YouTube Transcript: WMST113 Intersectionality Part 1 v1
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>> Hi. This is Anita [inaudible].
I am an associate professor at UNLV.
I've been here about 12 years.
And I am the director of gender and sexuality studies.
And something that we teach about a lot in our program is this concept of intersectionality.
It's a concept that has pretty much gone viral I guess.
A lot of people talk about it in social networks and especially
in popular websites related to feminism.
So it's pretty important on the popular level, but it's a term that originated in academia
and I'm going to spend some time describing it.
So these are a few definitions that I've come up with myself.
Intersectionality is when all of the social categories that we are assigned
at birth have a historical and contemporary significance that impacts our lives today.
Intersectionality is also a concept that recognizes that race, class, gender, sexuality,
ability, nation, religion, etcetera, all of those intersect and overlap
to create sociopolitical legal privilege in some instances and oppression in the others.
And so I know that that's a little bit hard to understand on a theoretical level so what I
like to do is use a visual to illustrate this a little bit differently.
So what you'll see when you see this diagram of intersectionality
that we've created is you have an intersection at the center.
At the center that would be the individual that would be the human being.
That would be you.
That would be me.
And each person is made up of different social categories, you know.
We're assigned these categories at birth and/or
as we grow older we understand them to be part of our identities.
So one of those in particular is race or ethnicity.
Another is gender.
Another is class.
And another is sexuality.
Those are the primary ones that people think about.
In fact, the class that we teach for our department is race, class and gender.
But in fact it's much more than just those.
We are -- All of these social categories intersect
to create both either a privileged experience or an oppressed experience at a structural level.
And beyond those we also have ones like language, culture, citizenship,
mental and physical health, religion and spirituality.
And these are the social categories
that most impact our lives whether we are conscious of them or not.
And yet we also have all of these outside forces that impact the intersection.
So, for example, our family, the history of this country, history of the world and its impact
on those categories, education, religion, economy, law, your numerical representation
within a wider society, healthcare and political power, all of those things "intersect"
to create your personal experience.
And depending on who you are and how your social category is identified, then your experience
within this intersection and within society shifts.
Another way to think about this is in terms of struggle or challenge.
So when I use the word oppression a lot of people don't realize
that oppression is not simply having a bad experience or having an individual struggle.
When we talk about struggle, especially in women's studies or in gender
and sexuality studies, we're really talking about structural,
institutional and organizational struggle.
And so I have another visual that I've identified as multidimensional struggle.
Again we have people who sometimes think about themselves as social justice advocates.
Right? They want to end discrimination.
And they might say, "Well, I'm very much against racism."
But yet they are very active sexists or they're very active ageists.
Or they're very active discriminators against LGBT people, lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender people which we call heterosexism or homophobia.
So if you take a look at this diagram that we've put together,
it's called multidimensional struggle and I indicate several categories on this diagram,
but there are very few of these that people actually take in to consideration even
if they are social justice advocates.
Generally you have people who will look at racism, sexism.
Sometimes they'll look at classism.
But they won't necessarily look at nativism or citizenism, for example.
Citizenism is a term that I created with a student of mine to talk
about specifically the discrimination that immigrants and/or people
who are not born citizens in to any nation are discriminated upon.
They're treated as substandard human beings in a society merely
because they weren't born in that nation.
Similarly some people don't think about body discrimination.
So if you're one of those people, for example, who has lunch and then immediately starts
to say negative things about your body like, "Oh, I feel fat.
I look ugly."
Or, "How could I have eaten that much food?"
That's an act of body discrimination.
Usually we're engaged in that kind of discrimination on an individual basis,
but it's also something that we receive from a structural I guess message
and from a structural perspective in terms
of what we call a beauty standard or a body image that is ideal.
That ideal is socially constructed, meaning that our society has created it.
They have deemed it as good or bad.
And so all of us fit in one way in to the privileged body standard or beauty standard
or the marginalized/oppressed body beauty standard.
And so when you think about the word fatism it's the way in which people actively discriminate
against people who are deemed fat or not fitting perfectly in to the beauty standard.
And if you look again at this diagram you'll see stuff like ageism.
We have both discrimination against young people and older people.
We have mental illness discrimination
and that's what some people call an invisible illness whereas, for example,
you might have a clinically depressed diagnosis and illness,
but you will not be necessarily protected against discrimination for your illness
because people don't recognize it or don't see it visibly.
You also have things like colorism where within especially people
of color communities you have people discriminating based on skin color.
The lighter you are, the more Eurocentric your skin is resembled, even your color,
the color of your eyes, are seen
as more favorable the closer they are to blue, to green or not brown.
That comes from a history of colonization that has taught us
to basically value European beauty image over native or African beauty image.
Or people who have African and Native American or indigenous origin, their skin color tends
to be darker and again that's something that's very active.
Colorism is a very active way of discriminating against people even within that same group.
And, you know, generally one of the things that people think about or don't think about in terms
of discrimination is this idea of xenophobia, just the general fear of the unknown.
And this is my definition of multidimensional struggle.
It's just something that I put together trying to identify this as a theoretical concept.
A multidimensional struggle is a concept that indicates that human beings often engage in
and experience a variety of struggles depending on their various sociopolitical identities,
including but not limited to racism, colorism, classism, imperialism, sexism, patriarchy,
homophobia, transphobia, heterosexism, ageism, ableism and many more.
And Kimberle Crenshaw [assumed spelling] is a law professor and Eagle scholar who is credited
with coining the concept of intersectionality.
In a legal court case the discriminated person, for example,
has to prove -- has the burden of proof.
So if a black woman wants to allege discrimination she has to pick one ism.
She can't pick racism and sexism.
She must pick one in order to prove that she's been discriminated upon.
And what Kimberle Crenshaw argued is
that if you're a black woman you cannot separate your race from your gender.
And if you're experiencing discrimination those two aspects of your identity coexist
and therefore in a legal court case should be argued together.
So again, for example, she says that a black woman may allege
that she is being discriminated upon as both a woman and black, but if white women
and black men have not been discriminated upon then that --
the victim of discrimination will have the difficulty of proving sexism and/or racism
against herself as a black woman.
And again what Kimberle Crenshaw pointed out is that that should not be the case.
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