On Intersectionality

Lola Okolosie writes in the Guardian today about intersectionality, one of those words my spellchecker dislikes and my inner Englishman distrusts. It sounds a bit academic, a bit foreign, possibly French. Doesn't sound very common-sense. You couldn't say it down the pub, and is therefore suspect.

It basically suffers, like a number of words that describe perfectly good things, from having been invented during an era of academia rather than being a salty, natural part of human conversation. It describes the fact that all oppression is related, and therefore we should see a black feminism, for example, as different to to the feminism of a middle class white woman. A complex interweaving of different oppressive structures isn't exactly the sort of thing Anglo Saxons were interested in when they were coming up with their lovely words like "carve" "elbow" and "cheese", that do exactly what is said on the also-Anglo-Saxon tin. The complicated nature of oppression is not served by our words "tyranny" "barbarism" or anything else we regularly use because they were invented by people facing a much less multipolar set of oppressions. It is left to people who have read Gramsci and Foucault to unlock this kind of stuff.

And that makes it very hard to explain to people. Worse, it makes it hard to explain just what people should do about it. You explain feminism to the man in the street, and hopefully he'll say "Blimey! I suppose we should get Page 3 out of The Sun and achieve parity of paternity and maternity leave!" (or something like that). Explain intersectionality, (which will take a longer time in any case) and he'll say "Right. So we should probably... look closely at how oppression is all related. And then... do something about it. I think."

Admittedly this is probably a street in Paris

Actually, Okolosie's piece was much better about it than I've seen before, and I felt like I was getting it more than usual:

White, middle-class and young women are often seen as the ones spearheading this new wave of activity. Their high-profile campaigns – to have women on banknotes, challenge online misogyny and banish Page 3, for example – though necessary and praiseworthy, do not reflect the most pressing needs of the majority of women, black and minority-ethnic women included. The problem is not that these campaigns exist, but that they are given a focus and attention that overshadows other work feminists are engaged with.

That seems very valid to me. It presents a bit of a problem though, because if we do create a bunch of "feminisms", as Okolosie's piece suggests, it leaves people like me with a bit of a quandry. I am not black, which assuming that part of the problem has been middle class white people hijacking feminism, means that most of what I can offer will be more of the same. I would feel very inauthentic volunteering for Women Asylum Seekers Together, for instance, because if I was doing so based on an intersectional insight I would also notice that the whole point was that the experience of actually being black or Pakistani and female counts. The further away the relevant identity drifts from me, the less I feel I can help.

What I can do, chiefly, is talk to my friends about things I know about, and that I know they have experience of. That's why the white middle class female experience figures largely in my feminist imagination. It's a jump for me to put myself in the woman's position, but one I am just about comfortable making. If, however, I were to reorientate my feminism intersectionally, I would be talking about the experience of South Asian women who live an immigrant life in Burnley, say. Not only would I be less authentic, but this would precisely defeat the point of actually seeing that someone else's experience is important.

That leaves me both quite clear of what Okolosie means and unsure of what she wants me to do. Keep quiet and let more important minority-concerned feminism speak louder by comparison would be the obvious thing, but I doubt she'd want that, and in any case, you can't rank the problems of the world in order of severity and solve them one at a time. You've got to do what you can, and I'm just not sure there's much I can do to be a good ally to a black feminism or a poor feminism or an Islamic feminism. I fear all this leads to People's Front of Judea territory, with a thousand different feminisms all clamouring for attention and not accepting each other's help.

Whatever happened to the holders-of-degrees-in-social-anthropology feminists anyway?

This is all very complex, and just writing about it makes my head ache. What do I actually mean? Chiefly, that I understand the need for intersectionality, but also not sure whether it will actually change anyone's behaviour. The maligned middle class feminists, even if convinced, will go on with their own campaigns for equality because its what they feel they can do best, since the black experience should be left to black feminism or risk being swamped by whitesplaining women. And given that they're the ones with the media influence, their story will continue to dominate.

All very difficult. Let's go back to first principles, then. How to communicate intersectionality? The way I would explain it down the pub is "If a fucker wants to fuck you over, they'll use everything they can about you to fuck you over. And then you're fucked in a whole bunch of different ways. And those ways add up to more than the sum of their fuck-parts" So, to coin a good Anglo-Saxon word for intersectionality, I suggest sumfuckery. It's worth a shot.