Intersectionality

Intersectionality AWID, 9th International Forum October 5, 2002 Guadalajara, Mexico

Intersectionality • “Understanding and Applying Intersectionality to Confront Globalization” • by Marsha J. Tyson Darling, Ph.D. Adelphi University Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Work to be Done • We have yet to fully analyze and institute anti-discrimination policy and practice re: • the marginalization of women based on layered and multiple identities, • the gendered aspects of racial and ethnic discrimination, • the racialized aspects of gender discrimination, • the sexualized aspects of gender and racial discrimination . Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersectionality: What is it? • Intersectionality is an integrated approach that identifies and analyzes multiple forms of discrimination. • Intersectionality refers to the interaction of two or more forms of discrimination, that compound to form multiple discriminations that manifest as inequalities among women • Intersectionality identifies marginalized women as experiencing multiple forms of visible, and not so visible, interacting discriminations. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersectional Analysis • Intersectional analysis identifies multiple and intersecting factors that are used to create discriminations: race and skin color, caste, age, ethnicity, language, caste, descent, ancestry, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic class, ability, culture. And, intersectional analysis identifies the following groups of people as particularly at risk to experience multiple discriminations - First Nation and other indigenous peoples, migrants, internally displaced people, trafficked persons, refugees, children and those under armed conflict and foreign occupation. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersectional Analysis • Intersectional analysis recognizes that women and girls experience racial/ethnic, sexual, and economic discriminations differently than men and boys. • Intersectional analysis focuses on public and private policies and actions that overlap and act to further discrimination against marginalized communities. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersecting Discriminations Against Women • Certain forms of racial and ethnic discrimination are directed towards women because of their gender. Intersectional discrimination also takes the form of ethnic based targeting of women for explicitly gender and ethnic based physical violence. Consider how little we know about the ethnic and gender violence against Palestinian women and girls under Israeli occupation. • Consider the ethnic and gender based violations of women in Bosnia, Burundi and Rwanda, in which their enslavement, sexual abuse and rape took place while in detention during armed conflict. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Stereotypes of racialized and sexualized women • Also, stereotypes about women as evil seductresses, beliefs about women as property, particularly as extensions of male honor, and beliefs about women’s sexual uncleanliness and unrestrained sexuality, have often been used as a rationale for sexual assault and rape, and for imposing the practice of female genital mutilation. • Sexualizing women in racist and overtly misogynist ways fairly well assures that some members of a dominant group will target women marginalized by discrimination and negative stigma for sexual assault. It also means that assault or violence against marginalized women by marginalized men is often dismissed or excused away. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersecting Discriminations Harm Women • Consider that ethnic and gender based sexual assault and rape also takes place while women are in detention within the state’s criminal justice system. Consider that women of color are the fastest growing prisoner population in the expanding prison industrial manufacturing complex in the United States. Sexual assault that targets racialized women in US prisons is largely invisible. • Consider the racial and gender based sexual assault and rape of migrant, trafficked, refugee and illegal alien women while they are detained by a state’s immigration system. In many countries, sexual violations against women while they are in immigration services custody are largely invisible. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersecting Discriminations Blight Women • Consider the sexual assault and abuse of women workers by their employers in the formal sector, and among women domestic workers, especially those women who are required to live with their employers while employed abroad, and who sometimes have wages due to them withheld. Consider the mistreatment, abuse, assault and deprivations many women migrants and women workers experience at the hands of private parties in many countries. For example, female Filipino foreign domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to abusive employers, as Hong Kong law requires that they leave two weeks after the expiration of their employment contracts. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Compounding Discriminations • It is also important to note that many women, marginalized by discriminatory actions against them, will be unable to affect redress, for they lack access to effective complaint mechanisms because of gender and racial bias in the legal system, and pervasive discrimination against women in the private sphere. We might aptly refer to this interlocking web of discriminations and diminishing, or non-existent recourses, as compounding discriminations. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Culture Refugee Age Religion Indigenous Socio-Econ Language Caste Ability Race Ethnic Hate Racism Trafficked Migrant Intersectionality refers to the interaction of two or more forms of discrimination that compound Homophobia Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Living on the Margins Members of socially dominant groups are at the center where they derive the greatest access to opportunities and state protections; public and private discrimination pushes members of marginalized groups away, to the margins of society, away from available rights. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Women in Marginalized Communities • While all women have been subordinated, First Nation and indigenous women, women of color, racialized women, disabled women, migrant, displaced, trafficked and refugee women, Dalit and Roma women, and lesbian, bisexual and transgender women have been pushed farthest from the center of the circle, that is, farthest from the place where they could expect to be supported and empowered. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Systemic and Systematic Discriminations • Most often, racial and descent discrimination, and cultural discrimination against Roma and Dalit women are accompanied by economic disempowerment and economic discrimination, leading to marginalization. In this way, social inequalities have become entrenched as dominant groups have expended a lot of effort to “justify” their exploitation and exclusion of Roma and Dalit, thereby fusing racial, caste and cultural discriminations with economic marginalization and allegations of the alleged “inferiority” of those being exploited. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Consequences of Discrimination • Over time, not only do many of those in the dominant group act to discriminate against marginalized women and men, thereby establishing privilege for those in the dominant group who do not necessarily themselves act to exclude, marginalize or physically assert racial, caste or cultural stigma onto a victimized group. Such derivative privilege is everywhere evident in our observations about visible entitlements for some that have been derived from longstanding discriminations against victimized and marginalized groups. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Consequences of Discrimination • Members of socially dominant groups: males, white people, heterosexual people, and physically more abled people, might not themselves practice discrimination against victimized people in order to derive access to opportunities. But their access to opportunities has been made easier by a legacy of discrimination that has stymied or eclipsed access, opportunities and rights for marginalized “others.” Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Gender and Racial Discriminations Join • If the prevailing conceptual framework we use to examine rights and deprivations views gender discrimination and racial discrimination as mutually exclusive problems, then other forms of intersectional discrimination, can and often does escape scrutiny, and hence, intervention. Consider the odious trafficking of girls and women, which is very often too narrowly viewed only within the context of gender discrimination. Girls and women enter trafficking networks because the racial and social stratification and discrimination that marginalizes them, renders them far more vulnerable to racial, sexual and descent based discriminatory treatment in being targeted by traffickers. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Gender and Racial Discriminations Join • Consider also the racial and ethnic and gender dimensions of the coerced or non-consensual sterilization of women belonging to certain racial or ethnic groups. Notice here that an intersectional analysis keeps our attention on the ramifications of compounding discriminations, namely, the denial of reproductive rights for certain indigenous and marginalized women -- the surgical sterilization of American Indian, Puerto Rican, Black American and Peruvian women, and the Quinacrine, non-surgical sterilizations of Vietnamese, Indian, and Latina women in Chile. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Structural Discrimination • Intersectional discrimination is also class or economic based. Consider that the impact of cuts in government spending on basic social services falls disproportionately on women living in poor households who remain responsible for their usual family responsibilities while having to compensate to fulfill those services now removed by economic restructuring. In such situations, austere structural adjustment policies and welfare reform policies exert a heavy burden on already poor women, as they now strain to met their families needs in a systemic context in which they are already denied access and many opportunities. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Identity Based Discrimination • In the context of identity based discrimination and women’s layered identities, intersectional discrimination against women also occurs when women’s sexuality is narrowly defined. In terms of our sexuality, all people have a sexual orientation, defined as sexual attraction to people of one’s same sex, or people of the opposite sex, or people of both sexes. Sexuality is always “gendered” and “raced,” as such, racial, ethnic and gender based beliefs, assumptions, stereotypes and discriminations shape attitudes about women’s sexual orientations. Since sexuality is “policed” and controlled by exclusionary beliefs in many of the world’s communities, heterosexual women are granted preferential treatment and lesbian and bisexual women, and transgender persons are marginalized and discriminated against by punitive, human and rights withholding laws, social policies and institutional as well as private practices. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

What Ought We Do? • As advocates for women’s rights, we must challenge the received paradigm whereby access to the exercise of rights are constructed oppositionally. That means breaking with and transcending using privilege as a tool to advance oppositional constructions of women’s worthiness. The limiting paradigm that we have inherited and that must be challenged calls for us to acknowledge and grapple with the fact that one of globalization’s main tenets is that some women’s privilege is accrued and held in place by other women’s subordination and marginalization. Dualistic oppositions have encouraged us to think that one person’s rights come at another person’s expense. Viewed in this way, development is easily all about who can establish and maintain competitive disadvantage over others. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Practical and Structural Change • How is a transformative, global women’s movement based on the goal of the equality and the exercise of human rights for all women possible in this context? Will women privileged by other women’s exploitation and marginalization act to resist advocating for the rights of marginalized women? Will ideological constructions obstruct rather than facilitate? These are some of the questions I urge you to explore at this forum, as these questions touch on some of the womens movement’s central challenges as we look to re-invent globalization. We will need deep analysis and some soul searching about how to practically and structurally challenge and transform the prevailing development and rights paradigms to halt and reverse the intensification of the gap between some women’s privileges and other women’s impoverishment and deprivations, between some women’s access to the exercise of rights, and other women’s further disempowerment. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Re-inventing Globalization • This is no small order of business. Re-inventing globalization means strengthening a rights and equity-based approach to intervening in and healing multiple discriminations. Also, we need to create and articulate more humanly interdependent boundaries that formulate new policies and advocacy agendas, particularly, as it relates to urging states to take greater responsibility for collecting, analyzing, disseminating and using disaggregated data based on an intersectional approach. Also, the United Nations system, including special rapporteurs, women’ rights groups, state institutions and agencies, and international financial institutions should develop personnel training and educational outreach using an intersectional approach, especially for those framing and implementing policies. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Re-inventing Globalization • Re-inventing globalization is also about our being vigilant about issues like our consumption of global resources and global stewardship, and of course, since the use of technology in globalization now threatens the survival of biodiversity in many places on the planet, re-inventing globalization will mean informing and mobilizing ourselves about emerging threats to biodiversity. In this vein, I am suggesting that we often define a gender analysis too narrowly. While examining the links that connect gender issues with environmental, technological, governance, and trade issues is not a new emphasis, let me suggest that globalization’s reach into civil society, and hence into women’s lives, now requires us to explore the inter-relatedness of these important and intersecting issues. Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Concluding Challenges • In conclusion, to re-invent globalization is identify, challenge and right the specific discriminations that function to marginalize and stigmatize so many women and girls. That means rebuffing attempts by the perpetrators of abuse to hide behind a “cultural defense” for public or private discriminations against women and girls. We must challenge deeply troubling and long views utilitarian views of those who are different, namely, that they are meek and deserving of exploitation. In addition, we must challenge the notion that the privileges that those in dominant social groups possess must be left unexamined, particularly, when those privileges have been made all the more possible because of other women’s exclusion and marginalization. And, of course, we must continue to challenge the privileges patriarchy confers on nearly all men, no matter the culture, simply because they are born male. We simply must author a new script by raising the human rights bar for marginalized women and girls. Will be available at: www.awid.org Email:darling@adelphi.edu

Intersectionality