Intersectionality

  • Intersectionality is a framework for understanding the complexities of lived experiences and outcomes by considering the combined effects of intersecting identities.

  • Crenshaw: The Urgency of Intersectionality:

  • Argues that a single axis framework for understanding privilege/oppression does not capture the complexity of social inequalities and life experiences.

  • Ex: Antidiscrimination laws that focus either on race or gender overlook combined effects of racism and sexism in the workplace/labor market.

  • Intersectionality is NOT just about having a collection of identities; it's about structural vulnerability (risk of material harm) and structural privilege.

Transgender People of color and risk

  • A human rights campaign and Trans people of color Coalition study estimates trans women face 4.4 times more risk of being murdered compared to cisgender women in the U.S. and at least 8% of trans people who have been murdered in the US are people of color

  • In 2024, 78% of murdered transgender people of color; 56% were black trans women,(Human Rights Campaign Report 2024)

  • Cisgender= when your gender identity aligns with birth sex/sex you were assigned at birth

Combated River Collective Statement (1977)

  • Black feminist Polititical statement that uses lens of intersectionality to:

    • Address racism and classism within white women dominated feminist Movement

    • Address patriarchy and homophobia within Black Power Movement and Civil Rights Movements

  • “We also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

  • Locate Black women as nexus of liberation from all marginalized people

    • Center multiplying marginalized groups to avoid “trickle down” approach to social justice

What is gender?

  • Gender;describes how societies determine and manage sex categories; the cultural meanings attached to men and women’s roles; and how individuals understand their identities, but not limited to, being a man, women, transgender, intersex, nonbinary, etc

    • Sex: the biological traits that societies use to assign people into the category of either male or female

  • Gender Binary:

    • Dichotomy in which male and female female, man and women, are constantly and binaries ranked, both in relationship to and against each other.

    • Conflates sex characteristics with social gender roles

    • Men associated with masculinity and women associated with femininity

      • These traits largely mistaken as the result of biology, not socialization. Like other binaries, the gender functions to reinforce and justify existing inequalities

Heteronormativity

  • Heteronormativity

    • Presumption and privilege if gender infirmity and heterosexuality

    • Assumes gender binary and heterosexuality as normal and natural; embedded within norms and social institutions (relationships rituals, marriage,child rearing, public spaces, sports, health care system, schools,etc

The gender binary as a colonial import

  • People around the world, including in Africa, have long lived outside the Western gender binary system. European colonization imposed a binary gender system across the globe

-Muxe (Zapotecs)

-two spirt (north American Indidgenous tribes)

-Mahu (native Hawaiian)

-Hijra(Indian)

-Yoruba (west Africa)-no concept of gender pre colonization

  • Those who did not conform to western binary were forcibly assimilated into western gender as a tactic of coloization.

Gender and whiteness

  • Turn of the century Eugenics encourage a binary gender system defined by reproductive sex and highly defined social roles for men and women

  • Idea tat societies progressed from “savagery” toward “civilization”m physical and social distinctions between men and women increased.

  • White people viewed as constantly evolving toward becoming the ultimate civilization (Schuller)

  • White people viewed as constantly evolving toward becoming the ultimate ci