Annette Martín (University of Illinois Chicago), "Intersectionality without Fragmentation"
Ethics, 2023
Many people, from across the political spectrum, have thought that there is something troublingly divisive about intersectionality. Intersectionality is often used to invoke differences: women have different experiences than men do. But Black women also have different experiences than white women; working-class Black women have different experiences than middle class Black women; queer working-class Black women have different experiences than straight working-class Black women; etc, etc. In pointing out all of these differences, intersectionality seems to divide us indefinitely.
Again, the divisiveness of intersectionality has been a concern on both the political left and right. In my paper, "Intersectionality without Fragmentation", I focus on a concern from the left, specifically from feminist philosophers. Many feminist philosophers have worried that intersectionality divides women, and that because it divides women, it undermines feminism. This is the central concern that my paper addresses.
We have essentially already seen why many feminist philosophers have thought that intersectionality divides women. Intersectionality has been used to point to differences between women and their experiences. But, as alluded to above, these differences seem to extend indefinitely. It's not just that Black women have different experiences than white women, or that working-class women have different experiences than middle-class women. Intersectionality suggests that differences across all kinds of social divisions combine and multiply. It suggests, for instance, that what it means to be a queer working-class Black woman is different from what it means to be a straight working-class Black woman, or a queer middle-class Black woman, or a queer working-class white woman (etc.), because race, class, gender, and sexual orientation all simultaneously play a factor in shaping individuals' experiences. But these differences don't stop at the level of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Things get even further divided when we factor in things like ability, nationality, immigration status, age, and so on. Where we seemed to have one group (women) we now seem to have lots and lots of small groups, or even no groups at all, just a bunch of individuals. And so intersectionality has been thought to cast doubt on whether we can legitimately think about women as a unified group.
Now why should we care, from a feminist perspective, about whether we can legitimately think about women as a unified group? Well, many feminists have thought that the point of feminism is to respond to women's oppression. Feminism battles the injustices that women face because they are women, and so the very purpose of feminism is defined in terms of the group women. For a silly analogy, suppose Buckingham palace is overrun by a bunch of corgis, and there is one person whose job description is to take care of the corgis that belong to the queen. Now suppose that there is no queen. If there is no queen, then there are no corgis that belong to the queen, and this person is out of a job. Likewise, if there is no group women, then there are no injustices faced by women as a group. And since feminism is thought to be defined in terms of responding to the injustices faced by women as a group, this would mean that there is no basis for feminism. And so feminist philosophers have worried that intersectionality fragments or undermines feminism because it fragments the group women.
Different feminists have responded to this "fragmentation problem" in different ways. For example, some have taken this as a reason to reject intersectionality. Many others have taken this as strong motivation to find some creative way of thinking about women as a unified group that takes into account the kinds of differences between women that intersectionality points out. In my paper I take a different approach that focuses on shifting how we think about oppression, and therefore feminism.
Recall that the reason why the fragmentation problem seems like a problem is because feminism has traditionally been defined in terms of the group women, because it has been defined as responding to the oppression that women face because they are women. In essence, what I offer is a different way of identifying the kind of injustice that feminism is concerned with. On this strategy, we can see feminism as responding to a kind of oppression that many women experience, but that is not defined in terms of the group women-- akin to finding a different way of identifying the corgis that the person at Buckingham Palace is responsible for taking care of, so that they don't find themselves out of a job if or when the queen dies.
There are a lot of details and caveats that you can read more about in the paper, but the basic idea is that we can define different kinds of oppression based on ideas and practices that we have about how to categorize people. To take an analogy, we have ideas about how to categorize different foods. For example, for many Americans: pancakes, eggs, bacon, and cinnamon rolls are categorized as breakfast foods. Salad is not considered breakfast food. Now, it doesn't really matter if it is legitimate in some deep sense to think about pancakes as breakfast food and salad as not breakfast food (and, of course, which foods are categorized in which ways will vary cross-culturally). Rather, it is enough that many Americans think in these ways to shape patterns of behavior in the U.S. in significant ways. For example, it is enough to get many Americans to cook eggs in the morning, to induce restaurants to serve things like eggs and pancakes at 9 a.m., and to drive a high demand for factory farmed eggs.
Just as we have lots of ideas about what and how we categorize things as food, we have lots of ideas about how to categorize people in terms of gender. These categorizations are often made based on things like an individual's clothing, their name, the sound of their voice, the shape of their body, their genetic makeup, etc. Whether someone is categorized as a man or a woman in a certain situation can affect how they are treated, even if the person doing the categorizing got it wrong (e.g. they assumed that "Hilary" would be a woman, but he is actually a man), or even if there is no legitimate way to think about the group women is a unified group. There can be patterns of injustice that emerge from these categorizations, even if the categorizations don't correspond to anything deeply unified-- just as ideas about "breakfast foods" can shape patterns of behavior, even if "breakfast food" doesn't correspond to any deep, unified category.
The basic idea, then, is that we can define gender oppression in terms of the injustices that emerge from these gender categorizations, and we can understand feminism as responding to gender oppression. On this way of thinking, feminism still responds to the kinds of injustices that feminists have long been concerned about. But feminism is no longer defined in terms of women, because the oppression that feminism is concerned with is no longer defined in terms of women. And so even if intersectionality or other considerations show that the group women is not a legitimate or unified group, this no longer poses a problem for feminism.
There are lots of details I’ve glossed over here. In particular, it is important to make sure that how we think about oppression does justice to intersectionality, or else the strategy ultimately fails. For those further details, I encourage you to check out the full paper here or email me (am92@uic.edu) for a copy.
Interesting. Seems like some game-theoretic modeling might be useful here. That's usually impossible since people writing about this sort of thing are usually math-phobic, but I happened to notice Professor Martín did a math major in college.