Feminist Theories, Essay Example

The relevance of the concept of intersectionality within feminist theory can be said to lie primarily in the radical malleability of the framework it presents: this approach above all underscores the notion that issues which confront feminist theorists are themselves immediately complex, and, as such, intersectionality assumes the very complexity of the social as the starting point for its discourse. In other words, the aim of such a theory can be said to avoid both reductionism and reification. This means that the problems that feminist theory faces should not only be reduced, for example, to a notion of patriarchy, as if all the issues that women are confronted with are derivative of this one social and discursive formation. At the same time, by performing such a reduction, one arguably reifies patriarchy, turning it into the irrevocable Real kernel of any feminist discourse whatsoever. Rather, at stake in the concept is precisely the analysis of the intersection of various conditions and social phenomena, such as sexism and class antagonism, in order to understand how they altogether engender instances of such social inequality. This, however, may be considered one precise definition of intersectionality, insofar as within the academic discourse relevant theorists pursue their own variations of the concept, each possessive of their own unique conceptual and theoretical concerns; moreover, such developments may be said to have their own precise accounts, obviously, of how women are construed, while also possessing precise further theoretical and political implications. Accordingly, the following essay, in recognition of the importance of intersectionality for feminist theory, shall treat three texts from three respective authors, Mary J. Matsuda, Kathy Davis, and Kimberle Crenshaw, in order to understand the theoretical implications of how each respective author employs this concept. In the case of Matsuda, intersectionality has a key practical function, which allows various discriminated groups to unify and become relevant in political action. For Crenshaw, the concept provides a deeper understanding of the true causes of social inequality, as opposed to, accounts based on identity politics. Finally, for Davis, the concept is radically open, allowing for different theorizations and conceptualizations of both theoretical discourse and practical action. After developing these interpretations in more depth, a comparative and critical account of these authors will be advanced, in which their precise usage of intersectionality is to be analyzed.

In Kimberle Crenshaw’s article “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color” the author employs a concept of intersectionality that is closely related to an opposition to identity politics. In short, identity politics provides a much too simplistic account of social equality. Accordingly, this opposition serves to maintain the relevance of intersectionality as theoretical approach. A crucial step in this approach is the theoretical recognition of the systematic effect of, for example, the phenomenon of violence against women. According to Crenshaw, the crucial theoretical move at the outset is that there is a “process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual.”  (533) The problem of the feminist theorist, in this regard, is precisely the attempt to de-particularize incidents of violence towards women. Rather than construing acts of violence as societal anomalies, one has to understand how the social system itself encourages such acts. The problem becomes therefore analyzable with an account of the social structure, as opposed to personal psychologies of perpetrator and victim and the non-interrelatedness of various cases of violence. Whereas this broad systematic approach essentially makes feminist theory possible, as opposed to a form of psychologism which discounts broader societal effects, for Crenshaw, there is also a certain misstep that can be taken from this beginning point. For example, Crenshaw considers “identity politics”, according to which “membership” in a racial, sexual, or class group is utilized to explain, for example, violence against women, a flawed discourse, insofar as it “conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race, class and sexual orientation.” (533) Namely, what is at stake in such identity accounts is once again a reduction and reification, which arguably misses out on the complexity of the social system that yields such violence: understanding violence according to simple identities over-simplifies the problematic, while forgetting how society produces a wide variety of different identities. Thus, as a counter-example to identity politics, Crenshaw proposes “that the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism.” (533) Accordingly, Crenshaw’s intersectionality opposes the reduction of a phenomenon of violence to a single cause such as sex; rather, diverse factors may constitute this violence. Furthermore, the case of women of color as present in the text is appropriate, insofar as here is a case in which sex and race clearly intersect.

However, what is also of importance in Crenshaw’s account is that it is not merely concerned with physical violence. Rather, physical violence is a symptom of intersectionality – that is, it is one form of violence. As Crenshaw notes, in her view, there are “various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color.” (534) Intersection therefore produces structural oppression and thus violence in various forms, such as women being unable to advance in the work place or the media presenting stereotyped images of women in the media. Hence, the violence experienced is essentially multiple; this can be said to correspond to “the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.”(534)  Hence, whereas the reason for violence can be a complex intersection of class and gender, from the inverse perspective, the woman who experiences this violence herself finds her identity constituted by this same complex intersection. In this regard, Crenshaw’s theory is a greater sociological theory of social identity, which addresses the complexity of this very identity and furthermore analyzes how phenomena such as violence could be viewed as reflections of this same identity.

At the same time, however, it is also a certain political and not only theoretical approach that Crenshaw advances with her attempt to make feminist theory understand the complexity of its subject matter. Crenshaw is concerned with the political implications of this theory: identity politics tend to oppose for example, women’s groups with anti-racism groups, according to their respective commitments to a singular identity. Intersection is therefore also a form of political resistance that attempts to break down such reified identities, in order to realize a common cause for these groups as grounded in their shared oppression within society.

Kathy Davis’ text also stresses the reasons of why intersectionality has had “remarkable success in contemporary feminist scholarship.” (68) For Davis, “intersectionality refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in power.” (68) Accordingly, as Davis states, the pertinence of this concept means that “it is unimaginable that a women’s studies programme would only focus on gender.” (68) Intersectionality is thus a certain revolution within feminist theory. This concept realizes that gender is not the crucial issue of feminist theory itself; rather, it is the synthesis of various elements of the social structure and how the hegemony of this structure as the result of such syntheses engenders the particular oppression experienced as, for example, women’s oppression. At the same time, Davis also notes the ambiguity in the academic literature regarding the concept. For example, it is not certain whether “intersectionality should be limited to understanding individual experiences, to theorizing identity, or whether it should be taken as a property of social structures and cultural discourses.” (69) Yet for Davis, it is precisely this openness of the concept that makes it so relevant: the concept is malleable and can be used to understand or posit both individual identities and social structures – this is its very theoretical value, since it remains dynamic and open to change insofar as it is a fundamentally radically complex discursive approach. At the same time, one can understand how the concept thereby possesses not only a theoretical, but also a clearly political aim: by remaining open, intersectionality lends itself to confronting changing ideologies and social structures by remaining resistant and active to the ever-changing political regimes, for example, capitalism, which arguably produces own specific forms of oppression though its own endemic notions of dynamism and complexity. Intersectionality is an open political strategy, which, because of its very openness, means that it can be used to adapt to a wide variety of political situations and address a large extent of political concerns, since it avoids any attempt at reductionism. Or as Davis phrases it, intersectionality “stimulates our creativity in looking for new and unorthodox ways of doing feminist analysis. Intersectionality does not produce a normative straitjacket for monitoring feminist inquiry in search of the correct line.” (77) Davis thus above all stresses the attempts at intersectionality to avoid “premature closure” (77), that is, to posit as certain or necessary a particular discursive analysis or approach. It can be added that such declarations of necessity is the precise ideology that feminist theory attempts to oppose: For example, ideologies that underscore the necessity of gender difference, according to some reification of an ideological law, such as “women belong in the kitchen.” This opposition to reification makes intersectionality a radical theoretical and political tool of critique for the feminist theorist.

Mary J. Matsuda’s text is concerned with the notion of coalition, essentially a political concept that strives to understand how feminist theorists can create solidarity networks to advance particular goals. Matsuda’s text is not attempting to introduce a new theoretical interpretation of intersectionality. Rather, Matsuda intends to introduce authors within feminist theory that she views as relevant to the aim of successful coalition: accordingly, she provides a powerful political and practical reading of the relevance of intersectionality. The relation between intersectionality and coalition is key for Matsuda precisely because, “in coalition, we are able to develop an understanding of that which Professor Kimberle Crenshaw has called inter-sectionality.” (296)The crucial theoretical payoff of intersectionality lies in the realization that identity politics is not sufficient to address the real political, social and theoretical concerns of feminist theorists and activists of various cause, such that, for Matsuda, there is a real practical value to such intersectionality: “most obviously, in unity there is strength. No subordinated group is strong enough to fight the power alone, thus coalitions are formed out of necessity.” (296) Intersectionality contains not only a theoretical function, but also a pragmatic function because it allows various marginalized groups to consolidate themselves according to their shared exclusion from the social system. As opposed to various activist and political approaches based on reified identities that are arguably productions of the social construct itself, intersectionality takes the shared exclusion and oppression within this system as its jumping off point for the organization of “coalition.” In other words, various factors have led to this exclusion: racial, gender and class as examples.

At the same time, this approach for Matsuda also makes sense because “some of us have overlapping identities.” (296) The understanding of oneself in terms of a singular identity homogenizes the individual according to how society views them, as opposed to celebrating the difference that is a product of complex intersections. The crucial issue in this sense is that there is no priority given to a single struggle: “to say that the anti-racist struggle precedes all other struggles denigrates the existence of the multiply oppressed.” (296) Intersectionality thus underscores the radical differences of those that altogether constitute the oppressed: this shared oppression itself and how society generates it must be understood and resisted.

Accordingly, Matsuda’s text is largely political and practical in nature: “intersectional analysis done from on high, that is, from outside rather than inside a structure of subordination, risks misunderstanding the particularity of that structure…adding on gender must involve active feminists, just as adding on considerations of indigenous peoples must include activists from native communities. Coalition is the way to achieve this inclusion.” (297) In other words, for intersectional analysis to be radically intersectional it cannot only remain confined to the realm of the theoretical. Rather it must intervene in the practical, insofar as intersection theory is based on the breaking down of fixed identities, identities, which in themselves are present in the distinction between theory and practice. In this regard, for Matsuda, intersectional theory is always intersectional practice.

All three authors, while committing to the relevance of efficacy of intersectionality within feminist theory, nonetheless can be said to stress three primary reasons, although interrelated, for such relevance. In the case of Crenshaw, intersectional theory can emerge in opposition to the clear limitations of identity politics, in which identities are reified: One must understand identity as a complex construction. Davis seizes on this very complexity to describe intersectionality theory’s strength: precisely because it is such a dynamic and malleable approach does it remain continually relevant, allowing the theory to address many different situations, while at the same time provoking new forms of analysis. For Matsuda, this same malleability reflects itself in political practice. Intersectionality acknowledges the dynamism of society in creating identity; it thus must intervene in an activist sense against this same society that creates such scenes of oppression in the form of a  coalition which captures the image of “the multiplicity of the oppressed” themselves.

In this regard, the discourse of intersectionality is obviously crucial in its opposition to the reification of identity, a reification that society itself has produced. Thus, it is no longer the case, as Matsuda notes, to prioritize one injustice over another: all these injustices must be resolved as symptoms of oppression produced by the complexity of the social structure, which engenders gender, racial and class antagonisms. As such, the political and theoretical strength of intersectionality lies in its ability to provide a collective theory for the oppressed in general, as common differences are used as a point for coalition, for example, on the political level. Here is truly an approach in which women can be represented in a diverse number of ways, precisely because the resistance to classification within intersectionality opens a space for all.

At the same time, however, the theoretical task of intersectionality is enormously difficult. Whereas its practical upshot is its unification of those who are excluded by social normativities, as Matsuda notes, it is really the creation of these normativities that become all the more difficult to understand. To understand this dynamism of intersectionality as producing a wide variety of phenomenon makes it difficult to advance a radical critique of society: how does society produce both patriarchy and racism? How does it create identities? Does this not entail a certain super-reification of society itself, in which society becomes a certain metaphysical being that controls all possibilities of identity and existence in general? Accordingly, what does the intersectionalist resistance to this type of image of society mean? It would seem that it is the pure celebration, both practical and theoretical, of pure difference. However, is this difference itself perhaps the product of the same hegemonic society such a theory opposes on its most fundamental level?

Works Cited

Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Feminist Theory: A Reader. (2nd edition).

Eds. Wendy K. Kolmar & Frances Bartkowski. New York: McGraw-Hill 2005. 533-541.

Davis, Kathy. “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful.” Feminist Theory. Vol. 9 (1). 67-85.

Matsuda, Mari J. “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition.” Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. (2nd edition). Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (eds.) New York:

Routldege. 291-298.