriarchal violence (often especially from non-EuroAmerican contexts, like footbinding and female genital mutilation). Daly and Lorde were contemporaries; Daly quoted Lorde’s poetry in Gyn/ecology but didn’t include any goddesses from African traditions or any examples of powerful women of color. Lorde’s letter was about this omission—and, as she put it, the ways that Daly twisted her words against her.

Lorde wrote:

“Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight. (If you and I were to walk into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the only thing they knew about each of us was that we were both Lesbian/Radical/Feminist, you would see exactly what I mean.) 

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference. For then beyond sisterhood is still racism.”

Ilyse said that she thinks the part of “Open Letter to Mary Daly” Megan picked for today’s reading beautifully gets at the idea of intersectional, well before the term was coined by Crenshaw. Ilyse claimed that this might help us see how scholarship works—how we’re all building on each other—and how a word (intersectional) can have so much power. Because, as one word, it stands in for not just Lorde but many, many Black thinkers and experiences that can name the multiplicities of oppression and discrimination and how they function. That’s theory at its finest!

Ilyse also said that what hits in Lorde’s essay is her comment on Daly’s dismissal thrice over: first, she comes for the ways Daly excludes Black/Africana examples in her writing; second, she comes for the ways Daly vilified Black/Africana examples (when they are mentioned, its in terrible light), third, she comes for the ways that Daly ignores Black scholarship. It’s a nexus of power and discrimination—the subject of Black or Africana doesn’t exist in any substantive way, and when it does exist it’s as a negative foil, and further Daly’s work belittles her colleagues so as to erase their work.

Megan said that beyond all of the above, she finds Lorde’s letter generous. Lorde—literally battling cancer when she wrote this letter—took the time, the energy, the emotional labor to ask Daly to do better, showed her what she did wrong, and did so not to shame her but to help her work. Megan suggested that that kind of work is often demanded of Black women, in particular, and it is owed no one; Lorde doing so simply demonstrates an intellectual and emotional generosity that Megan called unthinkably gracious.

Homework!

(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)

These obnoxious professors didn’t just sneak in multiple heavy-hitting theories and theorists, they had the nerve to assign so much extra work!? Of course they did, nerds!

Ilyse assigned:

Megan assigned:

Hold onto your butts—we’re back, baby!