Navigating Intersectionality

Session Objective: to explore our identities amidst and knowledge of privilege & oppression as they play out in the world

When examining issues of environmental racism, it is important to understand how various forces impact justice and injustice. In addition to questions of race, other identity factors – such as gender expression, sexual orientation, nationality, disability, and age, to name just a few – have an effect on individual and collective experiences. Session 4 of Climates of Resistance explores how these issues overlap with each other to shape outcomes. During class, we’ll discuss Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theories and critique competing claims in the ‘Oppression Olympics’ while building our understanding of the layers of racism.

  • Attend: class from 8-9:20am Eastern on Wednesday 8 September 2021, via Zoom, during which we’ll consider concepts found in Inga Bard’s #Intersectionality painting.

#Intersectionality (Oil on Canvas, 2017)

This #Intersectionality painting is one of the products of “Protest is the New Brunch”, an initiative by Inga Bard. The project took place at a secret party where guests were invited to paint by numbers, but, like most good cacophony, decided to paint by ideals instead. Inspired by Soviet propaganda posters, Inga Bard created prompts reimagining iconic proletariat poses with faces of Bay Area’s progressive creative class and replacing communist slogans with contemporary rallying cries seen on protest posters from the renowned Women’s March 2017.


About the Artist: Inga Bard was born on the eve of the dissolution of the USSR in Odessa, Ukraine, and became a naturalised US citizen after emigrating with her family as political refugees at the age of ten. She went off to study art in Miami soon after quitting high school, and has since studied and taught in Florence, London, and San Francisco. Her most recent project is Art for Civil Discourse, an initiative using public artwork to help communities spark conversation, dissect reality, and dream together.

  • Review: the Course Slides and our class definition of “intersectionality” based on your responses to Learning Log, Session 3.

Class Slides - 8 September 2021.pdf

  • Consider: our class conversation on the “Oppression Olympics” in light of this medley of voices sharing portions from Audre Lorde’s “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”. The piece reminds us why intersectionality is so important: not so we can engage in a competition over who is ‘worst off’, but so we can include the full range of people’s identities — because if we don’t, we end up marginalising others ourselves. As Lorde points out, it is a common strategy for those in power to “encourage members of oppressed groups to act against each other, and so long as we are divided because of our particular identities, we cannot join together in effective political action”.