Intersectional Feminism is for Everybody
By Lydia Green (she/her), activist, organizer, and ITF Founding Member, Policy/Education Co-Lead
For a long time, I internalized the idea that to support others was to put aside my own struggles. As someone who experiences both privilege and oppression, I thought that I had to split myself into pieces for different issues. I believed that I had to choose between unpacking my privilege or fighting oppression depending on the issue at hand — the oppression I face for my gender was not relevant in discussions of race, and my racial privilege was not relevant in discussions of sexuality, for instance.
Even once I started learning about intersectionality, the idea that different aspects of a person’s identity can combine to form unique types of oppression and privilege, I still thought that my privilege and oppression were unrelated. Intersectionality had taught me that women of color experienced more oppression than I, a white woman, do — but I still didn’t quite understand intersectional feminism.
I believed that embracing such feminism would require putting aside my concerns about my own gender oppression and considering myself an oppressor alongside the men I already knew were among those ranks. At this point, I knew that my white feminism wouldn’t help women of color, but, of course, when I believed that being intersectional meant having to ignore my own pain, I was incredibly resistant to embrace intersectionality.
Over time, though, I’ve learned that this view of intersectionality is an oversimplification: I am both privileged and oppressed in all situations, and both types of identities are relevant to my activism. I’ve also learned that even as a white person, I still benefit from feminism that centers people facing more axes of marginalization. But, unlike with my white feminism, people facing more forms of marginalization than me benefit too.
What “intersectionality” really is and why it matters
A beautiful thing about the concept of intersectionality is that it acknowledges that people are inherently complicated. Intersectionality shows us that most people do exist in this middle space between total privilege and total oppression, but we will only rid the world of oppressive systems in their entirety if we focus on liberating those at the intersections.
If we do not address the sexism that women of color face we will not fully rid the world of sexism. The continual existence of sexism hurts all women; if we do not address the racism that queer people of color face, we will not rid the world of racism, and that hurts all people of color. In other words, my liberation is connected to your liberation even if we don’t experience the exact same types of marginalization, because if any group is oppressed, none of us are free.
Here’s another example: the liberation of queer people of color would bring me personally closer to sexual liberation as a white queer person, since they experience the same queerphobia I do and more. The same isn’t true in the other direction, though — centering queer people with racial privilege in LGBTQ activism will help white queer people somewhat but will not address the racialized queerphobia that queer people of color experience.
As a white queer, I am not primarily impacted by racialized queerphobia, but the existence of queerphobia anywhere threatens my existence as a queer person. Unpacking one’s own privilege is, therefore, essential to the work of dismantling one’s own oppression. If we want the just world we’ve been dreaming of — for others but also for ourselves — we must be intersectional feminists.
A personal example
I’ve been thinking a lot about my own axes of privilege and oppression lately. Like most people, I experience both marginalization and privilege. I am a fat, Jewish, bisexual woman, but I’m also upper middle class, white, and cisgendered. When I was an intersectional feminism newbie, I felt like I had to choose between identifying either as privileged or oppressed; either I was fighting the sexism, fatphobia, antisemitism, and biphobia I face or I was unpacking the privilege I get from my race, class, and gender identity.
It never occurred to me that unpacking my privilege could also be a way of fighting for my own liberation. As a Jewish woman, two of the biggest forces of oppression I personally face on an everyday basis are feeling like I don’t quite fit into white, European beauty standards and worrying about antisemetic violence. Focusing on racial justice, particularly for black people, would help free me from both those concerns, since black people’s liberation includes the abolition of white, European beauty standards and the end of Nazi violence.
Black people are farther from the European beauty norms than I am, and experience worse and more frequent violence for their race than I ever will for being Jewish. Therefore, if I center myself, I don’t help black people achieve liberation, but when I center black people, they benefit and I benefit.
As a woman, particularly a fat woman with a lot of thick, dark body hair, I’ve always felt like I’m not feminine enough. Fighting for liberation for trans women means rethinking concepts of gender roles and femininity. Just focusing on cis women like me will never lead to the liberation of trans women, but the liberation of trans women helps hairy, fat cis women too. If we expand the definition of womanhood, there will be more room for me as well.
Even if someone doesn’t experience a typical form of oppression, they can still stand to benefit from intersectional feminism. Every human is born with differences. No two people look the same, act the same, or have the same exact experiences. Yet, our oppressive society tells us to conform to one thin, abled, straight, white, cis male model of existence.
Yes, you’re different too — and we should celebrate that
As Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body is Not An Apology, “Being different is difficult in a world that tells us there is a ‘normal’” (25). Not all forms of difference from the “normal” result in oppression, but all are stigmatized to some degree. Whether it’s attached to an oppressive system or not, all of us experience some form of difference that society tells us to feel shame about: maybe one of your arms is shorter than the other, maybe you have a stutter, maybe one of your parents died when you were young, or maybe you’re a woman. To be human is to be at least a little unique.
Not all forms of difference result in systemic oppression, but all systems of oppression stigmatize the concept of difference. White masculinity is all about conformity — heterosexuality, dominance, suppressing emotions white-picket-fence-nuclear-family-suburbia. Taylor writes, “We must move from occasionally celebrating difference (as long as it doesn’t fall too far outside the boundaries of our ideas of ‘normal’) to developing a difference-celebrating culture. Inequality and injustice rest firmly on our unwillingness to exalt the vast magnificence of the human body” (22).
This difference-celebrating culture that will liberate the oppressed among us will also liberate the most privileged among us from their body shame and fear of authenticity. To be a truly difference-celebrating culture, we must focus on the intersections. It’s not enough to just accept white women and men of color. We must find a way to celebrate trans women of color, queer disabled people of color, working class fat women, everyone — or there will still be that fear in the back of your head of straying too far from the “normal,” of not being straight-white-wealthy-cis-male-ablebodied-thin enough, no matter how many axes of privilege you benefit from.
Benefiting all of us
In addition to helping us all celebrate difference, intersectionality allows us to raise the bar for basic dignity and to feel collective joy. If the most vulnerable among us have guaranteed housing, transportation, food, water, physical and mental health care, respect, love, and every other thing that a modern human being needs to be healthy and fulfilled, the rest of us will have guaranteed access to these things too.
If you’ve ever been evicted, you should be an intersectional feminist. If you’ve ever gone without health care, you should be an intersectional feminist. If you’ve ever lived in transit desert or gone hungry or had polluted tap water or suffered any other type of indignity, you should be an intersectional feminist.
These systems of violence and oppression were designed to harm the most vulnerable among us, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are immune. When we ensure that even the fat, disabled, working class, black, trans, immigrant, non-Christian women of color who were supposed to suffer these indigities can live safe and happy lives, none of the rest of us ever have to worry about suffering from their oppression either.
The journalist Jaya Sundaresh summarizes the collective benefits of intersectional (and socialist) feminism best in a pair of Tweets, “‘A better world is possible. down with ‘allyship fatigue’, up with allyship exhilaration. you should be set on fire by the idea of liberation for black people, for the working class. This shit liberates all of us. if it feels hard, if it feels painful, you’re not doing it right.”
