'Intersectionaity' - gibberish or not?

It's gibberish when it's badly explained. The term itself has actual validity, and it's basically just about looking at how the ways discrimination against different groups in society, relate to each other.

It has its roots in Marxism though - so unfortunately there is a lot of bollock-speak/obfuscation behind the concept - but it's still valid and useful.

suicide_circus wrote: »

Industry speak.

Yea you're right - discrimination against anyone in society is just an academic theory and triviality, not a significant real world concern worth studying in any way...

That at least, is the sentiment that seems to come forward from a lot of threads like this in any case.

MakeEmLaugh wrote: »

The Sunday Independent published an article from Ruth Dudley Edwards this weekend in which she took to task the social and political ideology 'intersectionality'.

Edwards began her article by speaking about Charlotte Ezaz, a student at Oxford, who is campaigning for the statue of Cecil Rhodes in the university to be removed, on the grounds that Rhodes was a racist.

Racist, imperialist, slight nut. all round scumbag.

"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence,"

NiallBoo wrote: »

Dunno...it looks like its vaguely based on set theory. No arithmetic mind.

It uses a word used in set theory.

Let me give you an example of why it isn't maths. These statements.

The rich earn more than the poor.
Men earn more than women.

Sound the same in English but represent very different sets. In the first the set of all rich people R contains members where each and every member is richer than each and every member of the poor set P.

In the second case the set M for males doesn't guarantee this. Just that the sum total of all income of the members of M divided by the total count of members (the average) is higher than the average income of set F (for females).

Intersecting set M and set R would show more intersection than intersecting set F and R (but not that much) but being part of set R means that you are definitely richer than set P even if you are also a female, but being a male doesn't guarantee membership of set R.

That's necessarily verbose but you get the idea. In terms of income the fact that you are a woman and women earn less than men on average tells us nothing about your personal wealth. Class trumps everything. Also the differences between the rich and poor are obviously greater than the 13% difference between men and women ( depending on how you measure the rich it's a difference of orders of magnitude).

Eugene Norman wrote: »

Not anything much to do with class or Empire.

The class and empire that modern feminism rose from?

Austria! wrote: »

You think there's no data that women, gay people or black people face discrimination?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_inequality_in_the_United_States#Unemployment_rates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_opposition#United_States


Or maybe you think that when you combine these things the discrimination disappears? That would be very intersectional.

I don't live in the US. Nor is this an American forum. Though pulling statistics purely from there is very interesting.

Let's return to the statement, "We can say that lesbian women of colour are more oppressed than straight white males in general."

So in general we find 'straight white males' (we can leave the finer definition of who's who in the Caucasian race to the specialists..) living predominately in North and South America, Europe right through Russia, Australia and New Zealand. It's gonna be a huge number. No doubt some are well off but there's a hell of a lot of poor and disadvantaged places there, not to mention many warzones where these guys are fighting and dying daily.

How many lesbian, women of colour (?) are you including? I suspect no matter the definition it's gonna be a staggeringly small number in comparison. All the easier for the amount of those in the US etc to completely 'ruin' the average.... But hey who knows, I don't. And neither do you. Sciences usually wait for data to come out with statements the one above.

Austria! wrote: »

You're applying these things to individuals with very specific circumstances. We can say that lesbian women of colour are more oppressed than straight white males in general. In point 1, you're making an intersectional argument of your own, with your own conditions and disagreeing with anyone who thinks the woman is more oppressed than the man, despite the fact that you just made up that hypothetical comparison yourself and no one else got to take a position on it yet.

2. That is partly how me know discrimination exists. There's also lots of other evidence, like studies showing people favour identical CVs or work on based on certain lines (race, gender, height etc). But you're not disagreeing with contemporary social science thought here, just being a little simplistic.
I should add an oppressed individual can still get more education or money than the average. Your straight, white, male, from a council estate, with no education, can still become a crazy rich soccer player. A very smart person can get a achieve good grades, but if they more advantages they would have got excellent grades.

Lesbian women of colour from where? What if the lesbian WOC is a tenured American academic and the white male is an Albanian sheep herder?

Or Americans in general vs non-Americans?

An intelligent alien reporting from earth would say this about Europeans - mostly harmless and generally controlled by America, militarily, economically and culturally. But being American never comes into the intersectionality argument, which is a good trick if you are American.


Compare this to Chomsky or Pilger. They really go after real power but neither is part of the American sociological mainstream.

Austria! wrote: »

People can be oppressed for different things. Like race, gender, etc.

So you have to consider that though a women is oppressed, maybe she has more power than a black man. But then a black man is discriminated less than a black woman. And maybe some of the discrimination or harmful attitudes you would face as a black man are a little different than a black woman might face, because she's also a woman. It's pretty obvious stuff, but you can analyse it til you're blue in the face and tied in knots and overstate the effect of discrimination, but the idea itself is pretty bulletproof.

That's society's in general. Obviously Condi Rice has more power than you and I. She even has an oil tanker named after her.

In general is mostly meaningless. Read my post on set theory and why it is misapplied here.

That said some generalisations are more useful than others. I have first world privilege which means I am better off than the vast majority of third worlders ( but not all. There are rich businessmen and dictators of course).

But what's white privilege? How does it explain anything outside the US?