Much ink is being written about the word “intersectionality”.
It sounds like a barbaric word like that but it is a concept that allows us to analyze how discriminations combine by creating specific situations, a kind of magnifying glass that allows us to see the world in multi-dimensions. , rather than under a single bias.
Arabic + disabled = more than an addition
The experience of black women, for example, is not the simple addition of the sexism experienced by white women and the racism experienced by black men.
Moreover, a disabled Arab man will not necessarily suffer exactly the same prejudices as a valid Arab man, and a disabled white man.
Arab men are traditionally stereotyped with violence.
And disabled men have a stereotype of weakness.
The handicap of an Arab person can therefore sometimes attenuate the most virulent racist attacks.
Hamou Bouakkaz, former elected in Paris explains that being disabled had made "forget" that he was Arab *.
Kimberlé Crenshaw and the crash metaphor at a crossroads
The word intersectionality was born under the pen of Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law, in an article of 1989. In this text, the lawyer is interested in black women, and wants to show that justice does not take into account their specific case. It is based in particular on a lawsuit against the car manufacturer General Motors, which refused to employ black women before 1964. In the 1970s, the firm dismissed the black women it had recruited, arguing of their low seniority. These women file a complaint, but the courts reject them, explaining that they must file a complaint as women, or as black people, but that they cannot argue from a combination of the two. Yet it was good as black women that they were discriminated against.
To illustrate this blindness, Kimberlé Crenshaw uses a metaphor, that of a car accident at a crossroads.
Imagine that several cars collide with each other at a crossroads, and that care is refused to a victim struck by several cars, on the pretext that we cannot identify which car struck it.
This is exactly what is happening for these black women confronted with American justice, or closer to us, for veiled women who have applied to the European Court of Human Rights.
A tool of political struggle
The central idea of intersectionality is that you have to start from people's experience, rather than tackling big theories that don't work for everyone.
It is a theory of "located knowledge", where the minority experience instead of being a handicap becomes a privilege of knowledge.
But intersectionality is also a tool of political struggle, within movements such as
black feminism
, in the United States, and Afro-feminism, in France, which are responses to a majority feminism built around experience. of its most privileged representatives.
Reviews not always honest
Intersectionality is the subject of critics, who, let's say it, seem to have rarely read Crenshaw's text.
Among the more honest critics are people like Thomas Chatterton Williams.
For this essayist, it is not so much the concept itself that is in question, but its use, sometimes excluding.
Or the idea that “if you are not a black woman yourself, you cannot understand black women”.
We also find in these critiques the feminist Martine Storti, who recognizes the interest of the concept, but regrets in her latest book that it has been transformed "into a tool of summons, injunction and disqualification".
The problem with a concept is that it often escapes its author.
In any case, Crenshaw's aim was clearly not to divide and divide, but on the contrary to include more people, so that more people could identify with the proposed model of justice.
* Intruders in politics. Women and minorities: domination and resistance, by Mathilde Larrère and Aude Lorriaux (éditions du Détour)
Culture
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Sources for this article
- Kimberle Crenshaw,
Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.
University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol.
1989: Iss.
1, Article 8
.
- She Coined the Term 'Intersectionality' Over 30 Years Ago. Here's What It Means to Her Today,
interview with Kimberle Crenshaw in
Time
, February 20, 2020.
- Intruders in politics. Women and minorities: domination and resistance.
Mathilde Larrère & Aude Lorriaux.
Editions du Détour, 2017.
- Thomas Chatterton Williams
: "We must defend the right to offend, to say things that are not in unison with the new consensus"
, article in
Charlie Hebd
o
, by Laure Daussy, February 17, 2021.
- For a universal feminism
, by Martine Storti, Seuil, 2020.
-
Introduction to gender studies
, Laure Bereni, Sébastien Chauvin, Alexandre Jaunait, Anne Revillard, chapter 6 “Intersections”, Paris, De Boeck Supérieur, 2020.
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