Visibility

Visibility is perhaps one of the most crucial tasks undertaken by intersectional politics. It is not that this branch of politics provides individuals with the visibility they are entitled to, that would be to infantilize them; intersectional politics seems to be geared towards acceptance, towards acknowledgment, which is followed by embrace of the individuals’ unique existence. 

It is important to highlight the reason why this visibility is necessary. The burden of multiple intersecting oppressions is a burden that is abused by those in power, even if that power is only incrementally greater. Bell Hooks mentions how, for example, white women leverage their womanhood to gain physical support from black women, as do black men when they require the support of fellow black bodies. What is left out of this equation is the inherent significance of black women as fully involved participants, as sites of the convergence of two identities, not as either black or women.

This under-representation must not be taken lightly as an unintentional consequence of a person’s inability to process complex identities, it is a consciously cultivated blindness that must be acknowledged for what it is: the effective dehumanization of an individual to serve a specific political purpose. 

It is a violentprocess, this forceful separation of one identity from another, when neither can be- and should not be- erased. It is necessary for this reduction to take place, of course, because the existing paradigms do not support, or even acknowledge, the existence of non-binary identities. 

It is in this context that intersectional politics cater to identities that are more human than theoretical, considering that binaries cater to neat concepts over flesh and blood humans. It is this bifurcation between the idealized version of the human that contrasts the human in its situated reality. this reality could take the form of one’s existence as a queer person in Pakistan, as someone who feels misrepresented by the terms male or female, as someone who wishes to identify as a woman at one point in their life and later on, as male. These confusions, these seeming contradictions, are exactly the narratives that intersectional politics aim to create space for. 

It is not the elevation of one particular kind of existence, it is the acceptance of all kinds of existence that intersectionality facilitates. Considering that even within that framework, there are bound to be certain narratives that are excluded, or identities that evolve to represent some kind of identity politics, one must remain cognizant of the fact that the function of intersectional politics is to create space and facilitate the visibility of those who have been forced to perch on the sidelines for too long.