From my understanding, intersectional feminism believes this:
Not all women experience the world the same, or have the same struggles. You can subdivide people's struggles further.
For example, women and men experience the world differently.
Black people and white people experience the world differently with what sort of things they can take for granted and things that other people will assume about them.
And it goes further.
A white woman and a black woman, though both women, will each experience life a bit differently. A black woman and a black man, too!
And even further,
A gay black woman will experience life differently and have a different, more specific set of struggles than a straight black woman.
Basically, it's not just ethnicity, not just gender, not just sexuality, not just [insert method of subdividing people that can be imagined] that changes a person's experiences and struggles in the world, but the collection of all of them that changes their experiences of the world and the sorts of privileges and prejudices, etc, they experience.
Well, intersectionality doesn't go that far. First, not every difference counts as oppression. What does, that depends on... what the woke people agree on today (which may differ from what they agreed on yesterday or tomorrow). Race, gender, sexual orientation = yes. Being left-handed, or being poor = no. Being a demisexual, or otherkin = depends on whom you ask; probably yes in college, but no anywhere else. Disability = generally yes, but not autism, because reasons. It's complicated.
So there are N categories, and 2^N groups. Within each group, people are considered the same. For example, all black straight able-bodied etc women, whether they are millionaires or homeless, are considered to have the same experience.
That's not true. Intersectionality takes those things into account, it's just that in US law those traits are not illegal to use discriminately. They should be, but they're not protected classes.
> Disability = generally yes, but not autism, because reasons.
That's also not true, being neurotypical is acknowledged as a factor that makes your life easier. Since autism is included in the definition of disability under US law, it is also a protected class.
I was trying to describe intersectionalism, not the US law.
I have never seen anyone targeted by an online mob just because they said something bad about left-handed people. I am not aware of people being extra careful lest they accidentally offend someone left-handed. Maybe that's just my bubble.
Among the woke people, discussions of poverty are always framed in context of some discriminated group. Like, you can talk about the poverty of women, or poverty of black people. But you don't talk about poverty of poor people in general. Poverty is considered a bad thing that happens to oppressed people, but it is not a thing that makes one oppressed. No one cares about a homeless cishet white male... unless you say he probably has some mental problem, in which case it becomes an example of ableist oppression.
This is the reason why hardcore Marxists (such as Zizek) complain when people say that social justice warriors are Marxists. Marxism is about class conflict. Intersectionalism is about all kinds of conflicts... except for the class conflict! Intersectionalism is about having more female CEOs, more gay CEOs, more transsexual CEOs. Marxism is about eliminating the CEOs. To put it bluntly, intersectionalism is about things that can also happen to rich kids.
The problem with autism is that people on autistic spectrum are often quite bad at social skills... such as political correctness (think: James Damore). Which makes them unpopular among the woke people.
I surmised as much. Favouritism is another word for the same.
The problem with intellect is its need for reductionism. I understand there are strong feelings "supporting" the narratives as well, even if they don't really generalize to everyone.
Lots of other people have already replied, but I didn't see this explanation yet.
The concept of intersectionality came from a court case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where this black woman was denied employment. She had noticed that the company was hiring very few black women and thought they were being biased against her when they refused to hire her despite her qualifications. The court checked the numbers and they found that GM was hiring a sufficient amount of black men to not be racist, and a sufficient amount of white women to not be sexist. So, despite actually not hiring black women, GM was let off the hook.
If you've studied set theory, you probably know the concept of the intersection of two sets: basically the middle part of a venn diagram. The theory of intersectionality says basically, when people are biased against you in more than one way (in this case through sexism and racism) that the effects compound to create a situation where people like you are underrepresented in terms of opportunities, in a way that affirmative action failed to take into account.
Here's my pragmatic take on what it means. This isn't an endorsement.
It's a preference ranking based on identity group membership. The UC system has helpfully provided a table on the third page of this document[1]. Each organization may have a slightly different stack ranking, but suffice to say higher ranked group members are "more diverse" and thus should be preferentially admitted, hired, etc, to make up for systemic racism.
I believe "intersectional" comes from gender and ethnic studies, and refers to different axes of oppression. The idea is that different kinds of privilege/opperession intersect in individuals - such as a white (privileged) woman (disadvantaged).
There's a whole body of theory around intersectionality. That's probably the term to look up in Google.
My sibling commenter provided some good info on intersectionality, but in fairness it is worth pointing out some of the rumblings against intersectionality. Here is one from an author who I would describe as a radical leftist:
"By avoiding the morbid libidinal core of white supremacy, identity politics, intersectionality, and social privilege discourse comprise the most sophisticated sector of this police apparatus."
Let me try. You know the concept of oppression, like "men oppress women" or "whites oppress blacks". You can talk about each of those separately. But what happens when you notice that everyone has both a gender and a race? Should e.g. a white woman be supported as a victim, or rather attacked as an oppressor?
So you get intersectionalism, the updated philosophy of "Oppression 2.0", which says that there are multiple axes of oppression (such as gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.), and instead of dividing the world into 2 groups, you need to divide it into a matrix of 2^N groups. And the idea is that multi-oppressed people have more than the sum of oppression... for example, black women face all the oppression that white women face, plus all the oppression that black men face, plus some extra oppression unique for them.
It is still black-and-white thinking along each axis of oppression. Like, it would be a heresy to suggest that women have some disadvantages, but men have some disadvantages (albeit less than women) too. No! Women have disadvantages, therefore men have no disadvantages, end of debate. Etc. However, it introduces the extra nuance that e.g. white women may have some disadvantages that black men don't have, and black men have some disadvantages that white women don't have. However, black women trump them all at being oppressed, absolutely (i.e. don't you ever dare to mention that e.g. police kills more black men than black women).
So far the theory. What it means in practice is that now you can dismiss any person by finding someone who is more oppressed. For example, in the old days, if you were in a feminist group, and you were a (white) woman, you were considered a good person, end of debate. That means, white women were at the top of the pecking order. These days, if you are in a feminist group, and you are a white woman, you are considered a good person as long as the group complains about men... but if you try to make an argument about your own oppression, if any black woman decides that you take too much of the spotlight, she can silence you using the intersectional argument. Of course, she can in turn be silenced by a black lesbian woman. Who can in turn be silenced by a... well, it doesn't go on forever like this, because at some moment someone is a too tiny minority, so people will just ignore them. So, maybe the black lesbian woman actually does not have enough political power to silence the black straight woman. Sometimes the black woman doesn't have enough political power to silence the white woman. It depends.
So, whether you are a victim or a villain, depends on who opposes you in the debate. Which is kinda what this story is about. There was a white woman, she tried to play a victim card. After losing against a stronger card, she failed to humbly accept the defeat according to the rules of the game. Therefore she received an exemplary punishment. According to the rules, she is a villain, therefore she deserves all she got. Maybe from our perspective, this is completely disproportionate. But arguably, she made the choice to play this game, so perhaps she deserves it partially.
