SOC 1000: Week 10 - Intersectionality

Housekeeping & Assignment 2

The instructor acknowledges everyone for attending the lecture, whether in person or online.

There was a typo regarding the assignment due date; it has been adjusted to give students an extra week, from the 30th to the 6th. Similar to the first writing task, students will have to answer two questions out of three options. The questions will be available earlier, to give more time to think about them.

There will also be a quiz available at the same time as the writing task questions, with a one-week window to complete it. The quiz is timed; students will have 35 minutes to complete it once they start. More details about the quiz questions will be provided next week.

Despite the extended time, experience suggests many students will still complete the assignment last minute. Students with questions can ask during the break or after the lecture.

Recap: Identity & Intersectionality

The lecture connects to the previous week's discussion on identity, which emerged from the broader topic of culture. This includes the idea of how things change with respect to identity, such as gender.

Identity is linked with uniqueness and distinction; identifying something requires comparing it to something else. This relates to intersectionality and the idea of needs, both material and social. Diversity is tied to equality. The first point about diversity is the equal recognition of all differences. Everyone has different ideas and dreams.

The second step involves articulating these ideas. Individuals should have the equal right to articulate their social needs and bring them into public debate, whether on a micro or macro scale. This can involve changing consumption habits, joining social movements, or running for office.

The third step involves allocating limited resources to fulfill these diverse ideas and dreams. This requires decision-making processes and rules to determine how resources are distributed.

The element that connects these three ideas is the different types of equality. Social needs can come from various sources and be based on identity markers such as age, gender, race, sexuality, and class. These factors influence levels of equality. Intersectional sociology examines how these factors intersect and influence equality or inequality.

Historical Examples of Intersecting Inequalities

Obama's presidency and voting rights: Obama's election as the first black president was a milestone, but the struggle for voting rights for African Americans in 1965 shows a history of intersecting inequalities.
Aged care in Australia: Problems in aged care reveal an intersection between age and society, where the social needs of the elderly are sometimes exploited for profit.
Incarceration of Indigenous people: The high rates of incarceration and deaths in custody among Indigenous people highlight intersecting issues of political and economic power, as well as race. The case of Ms. Dhu, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who died in custody, exemplifies these issues.
Brittany Higgins case: The case of Brittany Higgins, involving sexual abuse in the Australian Parliament, raises questions about the protection of women in the workplace and the intersecting factors that contribute to such incidents.
George Floyd: The killing of George Floyd during an arrest in 2020, and the race-motivated police violence and the connections between crime, poverty, and race.
Julia Gillard's speech on misogyny: Julia Gillard's speech on misogyny highlights the intersecting factors of gender, political role, and misogynistic attacks.

These examples can be better understood through the lens of intersections rather than single explanations.

The discussion then connects to the idea of differentiation and integration. Identity markers such as race, gender, class, age, ability/disability, and sexuality can be differentiated, but the question is how they integrate or intersect, leading to lines of difference in society.

Defining & Critiquing "Isms"

Intersectionality can be defined as simultaneously critiquing "isms" such as racism, sexism, and capitalism. These systems overlap and interlock, potentially leading to systems of exploitation, oppression, and violence. Intersectional sociology seeks solutions to these problems, recognizing that they are often modern problems related to capitalism and colonialism.

Examples include the gender pay gap and the over-representation of migrants in the gig economy. These issues involve overlapping factors of race, capitalism, and gender.

Influential Figures in Intersectional Sociology

Two influential figures in intersectional sociology are Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Patricia Hill Collins: Collins emphasizes that intersectionality came of age during a period of immense social change in the 20th century, including anti-colonial struggles, global women's movements, civil rights movements, and the end of apartheid. She argues that seeing social problems caused by colonialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism as interconnected provides a new vantage point for social change.
Kimberlé Crenshaw: Crenshaw explains intersectionality in reference to education, examining how factors such as gender, race, age, and socioeconomic status influence educational outcomes.

Race & Racism

Racism is often associated with biological differences, but scientific evidence shows that DNA is 99.9% similar across racial groups. The concept of race is a social construct used to create differences and justify domination, oppression, and exploitation.

Racism is a normative concept embedded in culture, used to create racial and ethnic differences based on social inventions. A racist is someone whose words or actions display prejudice or discrimination based on racist norms, attitudes, and values.

Sex & Sexism

Sex is biological, while gender is a social definition. Gender is a socially negotiated and defined scale, related to social needs and recognition. The social aspect of gender often causes problems. Casual sexism, like casual racism, involves everyday remarks or jokes that express stereotypes and can lead to discrimination.

Isms can combine and intersect to create structural inequalities, such as a labor market that allows for a gender pay gap or a race pay gap. These inequalities reproduce themselves.

Other terms related to intersectionality include colonization, decolonization, Eurocentrism, and Introcentrism. Eurocentrism is the idea that white European men are the source of all great ideas, while Introcentrism focuses on European men as inventors. Decolonization involves giving equal weight to opinions from across the world.

Historical Figures in Social Science

Harriet Martineau: Often referred to as the first female sociologist or an early feminist. She translated Auguste Comte's work and wrote about empirical social research. She did work in the areas of slavery, women's rights, and political economy. She observed America and found that the treatment of women was comparable to slavery. However, she was not opposed to colonialism. Also there exist questions as to whether she was trying to be more successful by pretending to be someone else other than who she was since she was deaf and used a pseudonym.
José Rizal: A national hero in the Philippines who was a doctor and activist against colonial oppression. He wrote about work ethic from a non-European perspective, challenging the idea that Filipinos were lazy.
Pauli Murray: Murray made a statement that an African American woman's greatest achievement was that she'd survived. She lived between 1910 and 1985 and was a transgender person, a lawyer, and a women's rights activist. She was a graduate from Howard Law school in 1944 and founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. She was also the founder of Women's Theology. She also became the first black female priest of the Episcopal Church in 1977. Murray was dealing with laws about segregation in the US and that this was the root of racism. She highlighted for there to exist a double discrimination of a black female called Jane Crow.
W. E. B. Du Bois: He discussed what it felt to be a problem in that, no one knew what to say so rather than facing an issue it got tiptoed around. He discussed that one must not silence the discrimination or the racism, but rather address it. His father was black and of French ancestry. He went to Fisk University then became the first African American to graduate from Harvard as far as is known. He later moved to Ghana in 1961. He also established the first American School of Sociology at Atlanta University. He proposed that wealth was Eurocentric and only achieved at someone else's disadvantage. He proposed that the achievements of modernity is commonly based on the disadvantage of someone else which he called racialized modernity. He discusses concepts like class, that there may be inequality, but about the inequality about the colonization. He then discusses the concept of the veil, a membrane a see-through wall that keeps white people from understanding where black people come from. He then discusses that the colorline can be any line that divides and socially separate different people. There is also what is called double consciousness and how that impacts someone to self-perceivably think that they're less than someone from a different people. Then it gets wrapped with the concept of colorblindness where it becomes a false sense of equal opportunity, by showing different highly successful cases to give the example that anyone can do it.

The Four People

The presentation goes through all four of the individuals discussed previously. They each had their own set of great things that they accomplished and each of them still had various different ways of showing discrimination. They go against Eurocentrism, anthro centrism, and colonialism. The common thing between all the people is the interlocking of the different systems and how they all experience them and study them to ultimately make things a little more equal.

Intersectionality Summary

Intersectional sociology examines the social consequences of interlocking systems and isms at the macro, meso, and micro levels. It is not just about identifying differences but about meeting at the intersection to negotiate social needs. Bringing in the names that haven't been heard a whole lot will ultimately help make things a little more equal for everybody.