#intersectionality fail

[cardassiangoodreads]

I had a realization today on the more hellish of the blue hellsites (Twitter) that one of the most annoying misuses of “intersectionality” is to believe that discussions of certain oppressions on their own (e.g. misogyny) are inherently “non-intersectional” and discussions of others (e.g. disability) are inherently “intersectional.” And this is bad in both directions, more severely in the case of the first: It makes it seem lesser, creates attitudes like people thinking that misogyny is an inferior “add-on” oppression and that white women aren’t really oppressed, leading to, among other things, not understanding how essential to women’s full equality legal abortion is, and ignoring the way that militant misogyny led to the larger militant far-right using the same playbook and seeing it go unchecked for decades. 

But in the other direction, it makes it a lot easier for people claiming the second type of oppression to claim “intersectionality” when really they’re the ones derailing, they’re the ones showing a failure of empathy by insisting on making every conversation on how it affects them personally. They’re the ones actually not being intersectional, but are given a free pass because people just assume that something they haven’t heard of before = “intersectional.” 

And this is (as y’all know if you’ve read this blog before) a huge issue I have with a lot of current disability discourse that comes from people like me, white educated middle-to-upper-class Western people with relatively “invisible” disabilities. It becomes more about a way to understand themselves personally as “oppressed,” than really addressing the multiplicity and varying gravities of need among the very diverse group of people we now understand as “disabled.” (So to be clear, I’m not saying EVERY “hey what about disabled people” is an example of this. Sometimes it really is necessary! But there’s a particular way that some people get into anti-oppression politics more as a way to feel special themselves than anything else, and that’s obvious in how they talk about it. If you’ve been on the progressive Internet long enough I’m sure you know what I mean here.)

I think this also contributes to brain worms like how many people on the left are susceptible to the “””disability rights””” framing of anti-abortion arguments. Like there’s just this assumption that since abortion is a white ladies’ issue (which is not true lol, except that it does also affect white women because all women are oppressed by misogyny) it naturally needs some kind of “challenge” from another framework, and that one coming from a marginalized group that has been part of the “online social justice” conversation for not as long is inherently good. So people shut off their brains and fail to consider if the actual argument has any merit, and isn’t just people projecting their own self-centered nonsense, caring more about the rights of hypothetical future disabled “people” (because they see them as representation of their mothers possibly aborting them) than real living pregnant women.

[deadbilly]

That certainly is a loaded statement...

[cardassiangoodreads]

It actually kind of makes me mad how much “disability” is used on this website by privileged weirdos (and also WEIRDos) who clearly have never had to deal with so much as filing a request for work or school accommodations, much less an actual literal physical barrier to entry* somewhere, to delegitimize and shut down arguments on other social justice issues. I don’t even want to say “particularly X” because I’ve seen this used everywhere and against every other marginalized group: concerns about hypothetical PTSD sufferers who can’t stand seeing gay couples kiss at Pride; “sensory issues” that somehow specifically affect having poor and homeless people and POC share public spaces with them.... And now, not only making certain reasons for getting an abortion a “disability rights” issue when the only person with any actual rights is the one who is pregnant, but shutting down policy conversations on abortion over, again, hypothetical PTSD sufferers. It’s probably not long before this becomes disabled-on-disabled discourse, like someone with vague “sensory issues” claiming to be upset by the presence of someone with Tourette’s or an autistic person’s flapping. Arguably it already is, given how often the kind of “homeless people” argued about have their own disabilities or addictions.

Meanwhile, we have an Education Secretary in the U.S. who is doing everything in her power to force disabled kids out of school. The Americans With Disabilities Act is under assault by this administration, as is the Affordable Care Act repeatedly by Republicans in Congress... something that disability rights activists are risking life and limb to protest in Washington. As for abortion, there are lots of pregnant people who get abortions because of their own disabilities, because of the effects pregnancy has on their disabled bodies and brains, who are completely left out of this “disability” abortion conversation. These are real-world issues with real-world consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods outside of The Discourse. This is true even for people with sensory issues! Real sensory issues, like sensitivity to sudden loud noises and bright flashing lights, are a legitimate physical barrier of entry to people in places, in ways that go beyond/can be addressed without accommodating any prejudices they might have against other people on the margins of society.

But on Tumblr, you’d get the sense that “disability” is nothing but an argument dodge from the very most privileged people in that community. (When they are in the first place, given how often it’s used as a hypothetical by non-disabled people, or those claiming vague collections of “symptoms” that don’t fit any real-world diagnosis.) It makes that much harder for people with actual problems and involved in real-world disability activism to advocate for themselves on here and be taken seriously.

(*this doesn’t only affect physical disabilities if someone thinks that’s what I’m saying, ftr)

[cardassiangoodreads]

That person blocked me (because having perspectives and experiences that don’t align with theirs, and illuminating them to help them be more inclusive, makes me mean and lesbophobic, I guess) but it’s really funny when people tell me my idea of intersectionality is wrong who define it as literally the idea that intersectionality was designed to combat.

The idea that oppressions are isolated things that don’t intersect with each other is wrong. The idea that “oh they’re black but they still have privilege over me with gender/sex stuff because men!” is not intersectionality. The idea that you can separate them out that way and they’re not all intertwined is not it and why the heck do you think it’s called intersectionality...

[cardassiangoodreads]

I’m not a huge fan of the “men are evil and scary and bad and constantly out to hurt you!” stuff in online feminism, especially since personally, after years of it, it’s made me unnecessarily scared of dating men or encounters with men I don’t know in a way that does not hold up with my experience with them. (Maybe it does for some, even a lot of women! But it does not for me, and it’s had an effect that has reinforced, rather than subverted, my sexist oppression. So fuck that.)

But on top of that, there is rarely, if ever, any attempt to unpack which men women, especially white women, tend to picture when you talk about “evil and scary and bad” straight men. If anything, that race-blind “men are bad!” bullshit in online feminism has furthered the idea that I should think of black and Latino men as evil and scary, given me excuses for it, etc. to a degree that didn’t exist before I got involved in online “social justice.” I fucking hate that. I fucking hate that I don’t know where to find the tools for unpacking that. SJ should help with that, but it does the opposite. 

This is not an invitation to just modify it to “white men are evil and scary and bad and constantly out to hurt you!” because this whole line of thought is counterproductive. But if you’re at least not considering race as a factor when scaring women about men, when acting like straight male sexuality is inherently toxic and violent, then you’re practicing White Feminism and should not be surprised when WOC feel alienated from that rhetoric. And making it about being queer or whatever doesn’t change that. This isn’t even just one isolated Tumblry trend: this has been a consistent problem in online feminism/SJ since I got involved with it in the mid-2000s, and I’m sick of it. If you support Black Lives Matter, you need to help unpack and destroy the ideas that contribute to it, especially our societal idea of black people as more predatory and violent than other people. This bullshit does the opposite.

[demuresamurai]

This is for the white girl who told me this week that “Angelina Jolie is just kind of feminist we need right now.” “…black women suffer from the medical world’s widespread racial biases. A large-scale Johns Hopkins study found that many healthcare providers unconsciously prefer white patients, leading them to neglect black patients, offer them fewer treatment options than whites, and even prescribe them fewer painkillers. Angelina Jolie’s story may be encouraging to other women with BRCA gene flaws, but, as a white celebrity, her medical reality is completely foreign to black women in the same position.”

[sagittairy]

This is to a white man’s dollar, black and Latino men also make less than 77 cents on the dollar. Saying “To a man's dollar" reinforces white men as the norm.

[birdsy-purplefishes]

"Fear-based feminism is all about attacking individuals, not intersecting structures of oppression. “Kick up, not down.” Just as long as you’re kicking someone, and as long as the person being kicked isn’t you. As long as you are the one saying “STFU” and “sit down” and “cis white feminist tears” and shaking your damn head at someone else’s supreme ignorance. As long as you are not creating (because you might create the wrong thing!). As long as you are knocking down."

-glosswitch, on SWERFs, TERFs and Good Girls