There are many ways to consider the idea of an intersection, as my fellow bloggers are demonstrating with their unique, thoughtful posts! I sat down with G_ yesterday to have a conversation about intersection(s) and it went in a very different direction than I had envisioned for my own post! Have a listen to her audi-story, it turned out beautifully!
When I think of “intersection,” what first comes to mind is intersectionality. I first learned about the idea of intersectionality in a class on Gender in Public Rhetoric and Media that I took my sophomore year. I grappled with the idea as I was writing a paper on Audre Lorde’s speech/essay “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” trying to wrap my head around the far reaching depths of its meaning. In writing this, I was working out how as a framework intersectionality works to disrupt common ways that identity politics are used to oppress, marginalize, and minimize the experiences of people who exist on the margins, at the intersections.
It was a radical shift in how I understood the world, and reconciled a problem that arises when you start to think carefully about problems, difference, and oppression: that a person can be “both/and” rather than just “either/or.” A person can be both privileged and oppressed, at once and to varying degrees. It also exposes the way that an identity situated at multiple axes of difference may face compounded oppression at any one moment. What this perspective does is, rather than pitting one kind of oppression against another, it validates that we each have many identities that may help us or put us at a disadvantage in various contexts. So as I was reading Lorde and trying to find myself in this theory, I found that intersectionality resolves a certain dissonance, by validating struggle and exposing the dynamics of power. It illuminates the way that oppression is systemic.
Learning this lesson was mind-blowing and radically changed the way I approach problem solving, activism, and leadership. It is a continual process to recognize that 1) people (including myself) posses many identities and it is useful to talk about them in the plural, 2) that these identities don’t always fit nicely together, 3) that it is not a contradiction to have disparate identities, 4) that identity is tied to power and this relationship is inextricable, 5) that some identities are mutable and others are not and that (non)mutability matters.
While I learned about intersectionality in the context of systems of oppression, identity, power and privilege, there is much to be learned by extending this theory (which many awesome scholar-activist-feminists do) to unexpected territory.
My journey through the interdisciplinarity of environmental studies has led me to similar conclusions. First, that you must look beyond a singular actor to see individuals within intertwining systems. That people exist at once at a local and global and in-betweener scale, just like problems and their solutions. And lastly, that engaging the tools that other disciplines have to offer (much like recognizing how identities overlap and interact) can better inform an inquiry into how things work. I’m writing my thesis from this approach and this has informed pretty much everything I’ve read and written since.
In a more meta way, I learned of intersectionality as part of my course of study in ENVS, thus embodying the need for traversing disciplinary boundaries. So, to reflect on the sense of intersections that G_ and I discussed, it is in this way that we find those path altering convergences.