Some Thoughts on Intersectionality: Reflecting on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Word 30 Years Later

Hey there! Once again, I apologize for the sporadic nature of this page. I’ll admit, the slump in writing continues as I find it difficult to see anything I write as worth your time. However, I always have time for the today’s subject. By the time this comes out, it’ll be March. Today, it’s two o’clock on February 29th and, technically, time doesn’t exist for the next ten hours. So instead of prepping for my seminar on Gertrude as she appears in the first quarto of Hamlet (as I should be), I figured I’d sit down in a café and write down some percolating thoughts.

Over the past few weeks, especially considering that it was Black History Month, and feeling the impending International Women’s Day, I’ve been reflecting on how to be a better intersectional feminist. How perfect it was when the seminar topic of intersectionality landed in my lap for my Indigenous Feminist LGBTQ2+ Scholarship course.

I was a little upset, however. Because where other students in the course had their readings chosen for them, I had to go through five different anthologies of work and pick out the works that I thought represented intersectionality best and in order to do that, I had to go to the source. I had to study and understand intersectionality as Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced it in 1989. When I first started prep, I understood intersectionality to be a good thing. Understanding the differences across minorities leads to a better understanding of how to combat discrimination.

However, after reading Crenshaw’s work, I then moved on to the works of This Bridge Called My Back, edited and organized by Cherrìe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldùa, The Colour of Resistance by Connie Fife, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, and Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology by Makeda Silvera. And the simultaneous heaviness and criticality of intersectionality has never been more evident to me. In many ways, it ended up being beneficial for me to go through these works, as even though most were written over 25 years ago, they all combine to produce the groundwork for intersectionality. They enforce an understanding in the reality of it.

Often, it is easy for us to get lost in the idealization of what feminism can be instead of focusing on the weight of discrimination as it exists now. We (feminists – as I hope you are), as I’ve been trying to demonstrate, highlight and illustrate intersectionality as an ideal form of feminism and pat ourselves on the back (or at least I do) when we identify the labels incumbent to the term. When we tell our friends that “two-spirit” is more than just a First Nations person with the spirit of a man and a woman, and that it in fact has different meanings to different nations across the globe and is deeply tied to cultural responsibility, we pat ourselves on the back for being woke. When we say that a Black woman makes 61 cents to a white man’s dollar in the United States, we feel vindicated in the power of this knowledge. However, being woke (and further sharing it – even with the best intentions) does not fix the pay gap. It does not fix poverty rates amongst LGBTQ2+ people. For intersectional feminism to flourish in a way that is actually progressive, it must be understood as more than just an opportunity to flex knowledge on your friends. It must be understood under the term that Crenshaw presented in 1989: compounded.

A woman is not just complex through her identities as an elderly lesbian Latina with a physical disability. She is also compounded. As she goes through life, the problems she faces in her life and career (and the further ones that come with trying to absolve those issues) are most likely difficult to fix not just because she is a woman. The compounded identities of disabled, elderly, LGBTQ2+, and Latina certainly work together to make these issues far more egregious than they would be for a straight white able-bodied cis woman.

Think of the word compounded. Does it not bring images of heaviness? I think of a woman carrying bricks in her arms. Anzaldùa and Moraga present the image of a back as a bridge; white women stepping all over it for their own benefit. And sometimes (much of the time), that is what these identities can feel like. As Makeda Silvera notes, it is worse when these multiple identities are not only feared by the general public, but by family as well. The phrase “created families” in the queer community exists for a reason.

Reading those anthologies taught me this, and they also taught me that the biggest emotions to come from these compounded identities are anger, fear, and exhaustion. The anger, fear, and exhaustion that come from consistently being tokenized for an identity that, outside of the meetings and conferences that use these identities to check boxes, could otherwise be employed as motivation for murder. They taught me that, often, it feels like the back bridge could break at any moment.

So no, intersectionality is not glamourous, light, or easy. The experience of it is heavy, scary, and frustrating to say the least. And I realize that, as a white, able-bodied, young, cis woman, this piece could easily be read as me trying to flex knowledge on whoever chooses to read this. But I sincerely hope it doesn’t. What I hope this small piece of writing brings to you is, if you are not compounded, the devastation, anger, fear, and exhaustion that these women feel every day. In other words, I hope it fills you with as much empathy as it did to me. I hope it brings the motivation to go and read the words of the women in the anthologies and understand it even more (as I certainly could never explain or understand intersectionality in the way these words express). And if you do have the identities I’ve been talking about, what I hope you take from this is (even though this is not a review), to also go read the anthologies and perhaps take comfort in their words. They exist, primarily, for you.

As a final thought, I’ll tell whoever is reading this exactly what I told my class. In her Foreword for This Bridge, Toni Cade Bambara ends by noting how the novel needs no Foreword. To her, it is the Afterward that will make the difference. The folks who read what is being said and further engage with it and keep producing more conversation. And that’s exactly what I titled my seminar: the Afterward/word (since words count). So yes, keep talking. Keep having conversations about intersectionality (even in the comments if you feel so inclined!). But for the love of Beyoncé, please critically engage with what you’re saying and refrain from simply presenting information. The movement cannot survive based off stagnant facts. To quote Bambara, the revolution must be “irresistible.” We must make it so.