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Essays on womens intersectionality
Essays on womens intersectionality
Thesis on intersectional feminism
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Essays on womens intersectionality
Essays on womens intersectionality
Thesis on intersectional feminism
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Recommended: Essays on womens intersectionality
In “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform,” Dean Spade proposes that the United States was founded through “racialization…(which) continues to operate under new guises… that produce, manage, and deploy gender categories and sexuality and family norms” (16). More over, these laws and norms tend to maintain the “status quo,” and employ an inherently flawed justice system that is only equipped to address single-axis discrimination issues (5). Thus, the intersectionality movement is largely dismissed by the social and justice systems, as it utilizes “critical intersectional tools… that are often (too) difficult for legal scholars to comprehend” (17). Interstionality’s progress is also impeded by advocates leaving to support single-axis issues. However, Spade warns that this approach is ineffective, as it fails to protect the most marginalized members of society.
When the U.S. Declaration of Independence was written, it was generalized towards one group: white, preferably European, males. As years passed and the United States grew into a well-known nation, it was still clear that this group was getting more rights than others. This group created the idea of intersectionality to anyone who did not fit inside their parameters of being the typical the Euro-American white male. Everyone should be getting free rights, but this was not the case, until the other groups started fighting back. The women of the United States were one group who stood up and fought for their rights, ending women’s suffrage.
William Jennings Bryan once said, “Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority”. Standing up to the majority is vital, it gives individuals the opportunity to express their individual, unique opinions and experiences. It allows the majority to become open to diversity and the cultures that come along with it. This has been shown throughout history, Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is an instance of this. This speech encapsulated all that he was fighting for, for the African American minority in America and their rights.
The white women is oppressed but relishes in the freedom of her race. The black woman faces a unique combination of prejudice for both her gender and the color of her skin. When society tries to separate humanity into categories, including “ladies” and “colored people,” it is made unclear where we belong, according to Cooper. The women’s movement that is sweeping the nation is meant to teach courteousness and compassion, yet the white woman still looks down upon the black woman as her inferior. Likewise, while she acknowledges that some members of the black community have received honors, the race will not rise from oppression until the whole race does so, particularly black women.
Intersectionality is deemed 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”. There are loads of women nowadays that are still disregarded, women experiencing hardship, disease, and other issue that may allow women to feel as if they are not a part of the solution of the world’s problems. In the Article, am not I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality, the author’s state, “She enacts dispersal and dissemination both in terms of being members of a historical diaspora, but equally, in the sense of disarticulating, rupturing and de-centering the precariously sutured complacency and self-importance of certain feminisms” (Brahe e t., al 2004
Race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and ability strive as expressions that contain meaning with every single person. While these concepts do not add up to inherently terrible ideals, prejudice and injustice uniquely hardwire themselves within these terms. Intersectional feminism defines itself by the advocation of gender equality among all people while noting that every single person experiences oppression and discrimination, causing the problems surrounding these injustices to vary and shape a distinct experience and struggle for every individual. Intersectional feminism can change the world by introducing inclusivity and respect to our societal norms and beliefs.
It is unclear how research on intersectionality ought be conducted given how few guidelines exist (Bowleg 2012: 4). Both critical race theory and intersectionality accept that race is a social construct and that racism can intersect with other identities to change the way oppression manifests itself (Bowleg 2012: 5). Crucially, critical race theory has had an impact on discourse related to public health (Bowleg 2012: 5). With that said, intersectionality is able to provide a unifying language for issues involving intersecting identities and provides a more informative discussion by studying different identities together (Bowleg 2012: 6). It embraces complexity to contribute to a more accurate
At the heart of whiteness studies is the invisibility of whiteness and white privilege (Ahmed, 2004). Whiteness is thought of as the hidden criterion to which every other race is measured against. Through the lens of whiteness, the “other” is seen as deviant (Ahmed, 2004). The invisibility of whiteness, however, is only from the perspective of those who are white (Matthews, 2012). To people who are not white, it is pervasive and blatant.
The article displayed a discussion between a white woman and a black woman, where the white woman felt that she and the black woman had undergone the same form of discrimination because they were both women. In contrast, the other woman had argued that she had faced further forms of discrimination because she was black. While intersectionality doesn’t strictly refer to race, it’s true that both women hadn’t undergone the exact same types of discrimination, because the white woman has more privilege. To reiterate the main argument, this example can be applied to various types of people and their experiences with human rights violations and
Gender inequality spurred a hefty discussion, and for a good reason. Women are discriminated against in the media, politics, and the workplace, while men have countless advantages in every aspect of society (Eitzen, Zinn, Smith 223). Some will argue that there are not racial issues that still occur today. They believe the topic has been exhausted, and that there is nothing left to change. Naturally, these arguments are made by whites who have no idea what discrimination means.
Moreover, Hooks thinks that white feminist women were also incapable of recognising their own race or ethnicity due to following the ideal norms of feminism (cited in Valentine 2007, 11-12). Though civic rights might be formally available to all, the intersection of different social categories of identities such as gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality influence to what extent people are able to exercise their rights. As the experience of a white woman and a black woman cannot be possibly compared to each other, and thus, feminism catering only to the white privileged cannot strive for equality when it does not accommodate and reflects the experiences of women of background who are facing the multifaceted oppression. Therefore, critical race theorists developed ‘intersectionality’ to describe the interconnected and interdependence of race with other social
Intersectionality is described by Davis as “the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power”(p. 456, Davis). In relation to inequality and intersectionality, Browne and Misra discuss the anti-categorical approach which explains how by placing people in categories of race, class, and gender, we are only perpetuating inequality by continuing to acknowledge our differences. These categories are inherently intersectional, with race being gendered and “classed”, and gender being “raced” and classed”. (p. 468, Browne, Misra) In conclusion, race, gender, and intersectionality play a major role in understanding inequality.
Intersectionality is a framework designed to acknowledge and investigate the dynamic between various identities and their connected systems of oppression. As someone who struggles to understand the purpose of labels, as they give name to their co-existing stigma and predispositions, it intrigued me when I first began the paper, writing: “As a white male…”. In a society where identities are necessary to express oneself, everyone is susceptible to the oppression and benefits of these systems, and the goal of this paper is to simply explore how I, Nolan Cobb, was, and am affected by the stigma attached to the various labels of which I choose to identify. It is, however, noteworthy to mention that I will be greatly condensing my experiences throughout
This is not the case for Latinas, and Black women who tend to receive the full extent of the law along with their male counterparts. While this only examines one issue with intersectionality in the courts, identifying this problem can help to begin the process to fix the great issues. In conclusion, intersectionality has flourished in people’s minds after it had been coined by Black-feminist Kimberle Crenshaw in the late 1980’s (Sarah & Jones, 2018).
Kareen Harboyan English 1C Professor Supekar March 15, 2018 Word Count: Crenshaw’s Mapping the Margins: The Marginalization of Women of Color Analyzed Through Generalization and A Feminist Lens Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color expands on the multifaceted struggles of women of color and the generalizations ingrained in society that limit women of color and keep them in a box. In this text, Crenshaw builds on the concept of intersectionality which proposes that social categorizations such as gender and race are intertwined and have great influence on one another.