To understand intersectionality we need to understand how identity politics work in our country.
Our society is full of categories of identity that we use to define people. Some of these identities include, gender, race, class, attractiveness, ability, religion, culture, origin, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, age, language, body size.
These identities are inherently social. Meaning, individuals do not define them, society does. But since our society is historically and currently an unequal society, the way these categories are defined recreate and perpetuate the enduring structures of power that created this country. The social meanings attached to these categories are meanings given by those imbued with the power to define what is normal. Since whiteness and masculinity are the identities that have always controlled institutions of power such as the government, industry, education, disciplinary institutions, etc., whiteness and masculinity defined normalcy AKA the status quo. In consequence, all of these secondary identities that aren't located in the physical body such as class, sexuality, body size, culture religion etc. fell under the control of whiteness and masculinity to define their ideal conceptions. So today, mainstream society values identities based on the ideals the "status quo" of white masculinity defined for us. And since we live in a society that is very bent on being the ideal, our perception of people's categories are hierarchized based on how close they are to these ideals. Thus, power is leveraged by these measurements. For example, a white, straight, wealthy, physically fit, some version of christian, handsome, American, middle aged, man is deemed by mainstream society as the most powerful. But if he were to be gay, there would be one layer of detachment from this ideal, thus devaluing him as a person. People in our society are valued and privileged and devalued and disprivileged based on how near or far they are to the ideal that dominant society has presented us.
Intersectionality was introduced as a concept because people were misunderstanding the identity politics of our country. Whereas, feminists were describing oppression on the account of just being female, and anti-racism activists were describing oppression on the account of just race; intersectionalists clarified that oppression is not a singular force imposed because a person belongs to just one marginalized category. They explained that since our society has so many requirements to be considered normal, some people were missing more of those requirements than others--thus being oppressed on different levels. For example, a black woman is oppressed to a different level than a white woman or a black man. Gender and race are not isolated categories that award or take away privilege on their own. But together, a person's gendered race or raced gender creates a totally different experience of oppression. For example, while the aforementioned white male enjoys a high amount of privilege, access, and invisibility; a black transgender woman experiences the opposite of all these things but in a very different way than a black transgender man does. Because a transgender woman is actively moving away from the ideal by transitioning to female, society deems her as even more abnormal, thus her experience of oppression is different. A transgender male is moving in the direction of ideal (male) which makes his transgression less taboo, yet, on account of race and appearance (depending on how well he passes as male), he will still be oppressed.
That being said, intersectionality is most useful as a theory for understanding the multifaceted ways in which people are oppressed because of how the ways social categories such as race, class, and gender intersect for a specific person and determine the unique ways in which that person will experience life in this unequal society.
To put this in a sentence of technical jargon:
Intersectionality is an understanding of how experience is formed by the multiple ways in which aspects of your identity and the social categories they fall under intersect within structures of power at any moment in any context, and how the intersection of social perception, your felt identity, and your response mutually shape your lived experience in a continuum.
Here are some rules to help:
Since this is for a class called "Black Bodies: Intersecting Intimacies" and since the body is commonly described as the "site of suffering" the following discussion will talk about how all of these social categories are inextricably tied up within the body and perceptions of the body. AKA the "social visuality" of the body. Because we live in a visual society--historically documented by the need to see differences between one another--the body has and always will be a sign that indexes identity. Therefore, intersectionality always begins at the intersection of the physical body and the social perception of the body. (**since this class is called black bodies, race will be used as the example throughout).
“whether made visible (in the case of blacks) or kept invisible (in the case of whites), the body is a site of the racial experience" (Didero Fassin)
How does your felt identity intersect with how your identity is perceived? What physical attributes inform that intersection? How does context matter?
To understand this we need to first understand the politics of vision.
What does that anthropological jargon even mean?
The politics of vision means that a person's gaze is never a meaningless act. The act of looking is never separate from the identity of the looker, the context of looking, and the person/thing being looked at. Because of this, gazes are always full of expectations. These expectations were trained by the same forces that trained the looker herself, but they are usually never acknowledged, and they are enhanced or weakened by context.
Can you think of a time and place, when you saw yourself a certain way but knew that no one else was looking at you the way you would look at you? Vice versa, can you think of a time when you saw a body and used its associations and stereotypes to define the person?
"The look that the self receives is profoundly disappointing because the other does not look at the self in the way that the self imagines it ought to be looked at. " - Jaques Lacan
Did the knowledge that you were being perceived differently than you felt make you act differently? Why is this?
Because vision is a form of power. Vision is informed by historical narratives as well as social positions. Historical narratives of colonization still affect the way we view colored bodies. Because of these historical narratives and our current societal ideals, white bodies use their power to look thus taking away power from those who are looked at. The viewer is the actor and the viewed is the object.
“Vision is a social privilege articulated in terms of class, race and gender... if a social interaction is “normal” it is invisible but if it is anomalous then it is marked and transposed to a different register of visibility" (Brighenti)
"Different register of visibility" means that when a body is deemed as abnormal (or raced), the (white) gaze becomes colored by a "racially saturated visual field". Meaning, expectations for race come simultaneously with the viewing of the colored body. Because white bodies are perceived as the normal that make black bodies abnormal, they have the power to look at non-white bodies and inscribe them with pre-constructed racialized meanings in ways that white bodies are not.
"whiteness comes replete with its assumptions for what to expect of a Black body (or nonwhite body), how dangerous and unruly it is, how unlawful, criminal and hypersexual it is" (Yancy).
These assumptions are formed from a history of dominant society constructing narratives of "The Other" that perpetuate associations of inferiority between the black body and savagery. These assumptions are often implicit in the white gaze of the black body.
Being perceived in a way contrary to what you feel affects the way you feel. Growing up as a female and being perceived as weak, especially in comparison to my brother, made me internalize feelings of weakness. Gender is a visually saturated field too, but my white gender still allowed me a degree of normalcy since my gendered whiteness is still valued in the hierarchy of social categories.
But for people of color, existing in a world that perceives them contrary to the way they perceive themselves, can also take a toll on their felt identity. This is what W.E.B Du Bois calls double-consciousness. (see Du Bois).
“a feeling of inferiority? No a feeling of not existing. Sin is black as virtue is white. All those white men, fingering their guns can’t be wrong. I am guilty. I don’t know what of, but I know I am a wretch.” (Fanon)
This is the power of the white gaze. It makes people subjects to its expectations.
Have you ever internalized other's perceptions of you? Have you ever experienced a double-consciousness?
In this discussion we have talked about the meanings of raced bodies but we haven't defined whiteness. Since white bodies are the producers of the gaze that objectifies black bodies, it is imperative that we understand whiteness.
What is whiteness?
Whiteness is the norm for American culture. This is not new information for anyone. But whiteness is not just a norm, it is also an unspoken standard. Meaning, people are expected to be white, or as close to white as they can be, but this is never said out loud because that would detract from the power of whiteness. In a society where the racial make up is becoming less and less white, whiteness preserves its power by maintaining its mythic construction of superiority. To take away whiteness as a standard, we must deconstruct what it means to be white.
White is a color only in that it connotes absence of color. White is a race only in that it connotes absence of difference.
Whiteness means nothing because we made it mean nothing.
But if whiteness means nothing how can you say blackness means something?
Blackness means something because we constantly, every day, every second, make it mean something. We make it mean something as an act of oppression and we make it mean something as an act of resistance. Whiteness experiences neither. The only time whiteness means something is to differentiate it from blackness or to differentiate blackness from whiteness. Either option proves the same thing; whiteness is the constructed referent for normal. Meaning, it only exists when it has to reaffirm itself as the natural.
"Whites must be seen to be white, yet whiteness as race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power maintained by being unseen " (Dyer)
Obviously, the body is recognized by the visual field but the difference between a white body and a body of color in the visual field is that the view of a white body ends at the body, while the view of a colored body goes far beyond the simple body. This is because the white body can exist as an individual while the colored body will always be part of the colored milieu.
To give an obvious example: This is the reason why you, as a white person, only feel conscious of your race when you're in a room of colored bodies. Whereas, colored bodies feel conscious of their race in almost every room. This is why when you do things, you usually don't see yourself doing it as a white person, but just as a person. This is problematic because there are many behaviors that would fall under White American culture but can't be categorized as such because White American culture doesn't recognize itself as a culture. If you ever find yourself doing a group cultural event where no bodies of color are present, it might be useful to think this might not because there aren't that many black people in the area, but because this is something specific to your culture and not theirs.
"we characteristically see ourselves and believe ourselves seen as unmarked, unspecific, universal" (Dyer).
(Marked= abnormal/visible/noticed Unmarked=normal/unnoticed/invisible)
What effect does this self-perception of our own normal humanity have on our perception of non-white people's humanity? Does being less normal mean being less human?
"Therein lies one pitfall of institutional racism: the belief that whites, white endeavors, and white institutions are the norms and that white American culture is not, in itself, an ethnic category” (Gottschild).
If we all saw whiteness for what it is-- an ethnic category--and not as a universal, then this concept of difference that we like to impose on other people wouldn't serve to dehumanize and maybe the intersections of identity would be viewed as celebration, not as oppression.
How can you call out whiteness for it is? How can we deconstruct the standard of whiteness together?