Framing Intersectionality

Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies

Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, Linda Supik, Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, Linda Supik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317133568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 as a tool for the analysis of the ways in which different forms of social inequality, oppression and discrimination interact and overlap in multidimensional ways, the concept of 'intersectionality' has attracted much attention in international feminist debates over the last decade. Framing Intersectionality brings together proponents and critics of the concept, to discuss the 'state of the art' with those that have been influential in the debates that surround it. Engaging with the historical roots of intersectionality in the US-based 'race-class-gender' debate, this book also considers the European adoption of this concept in different national contexts, to explore issues such as migration, identity, media coverage of sexual violence against men and transnational livelihoods of high and low skilled migrants. Thematically arranged around the themes of the transatlantic migration of intersectionality, the development of intersectionality as a theory, men's studies and masculinities, and the body and embodiment, this book draws on empirical case studies as well as theoretical deliberations to investigate the capacity and the sustainability of the concept and shed light on the current state of intersectionality research. Presenting the latest work from a team of leading feminist scholars from the US and Europe, Framing Intersectionality will be of interest to all those with interests in gender, women's studies, masculinity, inequalities and feminist thought.

PART I
Intersectionality’s Transatlantic Travels: Geographies of the Debate

Chapter 1
Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Anti-racist Politics¹

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

One of the very few black women’s studies books is entitled All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave! (Hull et al. 1982). I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a black feminist criticism² because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.³ In this chapter, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in anti-discrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and anti-racist politics.

I will centre black women in this analysis in order to contrast the multi-dimensionality of black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. Not only will this juxtaposition reveal how black women are theoretically erased, it will also illustrate how this framework imports its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and anti-racist analyses. With black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases black women in the conceptualisation, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women.

This focus on the most privileged group members marginalises those who are multiply burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.

After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the marginalisation of black women in feminist theory and in anti-racist politics. I argue that black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and anti-racist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and anti-racist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating ‘women’s experience’ or ‘the black experience’ into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.

As examples of theoretical and political developments that miss the mark with respect to black women because of their failure to consider intersectionality, I will briefly discuss the feminist critique of rape and separate spheres ideology, and the public policy debates concerning female-headed households within the black community.

The Anti-discrimination Framework

A. The Experience of Intersectionality and the Doctrinal Response

One way to approach the problem of intersectionality is to examine how courts frame and interpret the stories of black women plaintiffs. While I cannot claim to know the circumstances underlying the cases that I will discuss, I nevertheless believe that the way courts interpret claims made by black women is itself part of black women’s experience and, consequently, a cursory review of cases involving black female plaintiffs is quite revealing. To illustrate the difficulties inherent in judicial treatment of intersectionality, I will consider [one] Title VII⁴ case: DeGraffenreid v. General Motors:⁵

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors In DeGraffenreid, five black women brought suit against General Motors, alleging that the employer’s seniority system perpetuated the effects of past discrimination against black women. Evidence adduced at trial revealed that General Motors simply did not hire black women prior to 1964 and that all of the black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs in a seniority-based layoff during a subsequent recession. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, rejecting the plaintiffs’ attempt to bring a suit not on behalf of blacks or women, but specifically on behalf of black women. The court stated:

[P]laintiffs have failed to cite any decisions which have stated that Black women are a special class to be protected from discrimination. The Court’s own research has failed to dispose such a decision. The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new ‘super-remedy’ which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Thus, this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both.⁶

Although General Motors did not hire black women prior to 1964, the court noted that ‘General Motors has hired … female employees for a number of years prior to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’.⁷ Because General Motors did hire women – albeit white women – during the period that no black women were hired, there was, in the court’s view, no sex discrimination that the seniority system could conceivably have perpetuated.

After refusing to consider the plaintiffs’ sex discrimination claim, the court dismissed the race discrimination complaint and recommended its consolidation with another case alleging race discrimination against the same employer.⁸ The plaintiffs responded that such consolidation would defeat the purpose of their suit since theirs was not purely a race claim, but an action brought specifically on behalf of black women alleging race and sex discrimination. The court, however, reasoned:

The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not indicate that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of ‘black women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.⁹

Thus, the court apparently concluded that Congress either did not contemplate that black women could be discriminated against as ‘black women’ or did not intend to protect them when such discrimination occurred.¹⁰ The court’s refusal in DeGraffenreid to acknowledge that black women encounter combined race and sex discrimination implies that the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women’s and black men’s experiences. Under this view, black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups.¹¹ Where their experiences are distinct, black women can expect little protection as long as approaches, such as that in DeGraffenreid, which completely obscure problems of intersectionality prevail. […]

Perhaps it appears to some that I have offered inconsistent criticisms of how black women are treated in anti-discrimination law: I seem to be saying that in one case, black women’s claims were rejected and their experiences obscured because the court refused to acknowledge that the employment experience of black women can be distinct from that of white women, while in other cases the interests of black women were harmed because black women’s claims were viewed as so distinct from the claims of either white women or black men that the court denied to black females representation of the larger class. It seems that I have to say that black women are the same and harmed by being treated differently, or that they are different and harmed by being treated the same. But I cannot say both.

This apparent contradiction is but another manifestation of the conceptual limitations of the single-issue analyses that intersectionality challenges. The point is that black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

Judicial decisions which premise intersectional relief on a showing that black women are specifically recognised as a class are analogous to a doctor’s decision at the scene of an accident to treat an accident victim only if the injury is recognised by medical insurance. Similarly, providing legal relief only when black women show that their claims are based on race or on sex is analogous to calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident. Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In these cases the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the involved parties simply get back in their cars and zoom away.

To bring this back to a non-metaphorical level, I am suggesting that black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination – the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as black women – not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as black women.

Black women’s experiences are much broader than the general categories that discrimination discourse provides. Yet the continued insistence that black women’s demands and needs be filtered through categorical analyses that completely obscure their experiences guarantees that their needs will seldom be addressed.

B. The Significance of Doctrinal Treatment of Intersectionality

DeGraffenreid […] is a doctrinal manifestation of a common political and theoretical approach to discrimination which operates to marginalise black women. Unable to grasp the importance of black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group, or as too different, in which case black women’s blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and black liberationist agendas.

While it could be argued that this failure represents an absence of political will to include black women, I believe that it reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination. Consider first the definition of discrimination that seems to be operative in anti-discrimination law. Discrimination which is wrongful proceeds from the identification of a specific class or category; either a discriminator intentionally identifies this category, or a process is adopted which somehow disadvantages all members of this category.¹² According to the dominant view, a discriminator treats all people within a race or sex category similarly. Any significant experiential or statistical variation within this group suggests either that the group is not being discriminated against or that conflicting interests exist which defeat any attempts to bring a common claim.¹³ Consequently, one generally cannot combine these categories. Race and sex, moreover, become significant only when they operate to explicitly disadvantage the victims; because the privileging of whiteness or maleness is implicit, it is generally not perceived at all.

Underlying this conception of discrimination is a view that the wrong which anti-discrimination law addresses is the use of race or gender factors to interfere with decisions that would otherwise be fair or neutral. This process-based definition is not grounded in a bottom-up commitment to improve the substantive conditions for those who are victimised by the interplay of numerous factors. Instead, the dominant message of anti-discrimination law is that it will regulate only the limited extent to which race or sex interferes with the process of determining outcomes. This narrow objective is facilitated by the top–down strategy of using a singular ‘but for’ analysis to ascertain the effects of race or sex. Because the scope of anti-discrimination law is so limited, sex and race discrimination have come to be defined in terms of the experiences of those who are privileged but for their racial or sexual characteristics. Put differently, the paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of the most privileged blacks. Notions of what constitutes race and sex discrimination are, as a result, narrowly tailored to embrace only a small set of circumstances, none of which include discrimination against black women. […]

The problem is that they can receive protection only to the extent that their experiences are recognisably similar to those whose experiences tend to be reflected in anti-discrimination doctrine. If black women cannot conclusively say that ‘but for’ their race or ‘but for’ their gender they would be treated differently, they are not invited to climb through the hatch but told to wait in the unprotected margin until they can be absorbed into the broader, protected categories of race and sex.

Despite the narrow scope of this dominant conception of discrimination and its tendency to marginalise those whose experiences cannot be described within its tightly drawn parameters, this approach has been regarded as the approp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Framing Intersectionality: An Introduction
• Part I: Intersectionality's Transatlantic Travels: Geographies of the Debate
• Part II: Emerging Fields in Intersectionality: Masculinities, Heteronormativity and Transnationality
• Part III: Advancing Intersectionality: Potentials, Limits and Critical Queries
• Postscript
• Index