jessica amber murray
intersectional politics belong on the right of the political spectrum.
discuss.
coach
You need to elaborate. That sentence doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
jessica amber murray
do you not see the inherent cultural conservatism underlying the whole thought process?
it's odd, though. let me ask you this: was marx an imperialist?
i asked this before, too: is opposing cultural appropriation as a concept (stripping it away from the other forms of racism that are generally the actual problem when cultural appropriation is claimed) consistent with opposing intellectual property?
hey, i tried to write an essay about this, but nobody wanted to read it, so i'll just throw it out there....
coach
When I think of "intersectional politics", I think of intersectional analysis; that is, looking at how different power relationships interact and construct each other. This relates to the idea that you can't just see these things as essentializing and erasing categories. So, for example, an intersectional analysis of class looks at class as something which itself (materially and ideologically) is constructed through other categories and sets of experiences - say gender and racialization - than simply whether or not one is a "worker".
jessica amber murray
right. and who constructed these categories in the first place? are they real things, or constructs of oppression? what side of the spectrum traditionally upholds these things and what side traditionally abolishes them?
another question: is it not the case that leftists generally consider many of the identities and traditional cultures themselves to be sources of oppression? so, would a leftist not consider upholding these divisions to be a process of furthering oppression?
it's like the academic left has taken this orwellian turn into becoming what it's supposed to oppose. i'll write this in time. i just got a comment on another thread that once again indicated the problems inherent to judging a book by it's cover, and felt the need to clarify that point.
but please continue on in this discussion.
it can only work itself out as a type of divide and conquer, and it relegates otherwise well meaning activists to a type of useful idiot for capitalism. i want to be clear, though, that, by rejecting intersectional analysis as capitalistic, i'm not falling into that divide and conquer trap. this isn't about some kind of repressed white resentment or converted white guilt or feeling left out of the analysis or something. i'm ultimately (not here) just trying to present an argument as to why the approach should be thrown out the window (it cements the division created by capitalism) and why we should go back to less categorical types of analysis.
it's hard to get to a world where everyone is equal by beginning by splitting everybody up into specific types based on physical characteristics.
it also presents a lot of cognitive dissonance. reason? it over-complicates things, then tries to present contradictions as equally valid. in that sense, the process tends to be largely incoherent. example: you'll end up with leftists that oppose nationalism and hierarchy aligning themselves with indigenous sovereignty movements for the sake of standing up for the most oppressed. if we start with a shared opposition to colonialism, which also exists on the paleo-right, there's a nationalistic option (sovereignty) and an anti-nationalistic option (abolition of all hierarchy, traditional culture, etc). the contradiction consequently comes in supporting sovereignty and opposing nationalism. you can't coherently take both positions. yet, all this over-complication confuses the issue and all of a sudden you've got people arguing one day for the abolition of racism and the next day for archaic tribal rules of inclusion (and consequently exclusion). you might provide this label of "intersectionality" to the process of supporting hierarchy in the name of abolishing hierarchy, but i'm more willing to throw it in the trash as incoherent cognitive dissonance.
pansee
"[...]so, would a leftist not consider upholding these divisions to be a process of furthering oppression?" Wait, how exactly is intersectionality, an examination of the politics of power THROUGH multiple layers of the various dynamics of oppression upholding those divisions? Because...it acknowledges that they exist in other, non-intersectional analyses?
Also, I think the threshold for what you will consider to be an acceptably left-wing idea is set just really unhelpfully far left, so much so that it leaves no room for solidarity. Actually, it's set so far that is kinda seems to only include you?
jessica amber murray
does it acknowledge they exist outside of the context pushed down? see, this is sort of exactly where i'm pushing back. in the sense that it does, it seems constructed by an external definition rather than an individual one. what it does is put people in boxes and then destroy their individuality by subsuming them underneath the projected identity politics of the box. anti-oppression is then presented as a process of becoming one with that box. which is what? it seems like it's upholding it. i think anti-oppression should be burning that box, and then tracking down the schematics for it and destroying them so that nobody can ever build these boxes or place people in them ever again. as though there is really any basis in sharing oppression based on physical characteristics, other than upholding a sense of conformity pushed down by the hierarchy in the first place. boxes. i'd rather get back to understanding humans as individuals with individual experiences that may or may not be related to their physical characteristics, and then building broad-based movements that throw all the categories out the window as meaningless. "i'm a human being, and the rest is bourgeois bullshit that doesn't fucking matter".
also, i'm not trying to put up a litmus test for being acceptably left-wing, as though there is some objective concept of leftism and the left isn't prone to collapsing into factions. ha! it's just that a lot of what i've seen over the last two years strikes me as lacking a certain perspective. yeah, we live in ubiquitous capitalism, and we all do hyper-capitalist things without realizing it, and etc. i guess i'm just noticing that the analysis seems produced to exist within, rather than opposed to.