Problems with Intersectional Feminism

Intersectionality is the theory that the further you get from being a straight white male you are the more oppressed and less privileged you are. It posits that such people are a font of hidden wisdom and knowledge about how the world really works (i.e. it's entirely about power relationships) and that privileged people should "check their privilege" and shut up while the less privileged tell them how it is.

Leaving aside the obvious facts that there are a lot of non-white non male people who have a lot of privilege, particularly the "scholars" pushing this theory, and there are a lot of straight white men who have very little power and privilege, Christina Hoff Summers points out 3 problems she sees in intersectional feminism as it is being practiced on many campuses.

1. it's a Conspiracy Theory - If this were no more than an effort to remind people to be sensitive to issues of race and gender it would be fine. But it's a lot more than that. It's an all encompassing theory of human reality that's constructed to be immune from criticism. If you question it then you just don't understand it or you're part of the problem.

2. Victim Creep - Campus life in some places becomes a mad scramble to join this or that group of victims. With victim-hood comes claims to wisdom, moral authority, unearned status, and privilege. None of this leads to anything productive or edifying.

Summers tells the story about a conference of intersectional feminist scholars. They were told to divide up into groups based on their reason for being victims. Dozens of groups formed, and even these small groups were unstable. For example, the fat women group polarized into gay and straight factions, the black lesbian group split up over members who had white partners. It became clear that this way of thinking is very divisive, promotes anger, and makes people focus on minutiae and trivial personal matters instead of coming together.

3. Bullying - Since white men are seen as the beneficiaries of unearned privilege, intersectionality becomes an excuse to treat them badly, in the very way that so-called victims claim that they are being treated. This just leads to a lot of anger.

In my opinion, being a victim in the intersectional sense is a dead end. Victims are not seen as being responsible for their problems or able to do anything about them. They apparently want The Man to shut up and do what they want, to fix things, but that isn't going to happen. Intersectionality may promote a sort of smug self esteem for those who see themselves as oppressed, but it leaves them trapped. Also, the degree of self abnegation being demanded of some groups is reason enough to discard this theory as being an inhuman, evil way of thinking.

More bull**** from self-proclaimed sociologists. #science

If you are not solving my perceived problem for me then you are part of my problem - makes perfect sense to me.

I shouldn't even respond to this...

But that is not what intersectionality is.

Intersectionality refers to the relationship between our various forms of how we identify ourselves and how they compete and complement one another in our perceived identities and our systems of privilege and discrimination.

The theory states that our various identities our inexorably linked and cannot be easily separated from one another. In other words, while white male might be the ultimate combo of sex and race in America historically and in most cases still today, it can be of limited value if that person is also gay and poor, but that person may still identify themselves more strongly with the white "race" rather than other historically oppressed groups like blacks and homosexuals. And conversely, while a person may be straight and rich and male, they will still sometimes face discrimination if they are black, and that person may identify himself more strongly with other black people who don't share his advantages even though his life has more privilege than the average black person.

Systems of power that privilege or discrimination against groups exist. This is a fact. It is not just about being a white male. There are many, many competing structures of power in our society and every society that combine and work against one another that in aggregate have historically empowered white males, most particularly wealthy ones, and power is ENDURING.

Also, there are some very real side effects of encouraging people to acknowledge these systems of power and that is what you are talking about. Reverse discrimination, "white guilt", etc. Those are also real. Amazingly, intersectional theory would not deny the existence of those and would actually support them existing.

I would refer you to the works of Michel Foucalt for further understanding of intersecting systems of power and oppression that have little to do with feminism so you might have a chance of understanding without getting all pissy.