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Multiple Social Categories Of Gender

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INTRODUCTION

Intersectionality between multiple social categories such as gender, age, race, sexuality has received a considerable amount of attention during the past few years. This is so because more people are voicing out their oppressive experiences through national protests and social media platforms. Once the feminist thought of gender as a variable within the multiple social categories of identity consisting of being 'woman or female ' and 'man or male ' is no longer sufficient to encounter the multiple complexes of social discrimination that many women faces today. This suggests that identities are not created by a unit variable of social categories, but are created through multiple variables of social categories and experiences …show more content…

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 …show more content…

It is also an analytical tool for studying, understanding, and responding to the ways in which a variable of social category as in gender, intersects with other identities and how these intersections contribute to the experiences of those who are oppressed and privileged (AWID 2004, 1). In general, women with privileged are often hardly impacted by structural and dynamic powers, however, by compounding the intersecting multifaceted layers of identities, women with backgrounds, disabilities, status, age, and so on experiences the impact

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