The Importance of the Intersectionality Methodology

A woman’s identity is not limited to her skin color, sexuality or religion. While identity politics in the United States try to push people into specific categories and trap them into groups, the theory of intersectionality recognizes each individual for what makes up their own unique identity. Intersectionality moves to include all parts of what makes a woman an individual and recognizes that there are culturally constructed categories such as skin color, sexuality, religion or political ideals that can act together to form oppression. Intersectionality removes the individual from the group to see a different form of oppression from the group but can also be celebrated to be different from the group. For example a black feminist woman may not be just a black feminist woman; she may also be bi-sexual and Marxist which makes her unique identity separate from just a black feminist woman. Intersectionality is an important methodology because it helps feminists recognize the different struggles within feminist movements and not just the white, middle-class struggle. The history of the women’s movement is interesting when considering the need in the beginning of the movement for intersectional ways of thinking. The intersectionality methodology is seen throughout the Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement and can be seen by bell hooks bringing intersectionality to light in her critique of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The intersectionality methodology is also expressed in Gloria Anzaldúa’s La conciencia de la mestiza  including her experience in different categories of cultures.

            The Combahee River Collective separated themselves from the white feminist movement in 1974 to declare that black women are an important group and their voices needed to be heard. “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (63). Interlocking. That is the intersectionality methodology in and of itself. The “systems of oppression are interlocking” and that needs to be recognized so that something can be done about it.  And if something cannot be done just yet, it needs to at least be recognized and talked about to begin to pave the path of uprooting oppressions. The Combahee River Collective’s A Black Feminist Statement recognized that they needed “to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of black and white men” (64). Was the women’s movement purposefully racist? Does it matter? While being caught up in antisexist women’s rights, white women did not have an intersectional way of thinking and mainly, or most likely, because of the time period. They should have and should have included all colors and classes of women, but they were focused on the white, upper-middle class majority of the time. The Combahee River Collective, in doing and thinking the opposite way of the white woman majority included in A Black Feminist Statement, “we also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of the black women by white men as a weapon of political repression” (65). The importance of the intersectional way of thinking is also recognized when they state that “no one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of black women’s lives” (66). That “multilayered texture” is intersectionality and the different layers of oppression. The racism within the white women’s rights movement was something that was also addressed and something very important to recognize as being a huge gap in intersectional thinking among white women. It would have been incredible progress if the emergence of intersectionality had become a natural way of thinking but they were made “painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and black history and culture” (69).

            This ambivalence white women had to the black feminist movement as well as any other women besides upper-middle class white women is made quite clear throughout Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. bell hooks brings to light the many groups that Friedan ignores throughout her book and by ignoring the many groups of women, displays a lack of an intersectional way of thinking. An intersectional way of thinking would have one recognize that there are other women who have their own different kinds of struggles because of the different cultural or societal categories that make up who they are. The women that Friedan focuses on are “a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women – housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life” (hooks 1). Friedan completely “ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women” and in doing so catered to the ignorance of the privileged white women. She made it seem like the women she was talking about included all American women and therefore lost any sort of issues involving the several layers of oppression other women have to combat on a daily basis. There is a link between race and class that has been suppressed by “past feminist refusal to draw attention to and attack the racial hierarchies” (3). There is a “central tenet of modern feminist thought” that completely ignores intersectionality and it is “the assertion that ‘all women are oppressed.’ This assertion implies that women share a common lot and factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women” (5).

            A specific individual account of intersectional identity is described by Gloria Anzaldúa in La conciencia de la mestiza, where she discusses straddling different cultures and lacking a culture while creating a new one. Anzaldúa states, “as a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is a queer of me in all races” (236). This is her expressing how lack of intersectional thought breaks her down into one group, as a lesbian she is seen as only a lesbian and that is it. She uses being a feminist as part of her intersectional being and says “I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it” (237). Her dilemma that she discusses is being in the many different cultures and which ones to identify with. If there was not a “tolerance for ambiguity” regarding the contradictions of being a La mestiza then the intersectional way of thinking would be one of acceptance removing the different layers of oppression as opposed to tolerating it.

            The history of the women’s movement as well individual accounts with the Combahee River Collective, the bell hooks critique of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s description of her own intersectional identity help to explain the importance of the intersectionality methodology. These examples reinforce the importance of the theory of intersectionality because they express the interlocking oppressions that all women experience within their own unique identities.