[ibarw] My Intersection

[eumelia]

I am a woman.

That's a fairly bold statement, don't you think? It is a very political statement. It signifies that I am not a man.
Man, as a rule, has been synonymous with Human.
In Hebrew the word "Adam" is not just a name, it is the word for Human. Son of Adam - בן אדם - Ben Adam is "Human".

As a Woman, I am by default "Other" and I suffer for it, obviously.

However, I do need to qualify my status as a Woman.

I'm also a Queer woman, but if I wanted to I could pass for Straight and most of my problems that step from homophobia and other forms of sexual (not gender) discrimination can quite easily not touch my life.

Isn't there something missing though?
No, not really, don't see anything else that's particularly important to my status as a Woman in a Patriarchal society.

Well, now isn't that significant.
Yes, very.
It signifies that I am a White Woman.
A different kind of default, as it happens.

If we were going to play Oppression Olympics I'd probably end up in the third to last place or somewhere about there.
But the comparison of the different Oppressions that go on in our sucky, screwy world is not only unhelpful, it is insignificant. Because by trying to justify my own oppression, I become blind to the fact that I, myself am an oppressor in turn - and in these parts even worse, an occupier.

So lets throw the Olympics out of the window please. Beyond the fact that it is an insult to people with actual grievances in this world (which I, I am lucky to say do not. I'm living a pretty sweet life, Queerness and Womanhood notwithstanding).

As a member of the Default population (that is to say, White/Ashkenazi Jewish), that had been raised by liberal parents (that is to say, colour-blind) it took me a long time to realise that where you come from, the colour of your skin and the religion that you practice are far more significant and that the meritocracy that the Neo-Liberal wave we currently engulfed proclaims that are living in is utterly and completely false.
That the very fact that I was born in a middle-class neighborhood, in a mostly middle-class city, twenty minutes from Tel-Aviv, enables me, so easily, to prove my merit.

So where is my intersection?
Personally, my intersection, when spoken about in sociological terms in that of Oppression, is in my Queer identity and the fact that I'm a woman.
But as a white woman all I can is to tread carefully.
Because as a white woman I am an oppressor of men and women who have been classes and racialised as Other.
And that really just the way it is.

There is probably something else that there is to be said about this subject, but I'm at a loss at the moment.

Please, comments are welcome!

Edited to add: Go read more entires written for International Blog Against Racism Week, which should be every week, of course.

Comments

[lifeofresearch.livejournal.com]

I have given this some thought about 25 years ago and my thinking is somewhat the same as before. I find labels helpful in a general sense for classification purposes. However, they may limit our enjoyment of people. For example, some religious leaders want us to distance ourselves from certain segments of the population based on some classification. I did not follow their advice and befriended the groups that they thought were untouchable. In the process, I found out that the leaders were the ones who needed to be untouchable for their for lack of a better word "hatred" for anyone who is different. Religion in itself is not bad it is the counterfeit application of religion to influence the thinking and practice of people to foster hatred toward another group. Therefore, I have become an accepting and affirming person of those who are different but I still resist the use of violence and language that stirs up violence.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Couldn't with you more, sir.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_yggdrasil/]

I have nothing very constructive to add, so I'll settle for clapping.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_yggdrasil/]

Oh, wait, a little something. I just wrote about a Rammstein video (http://users.livejournal.com/_yggdrasil/486887.html) that I found and was struck by the racist undertones (which is a pity, as it's also a genuinely awesome song and an erotic video). I just don't think it would have been that hard to make the audience realistic (i.e. multiethnic ... reality isn't All White All The Time) so you wouldn't have a black woman dancing for a snow white crowd. Then maybe I would have seen a woman empowered in her own sexuality instead of one disempowered because she's just another exotic plaything for white people.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Her exoticness in really emphasized by those blue eyes and snake.
She is very beautiful, but yeah, if the crowd were a little bit more diverse (and emphasized, not just scanned over) then it would seem so... umm.. disempowering, as you say.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

*blushes*
*Scuffs toe*
*Hides after saying* Thanks.

[imdissertating.livejournal.com]

here via IBARW - I'll add that I think about intersectionality through a mutually constitutive model such that your queerness & Jewishness & "whiteness" & female-bodiedness construct each other so it's not like you can say separate out these identities.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's what I'm trying to do, though I suppose it could be read like that.
I was trying to position myself on a spectrum of some kind. I know it's pretty futile, but a worth while exercise none the less.

[imdissertating.livejournal.com]

I get that - my point is that's how I understand intersectionality based on readings & research. To me, intersectionality is not so much a spectrum but a thread in a ball of yarn. Once you pull at one end, the whole thing unravels because it's all interconnected.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

the whole thing unravels because it's all interconnected.

I see your point, quite clearly. Personally, I'm still in the process of understanding intersectionality and where I stand with it, making this IBARW very important as it's kicking me in my privilege in many ways - I'm also trying to understand my role as an oppressive/occupying force better, because I feel that understanding that will make me a better ally in the end - so the idea of a spectrum is the way it looks to me at the moment, though the thread metaphor is very helpful, thank you.

[imdissertating.livejournal.com]

ooh, well if you haven't already, Kimberle Crenshaw is the foremother of thinking about intersectionality. Her piece is here: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:4_BK-iN7pIQJ:www.wcsap.org/Events/Workshop07/mapping-margins.pdf+kimberle+crenshaw+%2Bmapping+the+margins&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=ca&client=firefox-a

then Patricia Hill Collins has advanced the theory under the term "matrix of domination" or "matrix of oppression"

and then there are wikis here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality_theory

but since then, a lot of feminists have been critical of the intersectionality model, especially when people have used it as an additive framework (ex. gender + class + race + sexual orientation + religion + etc.) or when people start to place identities in a hierarchy, which then lead to the Oppression Olympics (i.e. I'm more oppressed than you because I'm a poor Latina immigrant woman and you're a middle class Black woman born in the U.S.)

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Oooh Ta!

I went over the wikis, but haven't read Crenshaw's piece.

[imdissertating.livejournal.com]

It's pretty great, and accessible, and it's seen as the canonical/original text on intersectionality.