The Intersectional Wound

This is a translated excerpt from the book “Interseccionalidad: Desigualdades, lugares y emociones” (Intersectionality: Inequalities, Places and Emotions) by Maria Rodó Zárate, published by Bellaterra Edicions.

Intersectionality, a principle developed by Black North American feminists in the 1980s, deals with the relationship between different strands of inequality, such as gender, race/ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, or age. The purpose of this principle is to understand how heteropatriarchy, capitalism, racism, white supremacy or ableism become intertwined to create unique webs of inequality, discrimination and violence that depend on an individual’s relation to each element.

Engaging with intersectional politics involves acknowledging potentially unequal and dominant relationships between different members of oppressed groups and understanding them as a transformative force. The way these inequalities are handled, however, often spirals into aggression and defensiveness which excludes any possibility of mutual understanding and alliance and creates environments where emotions take centre stage. By viewing emotions as social and cultural practices, as opposed to psychological states (Ahmed, 2017), exploring the emotional dimension of intersectionality can connect the structural roots of inequality to their lived experience, along with the discord, conflict and pain they cause.

Taking an intersectional stance on political matters means acknowledging that everyone can be both oppressed and privileged, thus blurring the binary mindset of “good vs bad”, “oppressed vs oppressor”, “victim vs attacker”. This, however, takes us to a place of instability and uncertainty, where any political action becomes complex and treacherous. On an interpersonal level it is especially difficult for politically engaged people, who, through the process of exploring their own political conscience, have identified the causes of their own oppression, given them a name and then organised themselves to confront these forces. It hurts when someone suddenly tells them that, from another perspective, they or their group occupy a position of privilege, or even that of an oppressor. This dynamic is a source of multiple political conflicts, and cuts especially deep within social movements whose objective is often precisely that of supporting and fighting for the oppressed.

In this context, recognising one’s own privilege creates friction and resistance; this may simply be a knee-jerk, defensive reaction, but often acknowledging privilege on one front is hard to reconcile with the pain and suffering experienced on another. As an example, a cis, white, heterosexual woman who has been a victim of gender violence throughout her life might feel attacked if she were called a white, European racist. She might be offended because she does not see herself as having racist attitudes, nor any privileges in that respect, but she may also feel that being put on the side of the privileged and the oppressors negates her pain as a woman, that it erases her or makes her invisible and takes political value away from her personal experience. We can suppose she has been rejected from jobs for being a woman, that she has dealt with catcalling on a daily basis, and that she had to go to Argentina with a friend because “girls don’t travel alone”.

She does, however, benefit from being white and having a common, “normal” surname when looking for work. She can move freely around the city without fear of the police stopping her and asking to see her papers, and she can go on holiday to Latin America as a tourist with a European passport. This is the intersectional wound: having to confront privilege while enduring suffering. It is accepting the position of the oppressor or privileged when you yourself feel oppressed. From an intersectional perspective, oppression and privilege can be experienced simultaneously, and the existence of one is not mutually exclusive of the other. This means that, although as a woman she may have less freedom to travel alone, her passport grants her the privilege of free movement over international borders. Although her whiteness is beneficial when looking for work, she will have fewer opportunities than a man because she is a woman.

Managing these privileges is a complex matter which demands self-criticism and an attitude that favours learning rather than questioning, as well as acknowledging and taking action. To learn means reading and listening to the voices of those who speak from first-hand experience about oppression without doubting their experiences. Assume that your own perspective puts you in a position from which you cannot understand the dynamics of a particular form of inequality – because you have not been subject to it, because you certainly have not paid attention when it has occurred around you, and because it is sometimes difficult to fully comprehend the cumulative effect of seemingly minor attitudes or behaviours.

The recognition of one’s own privileges is also fraught because privilege is often associated with the conscious intention of subordinating or dominating another person, but privileges are also the result of unique, specific historical processes. Reflecting on these processes involves considering questions such as whether you can cross borders freely, whether you are afraid of having your documents checked in an airport, whether cosmetics counters carry makeup in your skin tone or shops carry clothes in your size, whether you live in fear of having your electricity shut off or your language dying out. Is the theatre accessible to you because you can climb stairs? Can you freely enjoy your sexuality? Can you vote in your country’s elections? Are you confronted when you switch changing rooms at the gym? Does your family situation present any obstacles when registering your child? These questions are not a matter of privileges being wielded directly against another person; they touch on privileges which are structurally and institutionally ingrained, but nevertheless benefit us every day. What is more, one would be hard-pressed to distance oneself from these privileges on a personal level, which matters because it ties personal experience to structural issues, to historical processes, and to institutions and social norms which categorise people in different ways and generate inequalities. In this respect, acknowledging the privileges we are given is not only connected to a change in behaviour, but also to a recognition of the structural oppression suffered by others. Recognition of the pain of one strand of oppression by someone who does not suffer personally from it is an essential step towards establishing political alliances and for general change on a social level.

This brings us to action. This can take the form of renouncing those privileges which we are capable of renouncing, such as getting up to clear the table, relinquishing a position of visibility or power to those in minority positions, or often simply shutting up. Action can also mean ceasing to hold sexist, homophobic or racist attitudes and supporting the fights against these systems. An action can be something routine, such as evaluating your own attitudes in the bedroom, at work or at the pub, but it can also be organised political support of others’ struggles, support which places you next to, not in front of them. It means spreading ideas, participating in public events and transforming spaces where you have privilege while specifically seeking not to transform spaces where people suffering from oppression organise. This is to say that, as a white person, you should try to spread anti-racist ideas in a majority white workplace, but you should not try to change the methods of anti-racist struggle itself simply because you think they could be improved.

These three points, incomplete and simplified though they are, address the management of privileges. But how do we manage oppression? One of the most complex issues in confronting the intersectional wound relates to how we confront anger and pain. When a group identifies a situation of oppression, it is often met with anger. Whoever is on the receiving end of this anger feels it as an attack, and instead of contributing to the recognition of privileges or discriminatory attitudes, it causes them to close up, and any possibility of empathetic understanding is lost. But anger, when it comes to lived experience of oppression, is a fair and just emotional response.

Audre Lorde, in a text entitled, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”, reflects on the use of anger by Black women in discussions about racism and asserts that “any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger” (Lorde, 2007 [1984]: 128). She draws a clear line between anger and hate: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (Lorde, 2007 [1984]: 129). I believe that this acceptance and vindication of anger is key to not delegitimising struggles because of how they are expressed. Although her text focuses in particular on how to deal with racism among women, the same logic can be applied to discussions of other strands of oppression. Moreover, women have traditionally been denied any expression of anger in political environments, so the ability to express it is in itself a right of those who suffer oppression.

Lorde adds that anger is not only necessary to express pain, but that it also has a purpose. As she states, “anger is loaded with information and energy” (Lorde, 2007 [1984]: 127), and it therefore has the transformative potential to destabilise and crack the very foundation of what is generally accepted as normal. Anger pushes us to reflect on what we are angry about, what is causing such a surge in energy, what is being brought to light, and yet it is often received as an attack or, if related to people’s own attitudes, guilt. On this topic, Lorde (2007 [1984]: 130) highlights that “guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”

Accepting that anger is an expression of violent suffering, and that it helps to make oppression visible, is an important step towards not minimising struggles simply because they are expressed in a way that is considered politically unpalatable. However, this often comes up against the pain of those at whom this anger is directed, against their own intersectional wounds, and all the transformative potential this anger could have had is diverted into increased suffering.

Picking up our previous example of the woman who is angrily told she is privileged because she can walk through the streets of her city without fear of being stopped and identified because she is white, she notes a discord with her own experience and she may feel the other person’s anger as a denial of her own oppression, of the very real pain and unease she suffers as a woman in public space. These situations are sometimes dealt with by dissecting who has it worse or who suffers more, an approach which, more often than not, leads to a political impasse: Worse in what sense? Can the suffering of different individuals be objectively valued and compared with that of others? If so, does that mean one type of suffering is less important because it is less intense than that of another person?

It is in how we deal with these intersectional wounds that I believe we should complement anger with care. Anger is legitimate, necessary, and can be transformative, but feminist, intersectional political practice should also take care into account. An intersectional approach should understand that everyone has privileges, and that these should not be weaponised or thrown in each other’s faces. In an intersectional framework we should also understand that the person on the receiving end of anger may harbour their own suffering, which also must be recognised. It is essential to understand who or what the target of the anger is, as well as how it might be increasing the pain endured at the hand of another form of oppression. It is vital to reflect constantly on one’s own oppressions and privileges, but also to make an effort to be empathetic when anger is expressed among equals within a political space which aims to transform and where differences are acknowledged as an integral part of the collective work. I am not talking about an educational approach in which everyone has to explain the oppressions they experience so that people without that experience can understand. An approach like this might be valuable and appreciated, but we cannot expect the oppressed to constantly justify themselves or have a toolkit of evidence and convincing arguments at their disposal to back themselves up. What I mean by this is that, in an intersectional framework, an oppressed position should not be used as a moral authority. Experiencing one oppression provides an epistemically privileged perspective to speak about it, but not to speak about all oppressions, nor on behalf of an entire section of society.

On this point, Black North American feminist Patricia Hill Collins (2000) affirms that intersectionality rightly questions the additive approach which considers that Black women have a more truthful or accurate perspective from which to understand oppression than those of us in other groups. Collins, in her articulation of an Afrocentric epistemology, states that her aim is not to uphold a view that the position of Black women is epistemically better than that of other groups, but rather that Black women find themselves in a particular social position from which they can establish connections with other epistemologies. In this sense, she rejects approaches to oppression which consider that the more disadvantaged positions one can claim, the more subordinated they are and the more accurate their point of view.

I believe that this clear trend towards quantifying oppression, and thinking that the more oppressed someone is the more valid their opinion, is one of the main obstacles to building alliances. More than whether politics is rooted in identities or not, problems arise depending on the extent to which an identity becomes entrenched. In other words, the problem arises when one’s own identity is not a point of departure but a destination in itself, when identity is not a starting point from which to walk together, but rather a position to be defended as a political end in and of itself. Experiences of oppression are important sources of knowledge, and it is important that that be recognised, but they should not be used to shut down discussion. Intersectional logic demonstrates that these experiences of oppression are also shaped by positions of privilege that other people do not have, and weaponising these positions of oppression against people who do not share the same exact experiences implies, on one hand, a lack of recognition of the possible oppression of others, and on the other a lack of recognition of one’s own positions of privilege.

Sometimes, this tendency to throw around oppressed positions in order to catch people out is a consequence of the intersectional wound, of being identified as an oppressor and made to feel that your suffering is not recognised. It is in moments like this that people weaponise their own suffering and end up causing injury to someone else’s identity. This is why I think it is important to break these trends by keeping care in mind when identifying privileges. Suffering needs to be able to act as a bridge towards empathy, not as a wall that separates us from one another.

Furthermore, if we understand the liberation of one group as connected to the liberation of another, entrenching ourselves further in our own oppression not only reinforces other experiences of inequality, but also reinforces our own. In the end, it is necessary to be conscious that everyone has a different starting point and that what really matters is finding the direction in which we want to go. As Audre Lorde says: “Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different. […] It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference.” (Lorde, 1982: 226).

Maybe we can think of difference as a place to be, rather than a place to leave – not seeing it as a threat, but instead knowing how to deal with it intersectionally, and learning to live with and among difference.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Written by María Rodó-Zarate
Translated by Alex Minshall
Translation edited by Timothy McKeon
Originally published on Pikara

Image attributions
Lead image: Intersex-inclusive pride flag by Valentino Vecchietti via Wikimedia Commons
Image 1: By Alec Perkins via Wikimedia Commons
Image 2: By Elsa Dorfman via Wikimedia Commons
Image 3: By Marc Nozell via Wikimedia Commons

References
Ahmed, Sara (2017), La política cultural de las emociones, Ciudad de México: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género UNAM.
Collins, Patricia Hill (2000), Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment, 2a edición, Londres: Routledge.
Lorde, Audre (1982), Zami, a new spelling of my name, Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
Lorde, Audre (2007 [1984]), Sister outsider: essays and speaches, Trumansburg: Crossing Press.