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Intersectionality is a sociological concept that has spread widely over the past decade thanks to social platforms, universities and political debate: it has thus broken free from the U.S. academic niche in which it was born to land in mainstream media languages.
Birth and evolution of a concept
The term “intersectional” originated within third-wave feminism, promoted by African American jurist and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined it using the geometric metaphor of the intersection of two straight lines; intersectionality should therefore consider socio-economic affiliations (gender, race, and status) as multiple, analyzable only as an overlap of them and not individually.
According to those who practice intersectional feminism, discrimination does not travel on parallel roads or, at any rate, destined never to meet. It is the opposite. Discriminations intersect at a crossroads that postpones the interdependence of all injustices, which impact at multiple levels on one another and often simultaneously. To give an example, a black woman, beyond her personal and social situation, would automatically experience double discrimination by being part of two “disadvantaged” categories (female gender and African American ethnicity), which are not thinkable psychologically and socially as independent but acquire meaning simultaneously.
From this principle comes Crenshaw's road intersection metaphor, which states:
"...an analogy with traffic at an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Thus, discrimination can flow in either direction. And if an accident happens at an intersection, it may have been caused by cars traveling in any of the directions, and sometimes by all of them."
The further consequence of this approach is that the woman in the previous example, in this view, would automatically be considered disadvantaged with respect to both her black male peer and her white female peer, with whom she shares only one aspect in common and not both. According to intersectional theory then, the history of the individual and the community of belonging would not be informative in potency, no matter whether the white man suffers from mental or physical pathology, no matter even whether the white woman is underpaid, ascribed memberships respond to an ironclad mechanism that divides the world multiple categories of dominant and dominated.
The link to class struggle
An article by the president of Centro Studi Machiavelli entitled Red rainbow. Gender theory as part of neo-Marxism, that piece predictably aroused much controversy. I link to the paper in question to weave an additional thread to the analysis. Intersectionality arises precisely within feminism and not elsewhere, so much so that this is now referred to as “intersectional feminism.” While it is true that not all feminists are intersectional or Marxist (think of the TERFs who oppose the trans narrative as women), most neo-feminism has totally embraced the gender perspective such that critical voices “from within” are few and almost always tarred with the worst charges of high treason.
Intersectional feminism was born at a time of great political and ideal crisis in Marxism-the year Crenshaw's book came out was, ironically, precisely 1989, the watershed between the old world and the society of bourgeois affluence and reflux. It is safe to assume that neo-feminism, in its narrative of a compact group of dominant and dominated, has substituted social classes for gender classes, instilling a clash of the sexes that aims at no harmonization but even at increasingly sharp segregation between groups. In recent years, intersectionality has gone further, cutting like a shear through identities, individuals, trying to build a world of labels and memberships that are increasingly stringent and divorced from reality. This does not help the development of the human person. Moreover, according to the stereotype created by intersectionalist ideology the representative of a minority, a homosexual, a woman or an Italian of foreign origin, should by automatism vote for progressive leftist parties, beyond the development of their personal critical consciousness and concrete interests.
The struggle is real only if it is NOT intersectional
The European elections will be held on June 8 and 9, and these issues, far from being confined to the lecture halls of a California university faculty, are increasingly close and relevant. To use a metaphor, intersectional feminism has behaved like the European Union: it has united very different realities, it has come into being to defend the interests of a few (lobbies and academic power groups), and finally when it has been possible to challenge it, it has received various criticisms.
We want to close with an appeal to vote but above all to reflect: just as the trade union tripartite has not always defended the weakest workers, the lgbt and feminist movements cannot be representative of all female and homosexual people. Each citizen must be free to vote beyond the narrow confines of interest groups, in accordance with his or her own interests and, above all, his or her own intimacy of values. The struggle is real only if it is NOT intersectional.
A graduate in Psychology, a political activist, she cultivates in parallel a passion for the topics of political communication, the relationship between the sexes and military history.
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