Brah, Revisting Intersectionality
Brah, Revisting Intersectionality
Brah, Revisting Intersectionality
Revisiting Intersectionality
Abstract
In the context of the second Gulf war and US and the British occupation of
Iraq, many ‘old’ debates about the category ‘woman’ have assumed a new critical
urgency. This paper revisits debates on intersectionality in order to show that they
can shed new light on how we might approach some current issues. It first discusses
the 19th century contestations among feminists involved in anti-slavery struggles and
campaigns for women’s suffrage. The second part of the paper uses autobiography
and empirical studies to demonstrate that social class (and its intersections with
gender and ‘race’ or sexuality) are simultaneously subjective, structural and about
social positioning and everyday practices. It argues that studying these intersections
allows a more complex and dynamic understanding than a focus on social class alone.
The conclusion to the paper considers the potential contributions to intersectional
analysis of theoretical and political approaches such as those associated with post-
structuralism, postcolonial feminist analysis, and diaspora studies.
Introduction
At the time of the 1991 war against Iraq, feminist critiques of the then familiar
discourse of ‘global sisterhood’ were a commonplace. As American and British
bombs fell over Iraq once again in March 2003, many of the ‘old’ questions that we
have debated about the category ‘woman’ assume critical urgency once again, albeit
they now bear the weight of global circumstances of the early twenty first century.
This paper aims briefly to discuss some ‘old’ issues that continue to be central
to making feminist agenda currently relevant. In order to do so, it revisits debates on
‘intersectionality’ that helped to take forward feminisms in previous decades. The first
part of the paper discusses some long-standing internal conversations among different
strands of feminisms which have already furnished important insights into
contemporary problems. By revisiting these historical developments, we do not wish
to suggest that the past unproblematically provides an answer to the present. On the
contrary, we would wish to learn from and build upon these insights through critique
so that they can shed new light on current predicaments. Hence, when we start with
the 19th century debates, it is not because there is a direct correspondence between
slavery and 21st century forms of governmentality, but rather to indicate that some
issues that emerged then can help illuminate and elucidate our current entanglements
with similar problematics.
The second part of the paper comments on intersections as they have been
analysed in some autobiographical and empirical research based texts. We argue that
the need for understanding complexities posed by intersections of different axis of
differentiation is as pressing today as it has always been. In the final section we
briefly examine the contribution of recent theoretical developments to the analysis of
‘intersectionality’ which could potentially nurture fruitful new feminist agendas.
"Well, children, where there is so much racket, there must be something out of
kilter, I think between the Negroes of the South and the women of the North -
all talking about rights--the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's
all this talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped
into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.
Nobody helps me any best place. And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at
my arm. I have plowed (sic), I have planted and I have gathered into barns.
And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? I could work as much, and
eat as much as any man--when I could get it--and bear the lash as well! And
ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into
slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me.
And ain't I a woman? ..."
This cutting edge speech (in all senses of the term) deconstructs every single
major truth-claim about gender in a patriarchal slave social formation. More
generally, the discourse offers a devastating critique of socio-political, economic and
cultural processes of ‘othering’ whilst drawing attention to the simultaneous
importance of subjectivity--of subjective pain and violence that the inflictors do not
often wish to hear about or acknowledge. Simultaneously, the discourse foregrounds
the importance of spirituality to this form of political activism when existential grief
touches ground with its unconscious and finds affirmation through a belief in the
figure of a Jesus who listens. Political identity here is never taken as a given but is
performed through rhetoric and narration. Sojourner Truth’s identity claims are thus
relational, constructed in relation to white women and all men and clearly demonstrate
that what we call ‘identities’ are not objects but processes constituted in and through
power relations.
It is in this sense of critique, practice and inspiration that this discourse holds
crucial lessons for us today. Part lament, but defiant, articulating razor sharp politics
but with the sensibility of a poet, the discourse performs the analytic moves of a
‘decolonised mind’, to use Wa Thiongo’s (1986) critical insight. It refuses all final
closures. We are all in dire need of decolonised open minds today. Furthermore,
Sojourner Truth powerfully challenges essentialist thinking that a particular category
of woman is essentially this or essentially that (e.g. that women are necessarily
weaker than men or that enslaved black women were not real women). This point
holds critical importance today when the allure of new Orientalisms and their
concomitant desire to ‘unveil’ Muslim women has proved to be attractive even to
some feminists in a ‘post September 11’ world.
There are millions of women today who remain marginalized, treated as a
‘problem’, or construed as the focal point of a moral panic – women suffering
poverty, disease, lack of water, proper sanitation; women who themselves or their
households are scattered across the globe as economic migrants, undocumented
workers, as refugees and asylum seekers; women whose bodies and sexualities are
commodified, fetishised, criminalized, racialised, disciplined and regulated through a
myriad of representational regimes and social practices. So many of us, indeed,
In the introduction to a now classic book Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing-Up
in the Fifties, Liz Heron (1985) discusses how the provision of free orange juice gave
working class children the sense that they had a right to exist. The implication of this
– that social class produces entitlement/lack of entitlement to exist and that social
policy decisions affect this - is vividly demonstrated in this example. In the same
book, Valerie Walkerdine (who has consistently discussed social class over the last 20
years), describes walking with a middle class friend on a seaside pier and seeing a
working class family adding brown sauce to their chips. When her friend asks, ‘how
could they do that?’ Walkerdine is immediately interpellated as working class, drawn
into recognising the ‘othering’ of her working class background in this class inflected
discourse on culinary habits. In later work Walkerdine also discusses middle class
tendencies to view working classes as ‘animals in a zoo’ (with Helen Lucey, 1989)
and with Helen Lucey and June Melody (2002) she considers the ways in which social
class is lived in everyday practices and the emotional investments and issues it
produces. Some of the middle class young women, for example, were subjected to
expectations that meant that they could never perform sufficiently well to please their
parents.
‘“Race matters” writes the African American philosopher Cornel West (1993).
Actually, class, gender and race matter, and they matter because they structure
interactions, opportunities, consciousness, ideology and the forms of resistance that
characterize American life… They matter in shaping the social location of different
groups in contemporary society.’ (Andersen, 1996: ix)
At the level of everyday practices and subjectivity, Gail Lewis (1985) demonstrates
how ‘race’ and gender intersected with the working class positioning of her parents so
that their shifting power relations were only understandable as locally situated, albeit
with global underpinnings. Her mother (a white woman) was responsible for dealing
with public officials because of her parents’ experiences of racism in relation to her
father (a black man). In these instances, mother’s ‘whiteness’ (Frankenberg, 1993),
becomes a signifier of superiority over her black husband. On the other hand, since
both parents – marked by patriarchal conventions of the time surrounding
heteronormativity -- believed that men ought to deal with the outside world, this had
implications for their relationship at home, where her father prevailed. Lewis (2000)
develops her analysis of the intersections of ‘race’, gender and class in studying the
diverse everyday practices of black women social workers in relation to black and
white clients and colleagues and white line managers. She demonstrates that the
Over the last twenty years, the manner in which class is discussed in political, popular
and academic discourse has radically changed to the point that, as Sayer (2002) notes,
some sociologists have found it embarrassing to talk to research participants about
class. This tendency is also evident in government circles as when the discourse on
child poverty comes to substitute analysis of wider inequalities of class. While the
current government does not wish to use the language of class inequality, it has
pledged itself to eradicate child poverty within twenty years. However, it is important
to ask whether a commitment to eradicating poverty in children can ever be fully
achieved without the eradication of poverty among their parents. For example, a study
by Middleton et al. (1997) found that one per cent of children do not have a bed and
mattress to themselves, five per cent live in damp housing and do not have access to
fresh fruit each day or new shoes that fit. More than ten per cent of children over the
age of 10 share a bedroom with a sibling of the opposite sex. Yet, counter-intuitively,
over half the children who were defined as ‘not poor’ had parents who were defined
as ‘poor’. Their parents reported that they sometimes went without clothes, shoes and
entertainment in order to make sure that their children are provided for. One in twenty
mothers reported that they sometimes go without food in order to provide for their
children. Lone mothers were particularly likely to report this. In Britain and the USA,
recent studies by Ehrenreich (2002) and Toynbee (2003) provide another timely
reminder of how grinding, poorly-paid, working class jobs continue to differentiate
women’s experiences.
From their analyses of data from 118 British Local Education Authorities, Gillborn
and Mirza (2000) found that social class makes the biggest difference to educational
attainment, followed by ‘race’ and then by gender – although they recognised that
class outcomes are always intertwined with gender and ‘race’. The processes by
which social class continues to operate (for the middle as well as the working classes)
require more attention if processes of social inclusion and exclusion are to be taken
seriously. As Diane Reay (1998) points out in relation to education, this is not because
different social classes view the importance of education differently – middle class
position is commonly seen by both sections as central to social mobility and success.
However, middle class mothers can draw upon more success-related cultural capital
than their working class peers – e.g. they are better positioned to provide their
Similarly, The Social Class and Widening Participation in HE Project, based at the
then University of North London (Archer and Hutchings, 2000; Archer et al., 2001),
found that class has an enormous impact on participation in higher education.
However, ‘working class’ people do not constitute a unitary, homogeneous category,
and participation in higher education varies between different working class groups.
Participation is lowest amongst those from unskilled occupational backgrounds and
for inner-city working class groups. These class factors articulate with ‘race’ and
ethnicity to produce complex patterns of participation in higher education (CVCP,
1998; Modood, 1993).
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Avtar Brah is a Reader in the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck, University
of London, and can be contacted at a.brah@bbk.ac.uk.
Ann Phoenix is a Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, and
can be contacted at a.a.phoenix@open.ac.uk