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Please read/view these short selections:
bell hooks Ch. 10 “Race & Gender” Download Ch. 10 “Race & Gender”(note that she intentionally does not capitalize her name)
Audre Lorde, “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”Download “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”
Notes:
Privilege & Oppression
I mentioned the concept of intersectionality briefly in our discussion of the most recent waves of feminism and although it is a newer term, it is critical to gender studies and activism. As we continue through the course it will remain crucial to every topic we discuss so it is important to fully explore and understand. But before we can develop a solid grasp of intersectionality, we must understand the concepts of oppression and privilege.
What is oppression? First, we must distinguish oppression from suffering. Everyone in society can potentially suffer in some way. Any person can be bullied or treated unfairly or just have bad luck. What separates the two is that unlike general suffering, oppression is systematic and targets individuals as members of groups. Because it is so ingrained in society and social systems, oppression is often internalized and invisible. Feminist theorist Marilyn Frye illustrates this definition of systemic oppression as a birdcage. If you only focus on individual bars or barriers (for example wage gaps or voting rights) you will not see it as oppression, you’d expect people to fight against that single issue and learn to break free. However, systems of oppression work together like the bars of the cage. We cannot study the elements of an oppressive structure independently, without studying the entire system.
Thinking about oppression in this systematic and inter-related way can also draw our attention to those do not exist in those cages. The groups free from this inequality are in a position of privilege. Like oppression, privilege is not an individual judgment, it is systemic and built into social structure. By definition, privileges are unearned advantages granted to people in dominant groups whether they asked for those privileges or not. You can see the cage of oppression contrasted with the freedom of privilege in Maya Angelou’s poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. Links to an external site.
We can also illustrate the structural nature of privilege by thinking about which members of a category are “unmarked”. For example, if I say I want to discuss issues of gender, race or sexuality many people will assume I am referring to women, trans, and nonbinary people, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, or Asian experiences, and the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) community, respectively. In each of these examples, dominant identities are treated as the default, and others as variations of that default. The fact is, men still have a gender, white people still have a race, and heterosexual or straight people still have sexuality. Privilege and advantage is conveyed through this illusion of neutrality, which allows it remain invisible to those that have it, but highly visible to those who experience oppression or marginalization.
We all have some form of societal privilege. Having privilege doesn’t mean we didn’t earn our accomplishments or that we never had any barriers in our way. It just means that our barriers were not systemically connected to others like the example of the cage. Privilege can still be a hot button term- this short video delves more into how we can understand and better apply its meaning:
“Decoded: Why Does Privilege Make People so Angry”
Intersectionality
So how can we look at what is to encounter both privilege and oppression in our lives? How can we understand what it means to experience oppression in more than one area? Gender oppression for example is not isolated but instead intersects with all of our social identities such as age, race, class, gender, sexuality, and physical ability simultaneously. Your life is not influenced by JUST one of these- it is all of them at the same time. Since we experience the world through the combination of our identities, using intersectionality as a framework for studying gender allows us to recognize the ways oppression is linked.
Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality acknowledges everyone has their own unique experiences of privilege, discrimination, and oppression and we must consider each aspect if we are to achieve equality. A Black woman may experience both sexism and racism, but will experience sexism differently from a white woman and racism differently from a black man. Similarly, having privilege in one area does not mean someone automatically has privilege in all areas. Intersectionality recognizes that we can be privileged and unprivileged/oppressed at the same time. As we learned from our examination of feminist history, any feminism that purely represents the experiences of dominant and privileged positions will fail to achieve equality for all. The work towards gender equality must be intersectional.
Intersectionality is an important concept and we will continue to practice intersectionality throughout the semester so it is important to understand. This short video from helps demonstrate intersections and their impact.
“Kimberlé Crenshaw at Ted + Animation”
You can also listen along to the piece by Audre Lorde read aloud by Lauren Lyons, if this is a method of taking in the material that would be helpful to you:
After completing the reading and lecture notes, choose one quote from either the reading by hooks or Lourde that you found meaningful or that helped you connect to the concept of intersectionality. Write down the exact quotation and explain your thoughts on it by discussing your interpretation of what it means, why it stuck out to you, how it helps you understand intersectionality, and it’s significance to the study of gender.
Your discussion should be at least 200 words not including the quote and include at least 2 meaningful responses to classmates’ posts by either sharing your ideas of how their chosen quote connects to other important concepts such as oppression, privilege, or the metaphor of the cage or by offering a new interpretation/significance that you think is relevant.
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