Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture

Clarity in the Matrix

Erica B. Edwards, Jennifer Esposito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429557002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Popkultur

Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories are represented in, and constructed by, some of the most significant popular culture artifacts in contemporary Western culture.

Through readings of racialized television sitcoms, LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream American music, the role of Black Panther in Western imperialist projects, and self-love narratives promoted by social media influencers, it demonstrates how novice and emerging researchers can use intersectional theory as an analysis method in the field of cultural studies. The case studies presented are contextualized through a brief history of intersectional theory, a methodological rationale for its use in relation to popular culture, and a review of the ethical considerations researchers should take before, during, and after they approach popular artifacts.

Intended to be a textbook for novice and emerging researchers across a wide range of social science disciplines, this book serves as a practical guide to uncover the multiple and interlocking ways oppression is reified, resisted and/or negotiated through popular culture.

2021 Winner of the AESA Critics' Choice Book Award

1
Introduction

We are inundated with popular culture on a daily, even hourly basis. We see billboards as we drive or ride public transportation. We log onto social media and see pictures posted by friends. We read blogs and news articles. We watch movies, television, news reports, and music videos. We listen to music and read books and comics; and we can do all of these things anywhere we are at any time we want through the unprecedented capacities of mobile devices. Although we typically dismiss these cultural artifacts as mere entertainment sources, they also are what we would call educative (Esposito & Love, 2008; Happel-Parkins & Esposito, 2015; Kellner, 1995). This means that popular culture always has something to teach us – particularly through its emphasis on representing people’s philosophies, ways of life, values, and tastes. Popular culture representations are more than mere images, sounds and fashions we enjoy, they teach us about ourselves and other people (Kellner, 1995; Hall, 1997) and we learn how to see the world through the way it gets reflected back to us.

The histories of subaltern groups reveal that participating in and creating popular culture is not a neutral practice. As more and more people buy into certain cultural artifacts (i.e., music, dress, hairstyles, tv shows, etc.) there is always potential for marginalization, appropriation, and exploitation. The nature of power solidifies representations of people in dominant groups that, whether implicitly or explicitly, sidelines minoritized groups. This often results in limited, partial, or mis-representations of subaltern experiences. It is as if parallel worlds exist in popular culture: One that over-simplifies or ignores the realities of life under slavery, colonialism, racism, heterosexism and the patriarchy; and another that exists in the lived experiences of minorities (the latter being full of negotiated and complex identities fashioned through the institutions that emerge from and maintain domination). These parallel worlds continue, even as more and more subaltern cultural producers develop authentic portrayals of life under white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

To illustrate this point, we refer to a powerful moment in popular culture. The 1999 film The Matrix ushered a watershed moment in film history. The movie centers on a computer-programmer and hacker, Neo, who learns that the world he understands to be reality is actually a simulation called “the Matrix.” Created by sentient machines to mine human heat and electrical activity as an energy source, Neo is recruited by a crew of human rebels to leave the matrix and enter the real world – where he will fight against the machines to free humankind. Morpheus, the leader of the fight, invites Neo to leave behind the simplistic surface-level interpretations to, instead, enter a contested realm full of complexity, danger, and possibility. To accept the invitation, Neo has to make a choice: he can swallow a red pill and fight against exploitation or swallow a blue pill and continue living in the matrix. Neo swallows the red pill and enters the war to save humanity.

Like Neo, this book invites you to probe the parallel worlds we navigate in order to arrive at interpretations offering a more just and authentic portrayal of human experience in popular culture. We propose that your guide on this journey will be the theoretical and methodological framework known as intersectionality. Intersectionality is a social theory, born of the experiences of women of color, used to reveal and contest the multiple and simultaneous projects of oppression upheld by systems of domination (Collins, 2000). It asserts that reading oppression through a single social category, such as race or class or gender alone, limits the fullness of our understanding of social experience. This is because we cannot choose to only occupy one of these positions at a time. Social categories work in simultaneity – not only at the individual level but also in relationship to the social, economic, and political systems we navigate. Collins (1990), one of the progenitors of the frame who writes from a Black feminist standpoint, characterizes this process, aptly, as within a matrix of domination:

Race, class, and gender constitute axes of oppression that characterize Black women’s experiences within a more generalized matrix of domination. Other groups may encounter different dimensions of the matrix, such as sexual orientation, religion, and age, but the overarching relationship is one of domination and the types of activism it generates

(p. 544).

She asserts that oppression can be explained by the interconnected workings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories people occupy. Individuals, then, experience domination in a multi-faceted form. There is no one dominating oppressor, but instead many different ways a person may come to experience disadvantage because of their subjectivities. We offer you now, as Neo was, the red pill of truth that woke him from his position of exploitation and brought him toward clarity. It is our hope that on your journey you, too, will unveil patterns of marginalization, exploitation, and dominance produced and maintained by popular culture toward liberated representations of the complexity of human experience. We invite you, then, to use intersectionality to find clarity in parts of the matrix of domination upheld by popular culture.

We cannot discuss the Hollywood film The Matrix in relationship to intersectionality without also discussing how its production is tied up in patterns of domination. Sophia Stewart, a Black paralegal who refers to herself as “the Mother of the Matrix,” has become somewhat of an urban legend undergirding the film series. There are many erroneous reports circulating on the internet that Stewart was awarded billions of dollars in a copyright lawsuit against the directors Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski and Twentieth Century Fox. Stewart, a single Black mother, had been a paralegal in copyright law. She wrote a science fiction story called The Third Eye which she copyrighted in 1983. The basis of her lawsuit is that The Matrix and The Terminator films are similar or identical to her story The Third Eye. We have a lone Black woman literally standing up against the matrix demanding that she be compensated for ideas that were stolen from her. This is an intersectional concern precisely because, throughout history, the powerful have stolen ideas, lands, and bodies from people with less power.

Stewart’s case appears to have been dismissed because she missed the initial June 13, 2005 federal court hearing. She wanted a trial by jury and claimed to have irrefutable proof that the Wachowskis had stolen her ideas. The judge’s dismissal decision states that Stewart did not bring forward a triable issue regarding copyright infringement. The defendants and court admit that Stewart holds a valid copyright for The Third Eye and they concede that Fox (not the Wachowskis) had access to parts of it as early as the 1980s. However, for reasons unknown, Stewart missed the hearing, so a jury was unable to hear the case of whether The Matrix and The Terminator are “substantially similar” to The Third Eye. Stewart has since petitioned the court but to no avail. She maintains that people were paid off to keep her case from going to trial. She also won a judgement (monetary amount not yet determined) against her first attorney Jonathan Lubell (now deceased). Stewart was seeking 150 million against Lubell but the judge asked Stewart for evidence showing why he owes her that amount. Stewart, it appears, did not answer that and, thus, has not been paid any money from Lubell or his estate.

The court has determined that Stewart held a valid copyright but did not investigate whether the films were similar to the copyrighted story. In the process, misinformation about the case has circulated on the internet causing many to cling to the belief that Stewart has been awarded billions of dollars and that the court has conceded to her demands. Her book, The Third Eye, is available for purchase, though it is unclear if this was the copyrighted version from 1983. The court documents show that multiple versions exist, some being referred to as The Third Eye and some called Third Eye. Each version had a different number of pages as well.

We, like many others, want to believe Stewart. She invested time, energy, and resources to claim, recover, and profit from her work. The Wachowskis have also been embroiled in another lawsuit filed by Thomas Althouse who claimed The Matrix was based off his script, The Immortals. This lawsuit was filed in 2013 because, according to Althouse, he had not seen The Matrix until then. He contends that he submitted his script to Warner Bros in 1993. This lawsuit made it to trial and the judge ruled in 2014 that the plots were not substantially similar. It is interesting that Althouse had his day in court with the plots of both the movie and his script investigated while Sophia Stewart was not afforded the same opportunity. As intersectionality implores us to do, we wonder whether her race, class, gender, and other aspects of identity were wrapped up in the court’s decision to dismiss her claim. Questions like this are at the core of this book. It will support you as you work to uncover how histories, contexts, and representations uphold and are upheld by the ubiquity of racism, classism, hetero-sexism, and other systems of social stratification as they appear in popular culture.

Intersectional theory and its history

Intersectionality is a widely used heuristic analytical tool used to name and make sense of the complexity of lived experience in relation to systems of domination (Crenshaw, 2011). We bring up Stewart’s case, then, to illustrate how important it is for scholars to be able to interrogate how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories get taken for granted in popular culture. The frame holds that human beings cannot be reduced to a single marker of identity such as race or class or gender alone but instead that our experiences are mediated by the interlacing of these constructs (May, 2015). Thus, we are at once raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, abled, etc. beings. As May (2015) asserts, “one aspect of identity and/or form of inequality is not treated as separable or as superordinate” (p. 3). Further, these simultaneous markers are enmeshed with systems of oppression that sustain social inequality. Through its ability to demonstrate how oppression works through interlocking and mutually reinforcing systems, intersectionality can be used to develop solutions to social problems that are attendant to the unique needs of groups who find their experiences obscured by frames employing a “single-axis” approach, that is, analyses made through attention to only one marker of identity (e.g., race only, gender only, sexuality only) (Crenshaw, 1989).

This kind of analytical power has resulted in the frame’s wide use across various fields and disciplines within and outside of the academy and in local, regional, and global contexts (Hancock, 2016; Collins & Bilge, 2016). Its relative ubiquity stems from the history of intellectual and activist work of women of color dating back to the 19th century (Grzanka, 2014; Hancock, 2016; Collins & Bilge, 2016). It is often referred to as a “late feminism” emerging along a continuum of “waves” of feminist thought. We reject this characterization, though, as it props up white supremacy in women’s intellectual histories. Intersectional theory has a multiple origin story, so its history cannot be neatly mapped along a linear trajectory of thought. Thus, it certainly did not emerge after, because of, or in response to white women’s political organizing. For nearly two centuries, women of color have advocated for their specific socio-political and economic needs in the face of simultaneous projects of racism, classism, heterosexism, slavery, and colonialism. They also resisted liberation movements that accepted their labor but required their subservience and fashioned political organizations more acutely in-tune with the complexity of their needs. Maria Stewart, a U.S. Black woman writing and speaking publicly in 1831, was among the first to articulate the centrality of race, class, and gender in Black American women’s experience (Stewart, 1995 [1831]). This tradition was advanced by early-to-mid 20th century Black women activists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauli Murray, whose embodied writing and political work also demonstrates how women’s subordination relies on racism, classism, and sexism (Cooper, 2017).

The U.S. social movements of the late 1960s through early 1980s saw women of color autonomously writing out of their unique contexts but advancing arguments that constitute the core ideas of intersectionality. During that time, men were advanced as the face, voice, and subject of the movements for Black Power, Chicano Liberation, Red Power, and Asian-American rights. Women of color were also marginalized within the women’s rights movement as the demands there centered on the needs of white heterosexual women. Women of color feminist work is not solely derivative of these marginalizing experiences (Roth, 2004; Spring, 2005) but flourished during that time in part because of the oppressions faced in multiple spaces of identity. Black, Chicana, indigenous, and Asian-American feminist scholar-activists like Toni Cade Bambara (1970); Barbara Smith (1983), Akasha Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith (2015 [1982]); bell hooks (1984); Dorinda Moreno (1973); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1983); Shirley Lim and Mayumi Tsutakawa (1989); Beth Brant (1984); and Paula Gunn Allen (1986) produced anthologies and texts that are central to an understanding of intersectional thought and experience.

Further, certain women of color feminists defined key terms to describe intersectional experience. Frances Beal’s (1995 [1970]) “double jeopardy” is among the first to articulate the simultaneous process of racism and sexism in capitalist context. The Combahee River Collective’s (CRC) (2015 [1977]) “A Black Feminist Statement” was among the first to include a specifically anti-heterosexist lens to the intersectional project of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-classism. The CRC relayed the terms “inter-locking,” “manifold,” “simultaneous,” and “synthesis” in order to articulate the concurrent ways in which markers of identity interact with social structures (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Deborah K. King’s (1988) work produced important terminology such as “multiplicative effects,” “interactive oppressions,” and “nexus” which are used to denote the complexity of social processes. Patricia Hill Collins (2000 [1990]) would build upon these terms to coin “matrix of domination.”

Ange-Marie Hancock (2016) asserts that the “watershed moment” in intersectional thought occurred with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique in Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” There, she metaphorically invokes a traffic intersection to draw attention to the interconnected workings of discrimination. This description coalesces the political theorizations of women of color feminists before her, creating a particularly appropriate term to describe the frame:

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 traveling 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.

(p. 149)

This imagery makes plain how individual systems of domination converge to harm individuals, communities, or institutions. Since its publication, intersectionality has grown to reach “maximal salience across academe, the non-profit sector (including global philanthropy) and politics” (Hancock, 2016, p. 5).

Intersectionality is as likely to be used by researchers as an approach to critical theory and praxis as it is by lay theorists in th...