(FEM3) Interrogating Feminist Intersectionality in Theory, Research, and Praxis

This session critically engages with the concept and practice of intersectionality as an academic and political project. In seeking to understand its intellectual and activist origins, co-optations, and continuing relevance, the session poses the following questions: How is intersectionality articulated and applied today, what does it offer? How do analyses and action that are intersectional transform and expand feminist and sociological projects? Can intersectional frameworks account for complex identities and social locations without privileging particular oppressions or statuses of social stratification? Is it helpful to supplement intersectional analysis with other frameworks (e.g. queer theory, crip theory)? What is the role of intersectional research in challenging Whiteness, carceral/militarized state violence, sexual and gender-based violence, and other multidimensional oppressions? What strategies does intersectionality bring to address inequality and advance inclusiveness? How does intersectionality shape coalition and solidarity building strategies? What can intersectionality contribute to both social justice struggles and to productive world-making and joy producing practices? Tags: Féminisme, Théorie

Organizers: Sonia D'Angelo, York University, Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Saint Mary’s University, Ronnie Joy Leah, Athabasca University; Chairs: Jane Ku, University of Windsor, Ronnie Joy Leah, Athabasca University

Presentations

Kaylan Schwarz, University of Lethbridge; Claudia Mitchell, McGill University; Rebekah Hutten, McGill University

"Intersectionality is really important to me": Young feminists' engagement with theory and praxis

Our research explores the complex and multifaceted nature of feminist identification among young people. Our study included 24 self-identified feminists enrolled in women’s studies or gender-themed courses at two postsecondary institutions in Montreal. The study involved two data collection phases. In phase one, we invited participants to an individual object elicitation interview, a data collection technique similar to show-and-tell. Here, we asked participants to select and bring along objects that represented their identity as a feminist. In phase two, we invited the same participants to group-based participatory data analysis sessions. Here, we asked participants to identify themes among their own and others’ objects, and to respond to the research team’s initial interpretations of the dataset. Given the continued necessity for physical distancing due to COVID-19, both study phases were conducted through a video call. When articulating their relationships to feminism, participants consciously avoided monolithic portrayals. Participants explained and expressed their feminism in reference to multiple academic discourses and theories, including queer theory, ecofeminism, disability justice, standpoint theory, postcolonial theory, Afrofuturism, and gender constructivism. However, participants spoke most frequently about the importance they invested into intersectionality and made explicit and implicit remarks about intersectionality when describing the objects they chose to share. They characterized intersectionality as a lens, guiding principle, and politic that meaningfully shaped how they perceived themselves and others around them (citing lived experiences of sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism). They also utilized intersectionality as a strategic resource to critique and distance themselves from other forms of feminism, including “white feminism,” “girl boss” feminism, and “terf-y” feminism. This presentation directly relates to the session theme, in that it empirically illustrates the intellectual and everyday “co-optations, and continuing relevance” of intersectionality as a concept and a practice. We also reflect on the broader significance of intersectionality and consider the ways it circulates through academic discourse and popular culture.

Valérie Grand'Maison, University of Guelph

Feminist Disability Advocacy in Canada: Participatory Democracy and the Politics of Invisibility

Born out of the exclusions feminist disability activists experienced from both the Canadian feminist and disability movements, the feminist disability movement has adopted a more or less explicit intersectional approach throughout its 40 year history to address issues faced by women and girls with disabilities. Yet little recent scholarship exists on their strategies, decision-making processes, and challenges. This paper examines how a Canadian feminist disability organization has engaged with interlocking structures of oppression and privilege in its advocacy against gendered violence. Drawing on the elements of the active solidarity framework elaborated by Einwohner et al. (2019), I trace dynamics of representation, recognition, and participation of diverse women with disabilities in the organization’s antiviolence efforts. I conducted a document review and semi-structured interviews with key informants to identify how differences among women and women with disabilities are made to matter in the organization’s decision-making, organizational structure, materials, leadership, opportunities for dissent, strategies, relationships. Findings indicate that, from its beginning, the feminist disability movement in Canada is deeply committed to processes of participatory democracy, where women with disabilities across the country are meaningfully involved in every step of the advocacy. However, resisting the invisibility of women with disabilities in antiviolence activism and policy-making in the context of limited government funding, feminist disability advocacy reproduces dynamics of erasure and exclusion that sustain violence against specific group of women. This paper contributes to articulating how intersectionality is practiced in Canadian civil society and theoretically expands on framework that seek to analyze its application.

Jesse Henstridge-Goudie, Memorial University

Intersectional Analysis in Quantitative Research: Analyzing Sex/Gender/Sexuality Based Discrimination Before and During Covid-19

Research has shown the covid-19 pandemic had a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ2 individuals, females, and visible minorities in terms of health outcomes, job insecurity, and increased discrimination. Intersectionality, an approach that involves considering the unique experiences of those who exist on multiple axes of power structures and oppression, is a framework that is often considered in qualitative work, but less so in quantitative research. Considering this, i ask the following research questions: first, did discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity increase during the covid-19 pandemic? And second, how did having multiple marginalized identities affect reported rates of discrimination? In answering these questions, i used the dataset “experiences of discrimination from statistics Canada’s crowdsourced survey “impacts of the covid-19 on Canadians” (icc), with data from 36674 individuals collected from august 4th to 24th, 2020, and focused on reported discrimination on the basis of sex, sexuality, or gender identity/expression. To operationalize intersectionality in this analysis, i created a variable called “intersect” with eight possible categories for each combination of factors of interest. Intersect was then used as a focal independent variable, with discrimination before and after covid-19 as dependent variables. I also controlled for respondents’ socio-economic and demographic characteristics. Descriptive (frequency tables, crosstabs) and multivariate analyses (binary logistic regression) were used. Results from the initial univariate analysis of the dependent variables showed a 13.7% decrease in the number of people who reported discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity/expression during covid-19 compared to before covid-19. Bivariate analyses showed that before covid, 54.8% of people who identified as LGBTQ2 reported discrimination on the basis of sex/sexual orientation/gender identity compared to only 19.9% of straight people. During covid 27.6% of LGBTQ2 respondents reported discrimination and 7.9% of non LGBTQ2 reported experiencing discrimination. Before covid, a higher percentage of females reported discrimination; 29.7% compared to 9.7% of males. During covid this dropped to 12.3% of females and 5% of males. Further, visible minorities were less likely to report discrimination on this basis than those who were not visible minorities. However, this analysis did not address if the chance of experiencing discrimination was higher for individuals who fit into multiple of these categories at once, or whether being LGBTQ2 or female was a greater indicator of if someone was likely to experience discrimination. Therefore, i used the intersect variable which allowed me to do a more in-depth analysis of each of these categories by considering their intersections. Results showed that before and during covid-19, LGBTQ2 females who were not visible minorities reported the highest percentages and odds of experiencing discrimination. Compared to LGBTQ2 males who are visible minorities, non-LGBTQ2 females who are not visible minorities were 48% less likely to experience discrimination. Meanwhile LGBTQ females who are not visible minorities were 2.4 times more likely to experience discrimination. This clearly shows LGBTQ2 identity is the largest indicator of if someone was likely to report discrimination, and this likelihood was increased for LGBTQ2 females; with LGBTQ2, female, non-visible minorities as the most likely to report. These results go against what dominant literature and empirical studies tell us about how discrimination was experienced during the covid-19 pandemic. Possible reasons for this could be the timing of the survey (2020), as people had not yet felt the full ramifications of covid at this point. Focus on increased racial discrimination during this time and the rationalization of harassment may explain why visible minorities are less likely to report sex, sexuality, or gender-based discrimination. Further, this study demonstrates the methodological value of creating variables that capture multiple intersecting identities instead of those that attempt a siloed analysis of these marginalized identities. These results also show the need for increased research into this particular time period in Canada, and its effect on individuals with marginalized identities.

Lucely Ginani Bordon, York University

Social Reproduction Theory versus Intersectionality: Towards a unitary theory of capitalist social relations

This paper will argue that what separates Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) from Intersectionality theory is the absence of an ontological theoretical explanation for the structural relationship between intersecting independent systems and the causes of this intersection. Although many Intersectionality theories have insisted upon the co-constitution of social relations, they lack the dialectical understanding of totality. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze how the SRT allows us to identify the organizational logic of these intersections through the Marxian category of totality and propose a unity between relations of exploitation and oppression. The commitment of SRT, as a unitary theory of social reproduction that recovers Marx’s conception of totality, is to interpret social relations of gender, race or sexuality as concrete moments of the articulated, complex and contradictory totality that is contemporary capitalism. Intersectionality has been the most influential approach, especially among emerging Black feminisms in the 1990s, that sought to develop an integrative theory of multiple social oppressions. Gender, race, and class are commonly explained within this theoretical framework as static, autonomous, and preexisting relations that intersect within an abstract social field. In this sense, because they are autonomous parts, their interactions occur externally. Therefore, when they intersect, they affect each other and create a new reality - hence the notion of systems that add up. Nevertheless, still, these perspectives suffer from a foundational ontological atomism: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, intersect (McNally, 2017, p. 96). McNally (2017, p. 99) criticizes the inability of intersectional theorists to extract some kind of order or social system from these parts. Consequently, they are not able to explain why independently constituted axes of oppression would come into contact or why, when they interact, an ordered pattern of oppression emerges rather than random chaos. This approach fails to explain the social logic of the relationship between oppressions and the social totality they integrate (Ferguson, 2016, p. 44). By not exploring an internal relationship between partial relations and social totality, this theoretical field fails to return these abstract categories to the disordered-but-unified realm of experience. It considers a fragmented experience of social being, as if differences were experienced separately (Ferguson, 2016, p. 45). As Himani Bannerji (2020, p. 5-6) points out, the social experience is not lived as an intersectionality because one’s own sense of being in the world cannot be perceived fragmentally. Therefore, SRT demonstrates first that the racialized and gendered form that reality presents is neither an accident nor its finished and complete form, and second that the tools for understanding this reality can neither reject the empirical facts nor consist of a simple amalgamation of them (Bhattacharya, 2017, pp. 15-6). In the dialectical method, social relations would not need to be intersected because each is already within the other, co-constituting each other in their very essence (McNally, 2017, p. 107). SRT, therefore, understands capitalism as a social relation composed of a contradictory totality of relations of exploitation, alienation, and domination, which cannot be conceived as purely accidental and contingent intersections (Arruzza, 2014). In other words, racial oppression and gender oppression are not understood as autonomous systems apart from capitalism but as moments of capitalist totality. Theorists who propose a unitary theory do not understand patriarchy as a system or mode of production that has its own rules and mechanisms that reproduce autonomously, and neither do they understand capitalism as a set of purely economic laws. The significance of this unitary theorization is to reject fragmentary views that reduce relations of oppression to gender and race and relations of exploitation to class.