Thinking Outside The Rainbow By Sabrina Alimahomed

The Combahee River Collective was a black lesbian organization movement which strived to end the racial, sexual, and class oppressions that all women of color face. While trying to dismantle the interlocking system of oppression, these women faced obstacles brought upon by the systems of capitalism and imperialism. The term outsider within was introduced in Sabrina Alimahomed’s article, “ Thinking Outside The Rainbow: Women of Color Redefining Queer Politics and Identity.” Outsider within means being part of a community, organization, but being marginalized for reasons like race, gender, sexuality. For example, race creates outsiders within’s in the feminist movement, thus women of color experience multiple oppressions at once, unlike white

Write an essay that explains and illustrates the significance of taking an intersectional approach to queer studies. Intersectionality is a theory which states that people have multiple identities and therefore belong to more than one community and thus experience multiple oppressions at the same time. Those who face multiple oppressions because of their layered identities are mostly queer women of color. Taking an intersectional approach to queer studies means exposing the inequalities and disadvantages that occur when people have multiple identities in order for transformational political work to happen. People of color, especially lesbian women of color experience this layered oppression. As stated in Sabrina Alimahomed’s article, “ Thinking Outside The Rainbow: Women of Color Redefining Queer Politics and Identity,” queer Latinas and Asian/Pacific Islander women experience marginality within the mainstream LGBT movement and their racial and ethnic communities. For queer Latinas and Asian/Pacific Islander women, race creates another layer of oppression, while white women use their race as a form of power and privilege. As stated in Audre Lorde’s article, “ Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” women of color are regarded as others and not important when it comes to white feminism. White women ignore their privilege of being white, and instead of focusing on how women are oppressed based on differences of race, sexuality, class, and age, they just focus on being oppressed as women (Lorde 3) . They fail to understand or even want to comprehend the struggles of women of