SUPER PUNK

Exploring feminist theory using the readings “Interthinking Intersectionality” by Jennifer C. Nash, “The Problem of Speaking for Others” by Linda Alcoff, and lastly “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Issues” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty.

When we speak about feminism there is a common topic that seems to be the main focus among feminist theorists, and that is intersectionality.

It is defined as the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

Intersectionality is a tool for the analysis, the work of advocacy, and policy-making, which addresses multiple discriminations and helps us understand how sets of different identities influence the access that can be had to rights and opportunities.

When using intersectionality as an analytical tool, one cannot neglect the intersections of race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, etc.

Gender conceptual frameworks focus solely on gender relations. Although it is customary to state that women are not a homogeneous sector, the implications of this are usually lost at the time of application.

Rather, it tends to simply point the finger and create a competition to see who is most oppressed. As a result, certain issues and experiences remain obscured or invisible.

Problems that only or mainly affect certain women may be left without an appropriate or adequate response.

Similarly, many legal approaches conceive discrimination on the basis of multiple factors, which affect each other, each adding its weight to the overall burden of inequality.

Intersectionality in public policies implies a change of perspective regarding the way government and society execute and evaluates their actions for the public good.
It is necessary that everyone has an impact on the proposal and management of solutions, in addition, that the State provides opportunities and spaces for those that are not in a position of privilege.

I believe intersectionality is the first step to making feminism work, what type of feminism are we talking about if we are not speaking about every woman in the world, it’s important that we stick together to enforce the movement to deconstruct society’s patriarchal beliefs.

There are issues of how are we using intersectionality as feminists. Alcoff in “The problem of Speaking for Others” states “The point is that a kind of representation occurs in all cases of speaking for, whether I am speaking for myself or for others, that this representation is never a simple act of discovery, and that it will most likely have an impact on the individual so represented.”

Intersectionality helps us understand and establish the impact of such convergence on situations of opportunities and access to rights, and to see how policies, programs, services, and the laws that affect an aspect of our lives are linked to others.

Still, there is a problem when people that come from a place of privilege speak on issues that are not theirs and they use it as their savior tool other than uplifting voices.

It’s important that we all are aware of the issues going on with the women in our society but why are we silencing their voices, assuming their problems, and then trying to fix those assumed problems instead of listening to what they have to say?

We can’t force people to talk but must uplift and listen to those who are already speaking up about their issues.

In order to use intersectionality in our work, we have to think differently about identity, equality, and power.

Jennifer C. Nash in Rethinking Intersectionality states “Intersectionality’s reliance on black women as the basis for its claims to complex subjectivity renders black women prototypical intersectional subjects whose experiences of marginality are imagined to provide a theoretical value-added.”

Intersectionality pays little attention to the role of sexuality, nationality, or class when discussing black women’s experiences, but instead Nash proposes that black women’s experiences are solely the “aggregate of race and gender”.

We need to stop focusing not on predetermined categories or isolated issues, but on everything that defines our access to rights and opportunities; that is, in the points of convergence, in the complexity, in the structures, and in the dynamic processes.

In analytical terms, it implies seeing the eradication of discrimination and the enhancement of diversity as central issues for development and the full exercise of human rights.

It implies investing substantially in the analytical phase of our work; intersectional analysis is indeed more intellectually demanding than many other approaches to gender.

Western feminists have a big issue of speaking for others, more specifically for women from other cultures, but we need to stop, because as I stated above in this synthesis, western feminism solely focuses on gender discrimination, and disregards what other things affect women.

American women have historically fought against stereotypes that all women experience as being inferior. Western feminism is exclusive, and it might not even include all American women.

Because white middle-class women are typically the first to profit from social change and advanced privilege, some critics have said that this social construct serves as a means of further separating the connections between women from various socioeconomic backgrounds.

Advancement for some people does not always translate to advancement for everyone. Third-world feminists adopt a radical stance that contests the idea that all women have the same experiences.

They accept the diversity and varying points of view among women while also drawing attention to the hybridity and multiplicity of identities.

They acknowledge the need to identify various forms of dominance in women’s lives, reject the idea that women’s experiences are universal, and emphasize the variations among women from various social backgrounds.

Feminism can effectively address the complicated and wide-ranging issues we confront today by taking into account the variety of differences that make up the category of “women.”

“Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of ‘women’ as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always-ready constituted group, one which has been labeled ‘powerless’, [‘exploited’, ‘sexually harassed’ by feminist scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses]” Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.

Hegemonic feminism makes us believe that here in the US women have all figured out and that feminism has already won, there is not much more progress that is going to happen since we’re already at the peak of wokeness, but that is just a very ignorant belief.

Western feminist focuses on the liberation of women in other countries, basing their worries on ignorant accusations, ignoring the liberation of women in our own country that are being oppressed because of their social categories that are not “woman”.