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Intersectionality
Intersectionality
Intersectionality began when Kimberle Crenshaw introduced the term in 1989 to address the intersection of race and gender and the marginalization of Black women in feminist and antiracist theory and politics alike (Carbado et al. 303). She used intersectionality to highlight how social movement organizations or groups around violence against women excludes the vulnerability of women of color, especially those from immigrant and socially disadvantaged communities (303).
The concept of intersectionality exposes and calls for the dismantling of the substance of marginalization operating within institutionalized discourses (e.g., law) that legitimize existing power relations, while at the same time sharply highlighting how discourses of resistance (e.g., feminism and anti-racism) themselves can function as sites that generate and legitimate marginalization (304). For example, within the discourse of resistance to desegregation, racism has become the narrative of resistance for black men, and gender discrimination has become the narrative of resistance for white women, without questioning.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959)
Black women and women of color were marginalized in both of these ways. It was intersectionality that showed how an approach to desegregation that legitimized and internalized this marginalization narrowed the scope for systemic change, devalued both understanding and advocacy about racism and patriarchy, and undermined the possibility of maintaining meaningful solidarity by pitting resistance movements against each other (304).
Intersectionality encourages us to find and promote similarities while articulating categorical differences (305). It fosters a mutual recognition of how structures of hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation are related and thus how struggles are connected. An intersectional lens can help us to imagine and reveal the perspectives of both privilege and vulnerability of different categories, thereby enabling different categories to share and empathize with each other's experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and privilege, and to promote solidarity for connection and change.
Intersectionality, which began with the intersectionality of race and gender, has moved and transformed the theory itself through time and mainly through interpretation and practice by many activists and scholars (306). Making visible power structures that include other categories, intersectionality continues to change into something more robust, discovering not only racial, gender, or class power regimes, but also intersectionality that is more complex and visible only to those involved. It is also interpreted as a metaphor for understanding how multiple forms of inequality and disadvantage sometimes compound in modern times, creating difficulties that are often not understood by conventional thinking. Intersectionality as a social movement is not simply about understanding social power relations or limiting the perspective of intersectionality to the relationships questioned therein, rather it is about highlighting and bringing to the forefront dynamics that have often been hidden in order to transform them (312). Questioning the interlocking ways in which social structures create and entrench power and alienation, and calling attention to the ways in which existing paradigms that produce knowledge and politics often function to normalize these dynamics--- that is intersectionality as a social movement.
Rightlessness
Rightlessness
Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975)
Rightlessness, a term by Hannah Arendt, is defined as “a condition that effectively nullifies the fragile rights that individuals formally possess-persons" (DeGooyer et al 109).
It is a state of rightlessness in the exclusion of the benefits of citizenship and not having one's voice heard in a political membership system embedded in a rigid nation-state system (Gundogdu 11), and also in the sense that the rights of action or speech are also deprived (DeGooyer 2). Arendt considers not only those who have officially lost their nationality, but also refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and even naturalized persons who face the threat of naturalization deprivation in times of emergency (2), she concludes her critique with a proposal to reconsider human rights as the right to have rights to understand why the loss of nationality leads to a state of rightlessness(13).
While international rules and organizations exist to protect basic human rights, the number of people displaced by war or impoverishment is increasing each year, there are people who experience being deprived and locked out of their right to have rights through being recognized as an exception in some interest or class, even if they reside in their home country or are formally entitled to legal rights (DeGooyer et al 105).
In order to transform the problem of political community that generates rightlessness, the preferred form of social transformation is for us to recognize the human person in each other through action as speech, to realize freedom, and to participate in the fight for continuous equalization. However, “one of the most fundamental forms of rightlessness manifests itself today in the speechlessness of migrants. This plight does not indicate the loss of the faculty of speech altogether; instead, it suggests that one’s speech is rendered meaningless or not taken into account” (Gundogdu 21).
It is not the presence or absence of legal rights, but the deprivation of the right to act or speak (DeGooyer 2). It is not the presence or lack of language or conversational ability, but rather the interpretation that one's speech is meaningless and not taken into consideration (Gundogdu 21)---. When I interpret this state of being as rightlessness, I, as a young, female, Japanese woman, was in a state of rightlessness when I was in Japan, a country that is still extremely patriarchal, where the society respects seniority and male superiority. I, as an Asian immigrant living in the U.S., although I feel less suffocated than when I was in Japan, I still find myself in a state of rightlessness somehow in some moments.
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