Читать книгу Counseling the Contemporary Woman - Suzanne Degges-White - Страница 8

Intersectionality is rooted in a critical black feminist tradition that can be traced back to freedwoman and activist Sojourner Truth, whose 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman” radically challenged homogenous images of women’s experience. In illuminating racialized gender experiences, Truth called for women’s rights leaders to address the marginalization of all women and acknowledge the erasure of black women in women’s rights political movements. Even Truth’s speech can only be understood through two drastically different versions that were provided as transcriptions by two white women (Siebler, 2010). In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group in Boston, Massachusetts, issued a powerful positionality statement addressing racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism from their unique experiences as black women. In opposition to the narrow, culturally laden, and oppressive gender molds promulgated by white women and black men, they stated, “We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human is enough” (Combahee River Collective, 1977, p. 4). Their statement gave voice to many women of color, often sidelined by the single-issue politics of the black liberation and women’s rights movements. Women existing outside of the white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual Christian feminine ideal were frequently othered, relegated to the status of outsider. It is from this “outsider within” social location that Collins’s (2000) black feminist thought and intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2016) emerge.

Women of color have actively deconstructed white, Western ideals of womanhood and shaped critical discourse on gender through an intersectionality lens that addresses race, gender, and other cultural identities as multifaceted, interactive, and sociopolitically situated. From this philosophical grounding, Crenshaw (1988, 1989, 1991) coined the term “intersectionality” as a conceptual tool through which to examine the ways multiple systems of oppression interact and influence one another. Intersectionality theorists (Collins, 2000; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) challenge dominant views of social inequality along a single axis (e.g., gender) that only conceptualize between-group issues (e.g., men and women). Instead, intersectionality is used to examine social issues via the interactions within categories (e.g., race and gender) across multiple systems (e.g., individual and institutional racism and sexism). Collins and Bilge (2016) state, “Rather than seeing people as a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, intersectionality provides a framework for explaining how social divisions of race, gender, age, and citizenship status, among others, positions people differently in the world, especially in relation to global inequality” (p. 15).

Intersectionality adopts a multidimensional perspective to interwoven cultural identities through a prism of systemic privilege and oppression (Bowleg, 2008, 2013; Watts-Jones, 2010). The six core features of intersectionality include social inequality, power, relationality, social context, complexity, and social justice, which are typically present in application of an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Intersectionality has been used to interrogate problems of social inequality through recognition of multifaceted domains of power, which can include structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal domains. Relationality refers to the interconnectedness of different forms of oppression; that is, understanding how multiple oppressive systems relate to one another in different and interactive ways (e.g., racism, genderism, and sexism as complementary) in shaping experience. Thus, instead of focusing on how race and gender may differ, intersectionality emphasizes their commonalities and the implications of these intersections (Bowleg, 2012; Bowleg, Huang, Brooks, Black, & Burkholder, 2003). Further, contributing factors, interactions, and consequences of interrelated systems of social inequality must be understood within a given social context to have meaning. Therefore, it is important to contextualize power, relationality, and inequality in a social context (e.g., counseling practice in the United States). These interconnections result in a complexity that exceeds the reach of single-issue (e.g., race or gender) perspectives. Lastly, social justice speaks to the purpose of intersectionality; Collins and Bilge (2016) maintain that social justice is not a requirement of intersectionality but recognize that social justice action is often the purpose of its use. Thus, intersectionality serves as a practical lens through which to examine privilege and oppression as experienced by women from their different social locations.