First off, intersectionality can look something like this:
It demonstrates that if you're a woman, the poorer you are the more likely you are to be obese as compared to men (there are problems with using the Body Mass Index as a measure, but we'll leave that for another occasion). What you have here then is the intersection of two durable patterns of social division - gender and class - that produces a certain health-related outcome. Digging into this to find out what's going on means analysing how relationships characterised by class and gender intermesh and are performed/lived in the context of everyday life. Typically, while intersectional analysis is used to understand how multiple oppressions interact and redouble one another, it can be used to think about advantage too. For example, how class, age and masculinity intersect can help explain UKIP's support among a particular demographic.
The problems - and controversy - starts when we begin talking about political agency. Intersectionality gets a bad name because it is associated with point scoring and privilege checking. It's a problem that plagued some of the early theorisation on this topic. i.e. Where is the common ground for intersectional politics? You as a straight black woman and your neighbour as a gay white man experience different forms of systematic discrimination at the hands of the same configurations of power, but how to come together? Simply on the basis of it being a nice idea, as Laclau and Mouffe suggested or is there something else? Well, there is something else and that is class - but not how it is typically rendered by post-structuralist/neo-pragmatist/identity politics "common sense" thinking.
Class is largely a state of mind - you can be middle class poor or working class rich.
ReplyDeleteThis is why Labour's tuition fee thing was all wrong - sure it was meant to enable, but they didn't understand it would create barriers, and not only because of the money.
They did not understand what it was like to come from a working class background where the "thought" of going to university simply never occurred.
This to me is a fundamental disconnect - no more than many working class people can think up, even less middle class people (unless they have been working class) can think down.
Paradoxically this was why socialism was so important - "Libraries Give Us Power".
But it's true - middle class people cannot understand that if you put the services there and it is common sense then why don't they use them - hence more middle class people using sure start.
It is difficult to explain an absence - an enviornment in which doing a degree simply never comes up because it is what posh people do - doesn't matter if you are bright. Maybe that's less so now (thanks to Labour?) but when it was 5 per cent instead of 50 it was all too common.
And the same people are in the same jobs, so the class struggle continues.
The trick is not to fight the last war. The genius of the British ruling class is always being one step ahead. Good schools, I suppose.
"Where is the common ground for intersectional politics? You as a straight black woman and your neighbour as a gay white man experience different forms of systematic discrimination at the hands of the same configurations of power, but how to come together?"
ReplyDeleteCall me completely stupid, but isn't this like asking how Spider-Man AND the Scarlet Witch can both be Avengers? Ultron's still Ultron whichever weapon he uses.