Unpopular opinion: intersectional feminism is responsible for a lot of collateral damage that it is becoming increasingly urgent to address. It presents itself as comprehensive in its revelatory powers re: marginalized experience even though it actually enables silencing and reinforced marginalization of the most marginalized of such experiences by virtue of its very theoretical structure. Its ideals are not practically supported by its theoretical tools due to their own structural flaws.
In brief, upholding positionality as a criterion of discourse and ultimately decentering privileged commentary in attempt to define narrative authority ends up fostering oppressive dogma and suspension of necessary critical inquiry in the very attempts to do the opposite, and in ways that large-scale matter to the lives and plights of the most marginalized. […]
This may be a relatively digestible bit of expansion copied from another thread. For context, someone was musing about how third wave feminism seems to have a severe problem recognizing issues like misogyny and homophobia and generally identifying social conservativism within Muslim communities:Honestly I think this is partially wrought by intersectionality theory itself. It tries to unravel and juxtapose nuanced experiences within marginalized groups, but is absolutely ill equipped to do so because it falls into the trap of crystallizing identities and experiences to the testimony of visible community voices without interrogating those voices to begin with, because its very model undermines interrogation. It hinges on mechanisms like positionality to center the voices and experiences of oppressed people, such that representatives of those people are granted authority and outsiders are considered incapable of accessing the knowledge and experience to challenge that.
Except when those representatives given authority by virtue of their positionality are themselves bound to a conservative institution and dedicated to a cultural zeitgeist that is at odds with the values underlying intersectional theory to begin with, while intersectionality itself put roadblocks against any capacity to question or challenge such positionality and upholds a model of specifically decentering critique from outsiders, you get people who believe they are being the most authentic and supportive they can by refusing to extend models of critique that are not necessarily limited by their position as outsiders by sheer virtue of how they are positioned. So they eat all the BS up and the Linda Sarsours of marginalized communities continue to be upheld as representatives beyond reproach. And that’s third wave feminism ‘done right’.
There’s something perversely lacking in self awareness about the very theoretical models people take as authoritative right now precisely because they attempt radical self awareness.
I think a symptom of is that the moral and epistemic clarity of posts like http://nothingismere.tumblr.com/post/154828689842/ozymandias271-questions-that-will-apparently-be is weirdly uncommon. Like, this is such a bizarre exchange:
Querent - “How can I figure out what I should be doing to fight racism without burdening people of color by constantly asking them what I should do?”
@ozymandias271 - “You have a brain? Presumably you can use it to assess the quality of information yourself? Why are you making people of color do this for you?”
It’s one thing to recommend a debiasing intervention (e.g., ‘people under-weight evidence in the form of self-reports of others’ experiences when those people have lived very different lives; assign more weight to compensate’), and another thing to act as though the debiasing intervention replaces normal weighing-of-the-evidence altogether.
First-hand accounts from the disprivileged are a weight on the scale, not a qualitatively higher form of evidence/argument; obscuring that fact and talking in non-quantitative terms encourages epistemic learned helplessness like in Ozy’s post.
I mean, the exchange makes perfect sense once you take into account that Querent readers are trying first and foremost to ensure that they don’t get yelled at, and that openly admitting to that would get them yelled at. Ozy’s approach is the one that actually works better for everyone in the absence of any risk of yelling.