While researching on Intersectionality, I came across a quote from Audre Lorde’s address “Learning from the 60s” where she vehemently suggested that “there is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” This quote, I believe, is the living representation of what Kimberlé Crenshaw tries to highlight in light of the inconsistency of feminism to represent the hegemonized black woman. In retrospect, if there is one structural error that can be defined as the epitome of inconsistency in liberation movements such as feminism, it is the mere fact that they attain a rather polarized or blind-sided view of discrimination – disregarding the interconnectedness of all its various forms.
The forms of discrimination that have existed thus far have stemmed from an apparent dominant power structure: the ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’ (Hooks) Hence, it is important to understand that the existing dynamics of structural power cannot be rectified by treating each form of discrimination rather independently. In other words, selectivism or treating one form of oppression as bigger than the other only suffices the misfortunes of some and exponentiates the ignorance of others – those who fall under multiple marginalized categories.
Intersectionality penetrates the layers of discrimination that combine to form a ‘matrix of domination’ by the privileged identities. This can be best explained under the ambit of intersectional feminist theory as explained by Hooks. She reiterates on the fact that sharing a single umbrella identity of being a ‘woman’ is a rather broad form of generalization. Hence, it isn’t sufficient enough to explain the multitudes of realities a woman has to experience – which is determined by the co-existing identities she attains as the multiple ‘layers’ that will continue to define the form of discrimination she will face as a part of her existence.
In other words, the living example of a sector intersectional politics provides representation to is ‘the black womanhood’. It highlights the bitter fact that social inequality and the redistribution of structural power exists even within the liberation movements – where there are a dominant few and the subjugated others. It attempts to rectify the error that tends to propagate the rejection of a binary presence of a woman: that an individual can be a woman and a person of colour. That the ultimate form of liberation should not be a utopian idea but a foreseeable reality for the black woman where she liberates herself from the chains of both her sex and her colour. Intersectionality highlights her misery in the sense that, if otherwise, she remains uncategorised – the worst form of identification that comes about as a result of the combination of subjugation towards her multiple existing identities.
Hence, intersectional politics, in all means, is productive. It is productive because it creates the basic understanding of how dominant categorizations such as class or race, independently or in combination, interact with gender to promote a strain of marginalization that, at the very least, requires recognition and subsequent rectification.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 