Critical intersectional scholarship enhances researchers’ and scholar-activists’ ability to open novel research frontier
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English Pages 540 [541] Year 2023
Table of contents :
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: intersectionality and transforming the production of knowledge • Mary Romero
PART I: FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
2 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist • Lori Amber Roessner
3 Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): intersectionality and activism • Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
4 Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality • Matthew W. Hughey
5 The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship • Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
PART II: INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
SECTION IIA: CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
6 Intersectionality as an ethical commitment • Sophie Withaeckx
7 Disability and rural poverty in the global South • Shaun Grech
8 Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research in feminist food studies • Barbara Parker
SECTION IIB: CRITICAL SEXUALITY STUDIES
9 Researching sexuality and state • Jyoti Puri
10 Space, place, and urban future • Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder
11 Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional • Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
SECTION IIC: CRITICAL INDIGENOUS STUDIES
12 Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism • Renya K. Ramirez
13 Intersectionality and ethnography • Robert Keith Collins
14 Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology • Andrew Jolivétte
SECTION IID: CITIZENSHIP STUDIES
15 Intersectional insights into lived citizenship • Daniela Cherubini
16 Heterosexual marriage-related regimes • Laura Odasso
17 Intersectionality, citizenship and labor • Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas
18 Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context • Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson
PART III: INTERSECTIONALITY AND APPLIED RESEARCH
SECTION IIIA: SOCIAL WORK, DISASTER RECOVERY AND HEALTH DISPARITIES
19 Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma • Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim
20 Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery • Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt
21 Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s health • Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse
SECTION IIIB: SOCIAL JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY STUDIES
22 Scholar activist intersectional approaches • Akosua Adomako Ampofo
23 Multi-level analyses of homecare labor • Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun
24 Environmental activism and immigrant women of color • Nadia Y. Kim
25 Children’s rights and social change • Brian Gran and Colette Ngana
PART IV: INTERSECTIONAL GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM
26 Centering region and multi-scalar lenses • Ghassan Moussawi
27 Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research • Gabriella Sanchez
28 Intersectionality beyond its traditions • Bandana Purkayastha and Miho Iwata
29 Centering intersectionality in transnational research • Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales
Index
RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON INTERSECTIONALITY
RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN SOCIOLOGY Series Editor: Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Professor of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Germany The Research Handbooks in Sociology series provides an up-to-date overview on the frontier developments in current sociological research fields. The series takes a theoretical, methodological and comparative perspective to the study of social phenomena. This includes different analytical approaches, competing theoretical views and methodological innovations leading to new insights in relevant sociological research areas. Each Research Handbook in this series provides timely, influential works of lasting significance. These volumes will be edited by one or more outstanding academics with a high international reputation in the respective research field, under the overall guidance of series editor Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bamberg. The Research Handbooks feature a wide range of original contributions by well-known authors, carefully selected to ensure a thorough coverage of current research. The Research Handbooks will serve as vital reference guides for undergraduate students, doctoral students, postdoctorate students and research practitioners in sociology, aiming to expand current debates, and to discern the likely research agendas of the future. Titles in the series include: Research Handbook on the Sociology of Education Edited by Rolf Becker Research Handbook on the Sociology of the Family Edited by Norbert F. Schneider and Michaela Kreyenfeld Research Handbook on Environmental Sociology Edited by Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader Research Handbook on Analytical Sociology Edited by Gianluca Manzo Handbook of Sociological Science Contributions to Rigorous Sociology Edited by Klarita Gërxhani, Nan Dirk de Graaf and Werner Raub Research Handbook on the Sociology of Organizations Edited by Mary Godwyn Research Handbook on Digital Sociology Edited by Jan Skopek Research Handbook on Intersectionality Edited by Mary Romero
Research Handbook on Intersectionality Edited by
Mary Romero Professor Emerita, Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, USA
RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN SOCIOLOGY
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Mary Romero 2023
Cover image: Aedrian on Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930295 This book is available electronically in the Sociology, Social Policy and Education subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800378056
ISBN 978 1 80037 804 9 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 805 6 (eBook)
EEP BoX
Contents
List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxvi 1
Introduction: intersectionality and transforming the production of knowledge Mary Romero
PART I
1
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
2
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist Lori Amber Roessner
15
3
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): intersectionality and activism Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
33
4
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality Matthew W. Hughey
51
5
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
69
PART II INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES SECTION IIA CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES 6
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment Sophie Withaeckx
90
7
Disability and rural poverty in the global South Shaun Grech
108
8
Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research in feminist food studies Barbara Parker
123
SECTION IIB CRITICAL SEXUALITY STUDIES 9
Researching sexuality and state Jyoti Puri
143
10
Space, place, and urban future Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder
158
11
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
170
v
vi Research handbook on intersectionality SECTION IIC CRITICAL INDIGENOUS STUDIES 12
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism Renya K. Ramirez
186
13
Intersectionality and ethnography Robert Keith Collins
204
14
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology Andrew Jolivétte
223
SECTION IID CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 15
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship Daniela Cherubini
239
16
Heterosexual marriage-related regimes Laura Odasso
257
17
Intersectionality, citizenship and labor Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas
274
18
Gender-based violence and citizenship in a migration context Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson
292
PART III INTERSECTIONALITY AND APPLIED RESEARCH SECTION IIIA SOCIAL WORK, DISASTER RECOVERY AND HEALTH DISPARITIES 19
Intersectionality and immigrant and refugee trauma Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim
313
20
Power dynamics driving disasters’ impacts, response, and recovery Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt
332
21
Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s health Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse
351
SECTION IIIB SOCIAL JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY STUDIES 22
Scholar activist intersectional approaches Akosua Adomako Ampofo
370
23
Multi-level analyses of homecare labor Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun
385
24
Environmental activism and immigrant women of color Nadia Y. Kim
404
Contents vii 25
Children’s rights and social change Brian Gran and Colette Ngana
421
PART IV INTERSECTIONAL GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM 26
Centering region and multi-scalar lenses Ghassan Moussawi
443
27
Intersectionality and migrant smuggling research Gabriella Sanchez
458
28
Intersectionality beyond its traditions Bandana Purkayastha and Miho Iwata
476
29
Centering intersectionality in transnational research Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales
494
Index510
Contributors
Akosua Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. At the heart of her work are questions of identity and power—within families, political and religious spaces, and the knowledge industry. In 2005 she became the foundation Director of the University of Ghana’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy and from 2010 to 2015 she was the Director of the Institute of African Studies. Adomako Ampofo was the founding Vice-President (2013) and immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa (http://www.as-aa.org/); an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham; and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is Editor-in-Chief, Contemporary Journal of African Studies, and Co-Editor, Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog (http://www.cihablog.com/). Her recent book co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts is titled Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (Emerald Publishing, 2021). Pallavi Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research is situated at the intersections of immigration, gender, families, unpaid and paid labor, intersectionality, transnationalism. She is the author of the book entitled The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families and the Failures of Dependent-Visa Policy (New York University Press, 2022). Her other research has been published in many peer-reviewed journals including the American Behavioral Scientist, Contexts, Sociological Forum, Gender, Work and Organization, Women, Gender and Families of Color among others. Daniela Cherubini is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. She is part of the research group “OTRAS. Feminist perspectives in social research” at the University of Granada, Spain. Her research focuses on gender, migration and citizenship, care and domestic work, gender-based violence and intersectionality, mainly from a qualitative perspective. She is the co-author of Global Domestic Workers. Intersectional Inequalities and Struggles for Rights (Bristol University Press, 2021). Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and the International Institute at UCLA. She is the author of Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell UP, 2009) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, ethnicity, and migration under global capitalism. Robert Keith Collins, PhD, a four-field trained anthropologist, is Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. He holds a BA in Anthropology and a BA in Native American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Collins also holds an MA and PhD in Anthropology from UCLA. Using a person-centered ethnographic approach, his research explores American Indian cultural changes and African and Native American interactions in North, Central, and South America. viii
Contributors ix Cynthia J. Cranford is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research analyses inequalities of gender, labor and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. She is author of Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances, published in 2020 by Cornell University’s ILR Press, co-winner of the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements Section, and co-author of Self-employed Workers Organize: Law, Policy and Unions (McGill-Queens University Press, 2005). Cranford’s work has also been published in several journals including Critical Sociology, Gender & Society, Gender, Work and Organisation, Just Labour, Social Problems, Work, Employment and Society, and in several edited volumes. Filomena M. Critelli, PhD, is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. She teaches courses in social welfare history and policy, diversity and oppression, trauma and human rights, and global social welfare. Her research focuses on human rights of immigrants and refugees and global migration, as well as women’s rights and gender-based violence in domestic and international contexts. Critelli is Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Global Engagement, which promotes cross-national research that advances trauma informed and human rights perspectives and international scholarly exchanges. She has been involved in research, and academic exchanges in India, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and Haiti. Critelli’s work has been published in journals such as Violence Against Women, Critical Sociology, Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and the Journal of Migration and Integration. She is the co-editor of the book Trauma and Human Rights: Integrating Approaches to Address Human Suffering (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Brian Gran is a sociologist and lawyer whose scholarship concentrates on human rights, including children’s rights, law, and social policy. He has published books as well as articles in various sociology, law, and policy journals. Gran recently published the book, The Sociology of Children’s Rights (Polity Press, 2022). Shaun Grech, PhD, is director of The Critical Institute (Malta), Honorary Associate Professor, Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Cape Town, and Affiliate Associate Professor the Department of International Relations at the University of Malta. He is also editor-in-chief of the international journal, Disability and the Global South and co-editor of the book series, Palgrave Studies in Disability and International Development. Matthew W. Hughey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. He holds affiliate faculty positions at Nelson Mandela University, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Cambridge. Professor Hughey’s research examines the forms and functions of race and racism in identity-formation, media, organizations, science, and religion. He has received numerous awards and support from sources such as the American Sociological Association, Fulbright Commission, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The author of nine scholarly books and over 80 peer-reviewed articles, he is a frequent voice in international media and a recurrent expert witness for legal disputes over racial discrimination. Marcus Anthony Hunter is the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, coiner of #BlackLivesMatter, and author of four books.
x Research handbook on intersectionality Miho Iwata is Associate Professor of Sociology at Towson University. Her research interests focus on racist systems, racial hierarchies, migrants, and human rights. Passionate about social justice, she has analysed Japanese concepts of race and racial hierarchies and how ideologies and institutional arrangements affect migrants to Japan, including Japanese Brazilians. She engages in collaborative research and has published on religious minorities and human rights in the US, as well as marginalized religious groups building peace. She co-authored the book As the Leaves Turn Gold: Asian Americans and Aging (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). Andrew Jolivétte is Professor and Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department as well as the founding Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is co-founder and co-chair of the UC Ethnic Studies Council and the author or editor of several books including: the Lammy Award Nominated, Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community; Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity; Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community; Cultural Representation in Native America; Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority; American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century; and the forthcoming, Gumbo Circuitry: Poetic Routes, Gastronomic Legacies and Thrivance Circuitry: Queer Afro-Indigenous Futurity and Kinship. Jolivétte is the Board President of the San Francisco American Indian Cultural Center and the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture (Speak Out) and an Advisory Board Member of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nadia Y. Kim is Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies (and affiliated faculty in Sociology) at Loyola Marymount University. Her research focuses on US race and citizenship injustices concerning Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, intersectional and nativist racism in Los Angeles (e.g., 1992 LA Unrest), immigrant women activists, environmental racism and classism, and comparative racialization of Latinxs, Asian Americans, and Black Americans. Throughout her work, Kim’s approach centers (neo)imperialism, transnationality, and the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Kim is author of the multi-award-winning Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA (Stanford University Press, 2008); of multi-award-winning Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA, which chronicles the embodied, emotive, and citizenship politics of Asian and Latin@ immigrant women’s fight for cleaner air in Los Angeles (Stanford University Press, 2021); and of award-winning journal articles on race and assimilation and on racial attitudes. Kim has also long organized on issues of immigrant rights, affirmative action, and environmental justice, some of which she has incorporated into her research. She and/or her work have also appeared (inter)nationally on Red Table Talk, National Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, Radio Korea, and local TV news and in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Korea Times, NYLON Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. Patricia Madoo Lengermann is Research Professor of Sociology at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has been writing with Gillian Niebrugge since 1985. They write in the areas of the history of women in sociology and are the authors of The Women Founders—Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930 (Waveland Press, 2007, originally pub-
Contributors xi lished 1998) as well as numerous chapters and articles on the history of sociology and feminist theory. They have held visiting professorships at the University of Iowa, Gettysburg College, Wells College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, American University. In 1998–99, they co-founded the American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology, each serving at various moments as that Section’s chair. They have been the co-recipients of Distinguished Career Awards from the Harriet Martineau Sociological Society, the District of Columbia Sociological Society, and the ASA Section on the History of Sociology and Social Thought. They are currently writing a volume for Routledge, Re-introducing Jane Addams. Karen J. Leong is Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on intersectional and relational histories of immigration, settler colonialism, and community resilience. Erica Morales is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research interests include race, class, and gender; higher education, and historically marginalized communities. Her latest research examines issues of equity and inclusion for underrepresented groups, including students of color and student-veterans in higher education. Ghassan Moussawi is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work lies in the areas of transnational gender and sexuality studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial feminisms, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, empire, and nation. His book Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 National Women’s Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize and the Sociology of Sexualities 2021 Distinguished Book Award, investigates everyday life disruptions and violence, and queer formations in post-war Beirut. Kathy Nakagawa is Associate Professor in Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on inequities in education, racial literacy, and storytelling. Anjana Narayan is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She is the co-author of Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Kumarian Press, 2009) and the co-editor of Research beyond Borders: Multidisciplinary Reflections (Lexington Books, 2012). She is currently associated with an international and interdisciplinary collaborative research network to advance the study of lived religion and gender in relation to Hinduism and Islam. Colette Ngana is a doctoral candidate in Sociology who studies social inequities through the lens of health. Her work centers on the intersection of housing and trauma injury, particularly burns. Ngana also serves as a reproductive justice advocate with a background in reproductive and medical ethics. Gillian Niebrugge is Professorial Lecturer at The George Washington University and Professor Emerita at Northern Virginia Community College. She has been writing with Patricia Lengermann since 1985. They write in the areas of the history of women in sociology and are the authors of The Women Founders—Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930
xii Research handbook on intersectionality (Waveland Press, 2007, originally published 1998) as well as numerous chapters and articles on the history of sociology and feminist theory. They have held visiting professorships at the University of Iowa, Gettysburg College, Wells College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, American University. In 1998–99, they co-founded the American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology, each serving at various moments as that Section’s chair. They have been the co-recipients of Distinguished Career Awards from the Harriet Martineau Sociological Society, the District of Columbia Sociological Society, and the ASA Section on the History of Sociology and Social Thought. They are currently writing a volume for Routledge, Re-introducing Jane Addams. Laura Odasso is researcher at the chair Migrations et Sociétés of the Collège de France, and Collaborative Institute on Migrations fellow, based in Paris. She is also a research associate at the Centre méditerranéen de sociologie, de sciences politiques et d’histoire (MESOPOLHIS), Aix-Marseille University (France) and at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations and Equality, Université libre de Brussels (Belgium), where, in 2014–16, she conducted the research project Awareness and Migration: Organisations for bi-national family rights Empowerment (AMORE) funded by the European program Marie Skłodowska Curie. Characterized by a comparative and qualitative intersectional approach, her research interests are situated at the crossroad of sociology of (family) migration, sociology of law, and public and contentious policies. Her current research explores intimacy as a skill for accessing rights in the light of the materiality of formal and informal, online, and offline, legal brokerage. She recently co-authored the chapter “Intimacy Brokers,” in Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship and Rights, edited by Anne-Marie D’Aoust (Rutgers University Press, 2022) and edited the book Faire et défaire les liens familiaux. Usages et pratiques du droit en contexte migratoire (PUR, 2020, with A. Fillod-Chabaud). Barbara Parker is an Associate Professor of Sociology, and a faculty member of the Anishinaabe Kendaasiwin Institute (AKI) at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses broadly on gender and food justice (food security and Indigenous food sovereignty), critical dietetics, the school food environment, and more recently food pedagogy. Her edited collection: Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives, was published in 2019 with Women’s Press. She has also published in Journal of Critical Dietetics, the Canadian Food Studies Journal, Global Health Promotion, the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition, and the International Journal of Indigenous Health. Dr. Parker’s research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on food, gender and health, food security, the sociology of food and nutrition, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Parker was the recipient of a Teaching Innovation Award in 2020 by the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee at Lakehead University. Anna Smith Pruitt, PhD, is faculty affiliate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a research associate with the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaiʻi. Using participatory and intersectional approaches, her research examines the effects of extreme poverty and disasters on individuals and communities. Her applied research on disaster and homelessness has been used to promote community wellbeing and resilience and to encourage equitable access to resources and voice in decision-making processes for traditionally marginalized communities.
Contributors xiii Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. Her most abiding interests relate to issues of sexuality, gender, race, nation, and state from a transnational/postcolonial feminist lens. She is author of three books: Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge, 1999), Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell, 2004), and Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India’s Present (Duke University Press, 2016). Puri received the 2021 Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association. She is currently working on a project on death and migration. Bandana Purkayastha is Professor of Sociology & Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has served as the President, Sociologists for Women in Society (2013–14), and is, currently, on the executive committee of International Sociological Association (2014–18). Her areas of research are migration, human rights, violence and peace and she engages intersectionality and critical transnationalism frames in her work. She has received awards for her research, teaching, and leadership, locally and nationally, including, most recently, the American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard award for a career of scholarship and leadership improving the lives of women and other marginalized groups. Renya K. Ramirez is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and an enrolled member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. She is an author of Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2007) and Standing up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Nebraska University Press, 2018). She is writing a third book, Native Women of the Alcatraz Occupation and Afterwards. Her interests are Native feminisms, diaspora, transnationalism, environmental justice, settler colonialism, and Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe family/tribal history. Lori Amber Roessner, a professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media, teaches and studies media history and its relationship to cultural phenomena and practices, including the operation of politics, the negotiation of public images and collective memories, and the construction of race, gender, and class. Roessner’s journal-length cultural histories have appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Journalism History, among others, contributing to her receiving the distinction of American Journalism’s Inaugural Rising Scholar in 2014. More recently, she co-edited Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (Lexington Books, 2018) and served as a Faculty Fellow for the University of Tennessee’s Division for Diversity & Engagement, where she studied and offered recommendations for mitigating invisible and emotional labor. Mary Romero is Professor Emerita, School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is the author of Introducing Intersectionality (Polity Press, 2018), the Maid’s Daughter: Inside and Outside the American Dream (New York University Press, 2011), Maid in the U.S.A. (New York University Press, 1992), co-editor of eight books, including Intersectionality and Ethnic Entrepreneurship (Routledge), When Care Work Goes Global (Ashgate), and Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities. Her work appears in numerous social science journals and law review articles. She served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association. She has received various awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), and Study for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP).
xiv Research handbook on intersectionality Gabriella Sanchez is a sociocultural anthropologist and research fellow at Georgetown university Collaborative for Global Children’s Issues whose work examines ethnographically the manufacturing of smuggling as a mechanism of irregular migration control. She is the author of Human Smuggling and Border Crossings (Routledge, 2015) based on her work with migrant smuggling facilitators along the US-Mexico border, and co-editor alongside Luigi Achilli and Sheldon Zhang of Migrant Smuggling as a Collective Strategy and Insurance Policy: Views from the Margins (European University Institute, 2018). Evangelia Tastsoglou, PhD, LLM, is Professor of Sociology and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University. Her research engages feminist and intersectional perspectives on women, gender, and various aspects of international migration; Canadian immigration and integration; violence, citizenship, transnationalism, and diasporas. She is the co-editor of the book, Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is the recipient of the Saint Mary’s University President’s Award for Excellence in Research (2021). Carieta O. Thomas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her areas of research expertise include intersectionality, care work, and immigration and technologies of surveillance. Her current research interrogates the role pre-employment screening is playing in the management of undocumented Caribbean care workers within the labor force in the US and Canada. Thomas is a 2019–20 recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship who has engaged in interdisciplinary work in the fields of immigration law, refugee resettlement, and diaspora studies. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz teaches for Sociology and the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies at American University. He co-authored Race and Sexuality (Polity Press, 2018), co-edited, in English, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (New York University Press, 2009), Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism (University of Texas Press, 2015), and in Spanish, Travar el Saber (Transing Knowledges)—on education and trans people in Argentina (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2018). He is currently working on a Santería, race, gender, and sexuality manuscript. He is a member of the Grupo de Trabajo Feminista y Queer de las Américas (Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group) and has edited journals in multiple languages as part of their effort to challenge North-South knowledge formation and circulation. Lynn Weber, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, has for nearly 40 years been a leader in developing the field of intersectionality. As co-founder and director of the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis and as director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, she promoted intersectional research and practice through her scholarship, pedagogy, institution-building, and engagement with local communities. Her work in disasters explores inequalities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in the experiences of Katrina’s displaced across the country. Additionally, her work addresses intersectionality approaches to the social determinants of health. Lori Wilkinson, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Migration Futures (2021–28). Her research agenda focuses on the integration experiences of newcomers to Canada, with particular interest on refugee families.
Contributors xv She was recently awarded the Dr. and Mrs. Ralph Campbell Award for Community Outreach from the University of Manitoba (2019) and the National Metropolis Researcher of Excellence Award (2021). Terrell J.A. Winder is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests are racial and sexual stigma, sexual health, and identity development. In previous projects, he has assessed the role of mobile technology in the prevention and treatment of HIV, the impact of community organizations on religious and racial identity development, and the barriers to PrEP use among Black men who have sex with men. Winder’s current book project investigates the impacts that chosen family, community organizations, and visual media have on the gender expressions, racial and sexual identity formations, and the life trajectories of young Black gay men. Sophie Withaeckx is Assistant Professor in Philosophy (UD) at Maastricht University. Previously, she held the post of coordinator and post-doc researcher at RHEA (Centre of Expertise on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and as lecturer and researcher at Odisee University College. She holds master’s degrees in African Languages & Cultures (University of Gent), International Politics (University of Antwerp), and a PhD in Philosophy and Moral Sciences (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). Her research has studied understandings of culture, gender, and morality in experiences with gender-based violence among immigrant communities. In her current research, she explores how normative concepts of “the human” inform institutional spaces and practices. On the one hand, she examines discourses and practices of diversity and decolonization in higher education. On the other hand, she researches how taken-for-granted notions of humanness, family and kinship underlie ethics and practice in transnational adoption. Asli Cennet Yalim is Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida School of Social Work. Prior to entering academia, she worked as a psychologist with children and families across different educational and health settings in Istanbul. She received her master’s degree in Social Work from Florida State University and her PhD in Social Welfare from University at Buffalo. Yalim’s areas of research are refugee and immigrant mental health, forced migration in the Middle East, barriers to mental health services, refugee women, and community-based participatory research. She teaches courses in human development and social environment, research methods, micro level roles and intervention, social work in health settings, and social work with immigrants and refugees. Aggie J. Yellow Horse (she/her) is Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial health inequities, community-centered data collection, and critical data literacy.
Acknowledgements
Back in the Spring 2020, when Daniel Mather approached me about editing a Research Handbook on Intersectionality, the project sounded like an ideal one to begin the next phase of my career as a retired university professor planning to spend time writing. However, I had no idea about the challenges that researchers and universities were to face as Covid-19 worsened and the pandemic continued. Several authors had to pull out of the project due to illness, caretaking responsibilities, and general disruption of home and work obligations. Many of these authors were delayed by ongoing changes in the mode of teaching classes switching during the terms, assisting their children with online school, caring for sick children and extra caretaking responsibilities for elderly parents and relatives, some dealing with their own health crisis demanding hospitalization, and the list of unexpected events over the last two years continues. I am extremely thankful to all the authors who devoted extensive time and effort to draft chapters and revise them based on reviewers’ comments and feedback. My heart-filled gratitude goes to Jean Bohner and Anna Smith Pruitt for helping to finalize Lynn Weber’s co-authored article with Anna. Given Lynn Weber’s path-breaking research using intersectionality, I was excited when Lynn accepted my invitation to contribute to the Handbook and she recruited her former student and friend, Anna, to co-author the chapter. Before receiving the revised chapter, a mutual friend contacted me to say that Lynn Weber had died from complications of Covid. She was fully vaccinated but other health conditions compromised her body’s ability to fight the virus. Lynn had left notes concerning the edits and her wife, Jean Bohner, worked with me and Anna to finalize the chapter. I appreciate Jean taking the time during this very difficult loss to help finish the chapter. A year prior, we had no idea that this would be Lynn Weber’s last publication. I am profoundly grateful to have known Lynn and that our paths crossed during our careers. Her work was an inspiration to me. I am extremely indebted to the many colleagues in the US, UK and Canada that agreed to review chapters. Their feedback and insights made the overall Handbook stronger. I acknowledge the following academics who graciously accepted the request to review: Margaret Abraham, Hofstra University; Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol; Amy Armenia, Rollins College; David Beccera, Arizona State University, Hae Yeon Choo, University of Toronto; Nassette Falu, University of Central Florida; Julian Go, University of Chicago; Shobha Gurung, Southern Utah University; Kimberly Ann Harris, Marquette University; Cheryl Llewellyn, University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Eric Margolis, Arizona State University; Sarah Mahler, Florida International University; Joya Mistra, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Ghassan Moussawi, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign; Kari Norgaard, University of Oregon; Chijioke Obasi, University of the West of Scotland; Anthony Ocampo, California State Polytechnic University; Mary Pardo, California State University, Northridge; Lisa Park, University of California, Santa Barbara; Celine Pascale, American University; David Pettinicchio, University of Toronto; Bandana Purkayastha, University of Connecticut; Fernando Rivera, University of Central Florida; Susan Spronk, University of Owatta; and Hyeyoung Woo, Portland State University.
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Acknowledgements xvii I am extremely grateful to Eric Margolis’s willingness to put aside his many gardening, canning and woodworking projects to help with editing. I appreciate Dan Mather’s gentle guidance and patience throughout all the challenges.
1. Introduction: intersectionality and transforming the production of knowledge Mary Romero
If there was a single element contributed by intersectional scholarship it is transdisciplinarity. Writings on intersectionality continue to expand across the disciplines of law, humanities, and the social sciences moving from the margins toward the center. Women and Gender Studies has widely embraced intersectionality as an essential theoretical lens to understand social inequality and the power dynamics surrounding gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, ablism, agism, and other identities used around the world to marginalize groups. Many scholars have critiqued identity politics for its lack of representativeness for the larger collective. Political groups may not always share the same values or be situated similarly in their relations to social, economic, or political power structures. Debates surrounding differences, equality, and positionality (cf. Collins 2019; Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999) emerge as scholars consider how to theorize various social locations and marginalized populations, as well as comprehending various axis of domination (cf. Anthias 2016; Collins 2019; Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). Feminist and critical race scholars acknowledge that dominant narratives and themes embedded in academic disciplines were constructed around privilege and power that excluded oppressed and marginalized groups. Most scholars using an intersectional framework share a commitment to transforming the production of knowledge by including marginalized groups’ experiences. They recognize that economic and political power structures reproduce and maintain knowledge production by privileged groups. The ways in which intersectionality research methods have been conducted are significant in understanding the production of knowledge, including theoretical systems, research tools, researchers and stakeholders, methods for studying intersectional social processes and ways of researching lived experiences. Once believed to only be applicable to qualitative research, intersectional methodologies have expanded to include quantitative and multi-method approaches.
INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH METHODS Numerous collections have interrogated theoretical aspects of intersectionality (e.g., Collins and Bilge 2016; Dill and Zambrana 2009; Grazanka 2019; Hancock 2016; Lutz, Herrera Viva and Supik 2011). However, intersectionality is also used as a “framework or research paradigm to deal with the complex interaction of different social categories such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, or age, among others” (Rodó-Zárate and Jorba 2022, 24). It calls for an “interpretation of research findings within the sociohistorical context of structural inequality for groups positioned in social hierarchies of unequal power” (Bowleg 2008, 323). Attention has been given to identifying wrong ways of doing intersectional research; for example, employing a single-axis like gender to analyse a single system of domination. The authors in this anthol1
2 Research handbook on intersectionality ogy understand that research challenges increase as multiple identities and social locations are examined, the attention devoted to methodology has remained insufficient. As editor I try to remedy that. Even when they were trained in traditional disciplines, intersectional researchers differ by “incorporating more dimensions situationally specific interpretations, group dynamics and explicit emphasis on social change” (Weber and Para-Medina 2003, 222). Drawing on multidisciplinary approaches, critical intersectional scholarship enhances researchers’ ability to open new research frontiers. Applied fields similarly build on critical practices, such as community-based participatory research (CBPR) and other methods that embrace social justice and equality. Many researchers incorporate the methodology of intersectionality in their project design by inculcating social justice principals in their research methods, practices, and environments; they make certain the investigation is inclusive and employs more equitable “power dynamics among research team members from different social and professional backgrounds and academic ranks” (Agénor 2020, 805). As a motivation for this anthology. I have long noted that traditional research methodologies rarely include the complexity of more than one identity category; they prefer additive linear models or the expansion of previous research by adding additional groups (McCall 2005). They tend to simply compare subsamples to ascertain experiences of discrimination or privilege, instead of interlocking systems of domination. Even when not expressly stated, comparison samples between groups assume dominant groups as the norm and differences are mis-interpreted as deviations from the norm. There is also “the assumption of typicality/ normality of one group’s experience” (Cuádraz and Uttal 1999, 163). My literature reviews of many fields reveal tendencies focusing on the role of multiple social identities rather than axes of domination; thus, social inequalities resulting from sexism, racism, or heterosexism that shape, for example, wealth distribution, health outcomes, and educational disparities, remain invisible (Agénor 2020; Green, Evans and Subramanian 2017). The other approach common in the literature is additive or multiple models, which consists of analysing multiple axes such as race and citizenship separately and then adding the effects together (Bowleg 2008; Choo and Ferree 2010; Davis 2008; Hancock 2007; May 2015). Additive approaches imply a ranking of oppression, which does not consider individual experiences that include belonging to both dominant and subordinate groups (Weber and Parra-Median 2003). Social identities and social inequality are interdependent and mutually constitutive axes of discrimination and privilege—not independent or one-dimensional (Bowleg 2008; Collins 1995; Cuádraz and Utall 1999; Weber and Para-Median 2003). As Leslie McCall (2005, 1772) noted, complexity arises “when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories …” Various scholars have attempted to create and follow guideposts or hallmarks to assist the development of intersectional methodology. Some use six core ideas, social inequality, power, relationality, social context, complexity, and social justice to design and evaluate research projects (Collins and Bilge 2016). Although not always used as distinct methodology approaches, McCall (2005) identified three basic issues inherent in intersectional research processes and knowledge production: ● anticategorical complexity—“methodology that deconstructs analytical categories” (p. 1773),
Introduction 3 ● intercategorical complexity—“adopting existing analytical categories to document relations of inequality among social groups and changing configuration of inequality among multiple and conflicting dimensions” (p. 1773), ● and intracategorical complexity—“focus particular social groups at neglected points of intersection” (p. 1774). Researchers might also select one of the three styles outlined by Choo and Ferree (2010, 131) for understanding intersectionality in practice: Group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. They identified inclusion, analytical interactions, and institutional primacy as “three defining aspects of intersectionality.” While, Misra, Curington and Green (2021, 10) acknowledged Collins and Bilge’s (2016) six core ideas, they sought to “integrate some categories and add others” and wrote that the key methodological tenets of intersectional research are: ● ● ● ● ● ●
oppression, relationality, complexity, context, comparison, and deconstruction.
Inequality, power, and social justice are integrated into the “oppression” category, thus capturing power relations and social inequality. In research, complexity and context are researched through comparison and “identifying the inherently instability of categories, or deconstruction” (Misra, Curington and Green 2021, 11). The category “relational” goes beyond recognizing social identities to acknowledge that one’s subordination is related to another’s privilege. “Complexity” exists because social identities are intermingled with oppositional identities, as well as constructing privileges or disadvantages. Categories are therefore not independent variables; they exist in time and have historical backgrounds that are crucial to understand the reproduction of social inequality over time. MCall’s discussion of intracategorical analyses deconstructs categories to avoid essentializing identities and includes “partial and fluid socially constructed categories” (2005, 14). Designing research that centers intersectionality demands researchers consider what conceptualization of intersectionality will best fit the research questions and address the challenges posed by this approach. “For example, if inclusion and voice are priorities for a specific study, then the issue of how much the mainstream itself is problematized needs to come to the fore and be as explicitly addressed as possible” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 146). Social science researchers examining the mechanisms by which inequalities function in economic, educational, and legal systems must interact with their own social identities. Some social scientists have built on the structural intersectionality that Crenshaw (1989, 1991) introduced to analyse individual legal or economic status. Structural intersectionality research designs and methodologies uncover policies and procedures assumed to be neutral but have differential impacts and reproduce a wide range of inequalities (Collins 2019; Crenshaw 1991). Researchers typically begin the study by identifying interconnecting social identities at the individual level (e.g., race, class, gender, and sexuality) and then connect to structural inequality exposing interconnectedness at the institutional level—social practices and policies reproducing inequality. For instance, case studies are frequently used to examine differences
4 Research handbook on intersectionality and the complexities of experience from multiple intersecting categories like race, sexuality, and social class, within specific social locations to unpack diversity and difference within intersecting categories. Other researchers are less interested in diversity and difference within multiple intersecting categories to focus on processes that produce and maintain resistance. An alternative proposed by Durfee in 2021 begins by identifying institutional mechanisms producing social inequalities and then examining groups with marginalized social identities. In her study on domestic violence civil protective orders, she argues that this approach “can reveal the interconnectedness of barriers, risks, and vulnerabilities faced by different groups of multiple marginalized survivors” (p. 342). Drawing on her interviews she compared lived experiences to assumptions embedded in the law and legal practices; the goal was to rectify a system relying on “the ‘universal woman’ and ‘universal risk’ discourse” (p. 360). Qualitative researchers using grounded theory (Glaser and Straus 1967) do not begin with a pre-determined sample but rather identify categories as they emerge from ongoing data analysis. However, researchers must be careful not to impose a particular matrix of domination on the data or end with discussions of identity construction and lose sight of power relations (Collin 1995; Weber 1995). Intersectional research requires analysing multiple dimensions of individual identity and social structures simultaneously. As Cuádraz and Uttal (1999, 158) observed: “it is particularly challenging to analyze how individual experiences and biography are embedded in social structure and history while simultaneously accounting for each of these multiple social structures.” They argue that the individual’s understanding of their own life is shaped by both their situational location (the contemporary moment that they are reporting about) and their social location (more than situational location; a location shaped by particular social histories of race, class and gender), as well as the contemporary social context (the stratification of society and the politicization of certain topics). (p. 173)
Designing a study to collect the data required for such an analysis is important, as the following examples demonstrate. In her study of Black lesbians, Bowleg (2008, 313) advises intersectional researchers to address “developing questions to measure intersectionality, analyzing intersectionality data, and interpreting them.” In terms of research questions, she warns that asking additive questions calls for additive answers, such as asking the respondent to rank their identities. Similar questions are better framed by asking about separate experiences of each identity, such as and/ or race, gender, and sexuality. Open-ended questions leave room for other social identities to emerge that the researcher did not expect. Recognizing unintentional exclusion requires data collection on embedded assumptions of groups or essentializing groups, such as women, LBGTQ individuals, or migrants. Examining the ways that “same” is equated with “fair” in services, treatment, for example, privileges those whose social position is constructed as the norm. Thus, other questions need to “highlight the importance of articulating intersectionality explicitly in interview questions,” in other words, “ask precisely what you want to know” (p. 315). Interpreting individual accounts always occurs in historical and social contexts since researchers’ identities are socially constructed. Contextualizing one’s findings in a sociohistorical framework is crucial in intersectional research. For intersectionality analysts, the key interpretative task is to derive meaning from the observed data on the one hand, and to on the other, interpret this individual level data within a larger sociohistorical
Introduction 5 context of structural inequality that may not be explicit or directly observable in the data. (Bowleg 2008, p. 320)
Early on, researcher-activists were drawn to a conceptual framework that aimed to uncover the different economic and political conditions of groups previously ignored in developing research designs, excluded in policy recommendations, and whose experiences had been distorted by comparing them to the status quo. Although intersectional theorizing began in and continues to dominate academic discourse, praxis is a crucial component. Intersectionality is an important analytical and practical tool for social justice movements building solidarity across the matrix of domination (Collins 2019; Collins and Bilge 2016). Research-activists collect data to analyse institutional practices and procedures that create hidden barriers for marginalized groups and is used to engage in strategic actions and political actions. Praxis is an integral part of intersectionality as demonstrated by Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper to the Combahee River Collective (1986). As I write this introduction, social justice groups and practitioners are using intersectionality as a tool to respond to the recent decisions by the US Supreme Court, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (allowing prayer in public schools), and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (limiting its measures to controls at individual power plants). Taking the case of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, individuals and groups immediately began organizing and taking steps to assist women in vulnerable states. Individuals immediately began demonstrating and protesting and Rise Up organized nationwide protests for July 4th to call attention to women being denied freedom. Groups across the country are at work to defeat state ballot initiatives restricting or eliminating access to abortion. Vote Pro Choice is pushing forward with efforts to increase the number of all women voting in county and state elections. Abortion rights groups are also making sure women living in conservative states have access to funding and travel to have a safe abortion. Abortion rights litigators are filing lawsuits in numerous states to establish state rights giving women reproductive choice. Abortion providers are working toward expanding services to accommodate out-of-state women. Medical schools located in states that will restrict their training of physicians in all reproductive care are establishing available training to provide clinical experience, such as traveling residencies. Recognizing the struggle will be a long one; these efforts are not only aimed at protecting women’s choice but also their physical and mental health. Empirical researchers concerned with value-free and notions of objectivity discourage the scholar-activist approach and tend to view their methodology as less than rigorous and engagement with social justice as delegitimate findings (Romero 2020). Norms of research objectivity still dominate academic discourse in the US and engaged researchers tend to be dismissed as social justice warriors rather than scholarly empirical research (Abraham 2019; Romero 2020). As intersectionality becomes more accepted within subfields in traditional disciplines, scholar-activists are gaining more acceptance and social justice research agendas are gradually finding some support.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This Handbook is not a textbook approach to intersectional research methods because a formal or standardized methodology is precisely what intersectional theory, methods, and practice crit-
6 Research handbook on intersectionality icizes (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013; Misra, Curington and Green 2021). Intersectionality is “a fluid interpretive framework” and “thrives on the reality of tensions existing between categories” (Gill 2016, 69). This methodology requires examining the dynamics of individual and group identities as they intersect within the axes of power that comprise a structural level of analysis. The Handbook’s goal is to provide a sampling of promising research approaches from various disciplines that offer innovative advances in intersectional methodology. The editor solicited state of the art contributions beginning with foundational and empirical writings that explain historical developments of systems of oppression, interdisciplinary research on marginalized communities, and empirical power relations between groups. I included chapters that address applied research and emerging global perspectives of intersectional research. Most intersectional research includes feminist frameworks, and I sought critical race approaches for their specific contributions, and obviously because critical race theory has become part of the US culture wars. However, this research has also been labeled as “domestic intersectionality” (Patil 2013, 854). Over the last decade scholars have applied multiple social scales to include transnational scales, alongside intimate, local, and national scales (Mahler, Chaudhuri and Patil 2015). Global chapters address intersections emerging in the wide range of social issues to be considered alongside patriarchy and sexism—capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, climate emergencies, imperial decline, and public health are just a few of the issues comprehended by intersectionality. Others incorporate intersectional methods with participatory action research (PAR). Contributors to this book were asked to go beyond thinking of intersectionality only as an analytical tool and address how one goes about doing intersectional research. In drafting their chapter, contributors were asked to keep the following questions in mind as they described intersectional methodology: ● ● ● ●
What would a full array of intersectional methodologies consist of? What would be the actual research method(s) for each? What would a full array of intersectional projects consist of? What intersectional research captures the various levels of analysis: micro, meso, and macro? ● What are the future directions of intersectional methodologies? ● And what are the methodological challenges? Before Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 law review article coined the term “intersectional” for conceptual approaches that seek to uncover overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination, researchers and activists, particularly Black feminists, had been contributing to its conceptual development. Recalling the history and intellectual origins of intersectional frameworks of analysis is important in acknowledging the extensive body of knowledge and contributions of women of color. Furthermore, it was important to avoid participating in the whitening of intersectionality (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Bilge 2013, 2014). In preparing this Handbook, I began with a section on foundations laid by scholars who have largely been written out of the cannon in numerous disciplines, such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacob, Maria Miller Steward, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Frances E.W. Harper, and Ida B. Wells. As Hancock (2013, 263–4) noted: This intellectual tradition had three hall makers that continue to part of the Black feminist tradition: (1) Goals of empowerment and liberation; (2) Focus upon Black women’s experiences and knowledge—what Collins later termed ‘Black feminist epistemology’, and (3) Commitment to Black
Introduction 7 women’s self-determination—power over their political, economic, reproductive and artistic lives as Black woman, not as disaggregable identities of Black + woman.
Although, I was unable to include chapters on each of these scholars, I wanted to highlight the intersectional research they conducted and demonstrate both the empirical rigor of their studies and their commitment to social justice and social transformation. In short, “intersectional” is a useful new term for scholarship with a long tradition. I also wanted to acknowledge and include the (mostly) white women scholars in social settlement movements who supported and worked alongside many of these Black scholars. They practiced intersectionality speaking, writing, and conducting research in the fight for racial, gender, and class equality. Women scholars in the social settlement movement, and beyond, taught in universities and published in academic journals, “their major goal was to reach the general public, structure government policies based on principles of social justice and advocacy” (Romero 2020, 8–9). As Morris (2015) documented in The Scholar Denied, Du Bois and women scholars working at Hull House co-authored the first sociological book containing “the methodology mapping demographic information on urban populations according to their geographic distribution” (Deegan 1988, 55) and “the use of mapping as a statistical technique to reveal patterns of social groups” (p. 62). Not only was their research based on empirical methods, they also were engaged in social justice research and practice, transforming knowledge, and advocating for social change. Critical race feminist scholars are also using the opportunity to reclaim scholarly traditions previously made invisible in constructing the cannons of various disciplines. This is evident in the scholarship on scholars previously marginalized in my discipline of sociology, including: W.E.B. Du Bois (cf. Basevich 2020; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015; Wright 2016); the role historically Black colleges and universities have had in producing and transforming knowledge (cf. Jones 1974; Wright 2020); women’s contribution to knowledge production (cf. Deegan 1988, 1991; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998), decolonizing knowledge (Blauner and Wellman 1973; Connell 2007; Go 2017); and addressing settler-colonialism (Banivanua Mar and Edmonds 2010; Patel 2021; Rifkin 2017; Veracini 2015). I constructed the Handbook to incorporate many of these efforts to reclaim silenced voices. Part I, “Foundational Research” begins with Lori Amber Roesser’s historical and journalist account of Ida B. Wells-Barnett as an activist and journalist. Engaged in antiracism and women’s rights initiatives, Wells-Barnett employed tools of investigative and data-based journalism, including empirical evidence like firsthand accounts and statistics. Her work has become a prototype for responsible activist journalism. Her intersectional analysis of race, gender, and class is evident in her writings about her removal from first-class train car, which she had purchased a ticket for, and forced into the second-class smoker’s car. More than a decade before the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, she lost her fight in court and recognized the lack of support in the patriarchal Black community to fight for Black women. Her campaign against lynching exposed the myths of the white southern gentleman, brute Black male rapists, the chaste southern white lady, and the immoral, hypersexual Black Jezebel and linked systemic oppression in maintaining violence against Blacks. Next is a chapter by Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge in which they analyse Anna Julia Cooper’s writings and activism to expose white domination from the standpoint of “a Black Woman of the South.” Cooper used narratives to link race, gender, class, and region to macrosocial structures. Her scholar-activism is evident in her critical scholarship and service to
8 Research handbook on intersectionality the Black community in face of the financial and professional risks. In Chapter 4, Matthew Hughey presents Du Boisian Sociology and reviews the debates surrounding his use of an intersectional paradigm to analyse the racial vulnerability of Blacks along various social, political, and economic axes of domination. Hughey demonstrates the interdisciplinary influences in intersectional sociology and emphasis on empirical data to inform policy. He points to Du Bois’s use of standpoint theory (long before the term was named) in conceptualizing “second-sight” and “double-consciousness,” as well as his continued interest in economic and political structures shaping oppression and opportunities in the lives of Black Americans. Having shown the foundational work for an intersectional approach in Du Bois’s work, he analyses The Talented Tenth, the Philadelphia Negro, Black Reconstruction America 1860–1880 and Darkwater to examine the understanding of race, gender, and class categories as simultaneously lived experiences. Part I concludes with a chapter on the social settlement movement and activist scholarship. After introducing the college-educated members and activities of the social Settlement Movement, Lengermann and Niebrugge present their activist scholarship on social problems and solutions appearing in their research reports, policy recommendations, theoretical discussions, and memoirs and autobiographies. They examine the use of intersectional analysis in five propositions, including the use of their own intersectional identity as white college-educated women and coalition building with Black men and women. The rest of the Handbook is organized into Part II, interdisciplinary studies, Part III, applied and community studies, and Part IV, global perspectives. Most readers may be surprised that Gender and Women’s Studies is not included under interdisciplinary studies. However, given the volume of writings and attention to intersectionality in women’s studies, I choose to include other interdisciplinary studies in the social sciences that incorporate intersectionality in their theory and research. As the reader will find, most contributors have already integrated gender and feminism in their research. Other multidisciplinary studies point to new ways of conducting intersectional research, other than feminism, such as settler-colonialism and colonialism. Part III present chapters on applied research and offers ways that intersectionality methods are used to address inequality and oppression in the professional schools, including social work and public health. This part includes a subsection on social justice and community studies, which offers perspectives into scholar-activism, researching social movements, and social change. Part IV offers global perspectives that include globalization and transnationalism. Although the Handbook is organized into these four parts and several subsections, there are overlapping themes throughout the Handbook, namely, sexuality, migration, activism, scholar-activism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, violence against women, and participatory action research. Part II, “Intersectional Research in Interdisciplinary Studies” is divided into four subsections: Critical Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Sexuality Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, and Citizen Studies. Sophie Withaeckx opens Part II with an essay on intersectionality as an ethnical commitment and suggests ways that values and normative commitments can anchor researchers to make decisions about interpretations and understandings of intersectionality. This is followed by Shaun Grech’s chapter on the multidimensional intersections of disability in rural poverty in the Global South beginning with the legacy of colonialism and continued by contemporary geopolitics and multiple other axes of power. Barbara Parker frames feminist food studies as anticolonial praxis in community-based research to discuss doing intersectional research. This subsection is followed by the Critical Sexuality Studies subsection, beginning with Jyoti Puri’s work on sexuality and state by researching antisodomy law in India in
Introduction 9 relation to colonial histories and contemporary context and transnational aspects of research. Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder consider the significance of queer geographies by examining Bayard Rustin’s life, particularly an arrest in Los Angeles in 1953. They introduce the term “intersectional recovery” to describe “an intentional form and pathway for pragmatic and meaningful recovery, recasting, and reclamation of the overlooked and understudied biographies and geographies of Black queer figures.” Salvador Vidal-Ortiz examines the ways that researchers have approached the intersectionality of sexuality, gender, and migration, incorporating sexuality across sexual orientations and gender identity. Focusing on an interpretative approach, he analyses two special journal issues on the topic and addresses the uses and limitations of various methodologies. Three chapters compose the subsection of Part II on Critical Indigenous Studies. Renya Ramirez analyses intersectional research in understanding environmental racism as impacting Indigenous communities and feminist activist responses. Applying an Indigenous philosophy of “All of Our Relations,” she identifies a missing category that includes all living things by referencing “more-than-human” to call attention to the interdependencies of all life on earth including animals, plants, water, and land. Robert Keith Collins uses an integrated intersectional and person-centered ethnographic approach to examine intragroup differences among African-Native Americans as they navigate and negotiate their individual lives and make sense of their racial and cultural experiences. Andrew Jolivétte identifies a methodology for intersectional race, gender, and sexuality from a critical mixed-race, Afro-Indigenous perspective. The chapter builds on inheritance refusal, which refers to the inclusion of community voice and experience and in this case from a position of power rather than a place of damage. In his chapter, he develops a practice of “Thrivance Circuitry” and “Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness Model” (TC-CRM) within queer Indigenous communities (QIC) as well as across other queer communities of color (QCOC). Citizenship Studies is the last interdisciplinary subsection in Part II. Daniela Cherubini frames the intersectionality of “lived citizenship” as it is experienced, negotiated, reclaimed, or contested by marginalized groups striving for inclusive citizenship. Referencing her ethnographic research on migrant women’s work in grassroots associations in Southern Europe, she illustrates how she connected the macro and structural analysis of civic stratification, the meso level of collective action, and the micro analysis of individuals’ experiences, narratives, and actions. In her chapter on citizenship, Laura Odassa engages Plummer’s construction of intimate citizenship by using intersectional methods to examine the processes of heterosexual marriage-related migration and the screening of these mixed-status unions by state regimes. Pallavi Banerjee and Carieta O. Thomas place their chapter on intersectionality methods in the context of labor and citizenship in transnational regimes for paid and unpaid reproductive labor. They illustrate the challenges in using intersectional methodologies in researching intersectional citizenship-labor regimes. Evangelia Tastsoglou and Lori Wilkinson explain the use of intersection methods in their research on gender-based violence in Canadian immigrant communities. Part III, “Intersectionality and Applied Research” explores the ways intersectional methodology is used in applied research settings and research on social justice. In the subsection Social Work, Disaster Recovery and Health Disparities, Filomena M. Critelli and Asli Cennet Yalim examine various intersectional research methodologies to study migrant and refugee trauma. Lynn Weber and Anna Smith Pruitt’s chapter addresses the challenges of intersectional methodology in disaster research posing the ethical dilemmas and social justice com-
10 Research handbook on intersectionality ponents of disaster research. Their multi-method intersectional methods used in researching the devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina are presented to show how they confronted the pitfalls previously identified in the field. Karen J. Leong, Kathy Nakagawa, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse report on lessons gained from conducting a pilot study of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women’s experiences of health inequity. They warn against losing sight of group differences, such as the different social, historical, and political contexts for migration. Akosua Adomako Ampofo wrote the first chapter in the subsection on Social Justice and Community Studies. She reflects on and interrogates her own privileges and disadvantages as a scholar-activist. Cynthia J. Cranford and Jennifer Jihye Chun developed a multi-level intersectional framework within the social organization of homecare that considers the social locations of workers, receivers, or both. The chapter recognizes individual, organization and multiple actors in the employment relationship as well as workers’ collective voice. Nadia Y. Kim’s research draws from the intersectional feminist methodology she used in her book, Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Los Angeles. Brian Gran and Colette Ngana review the range of intersectional methodologies used in conducting research on children’s rights and apply an intersectional lens to examine how human rights systems relate to children. They discuss the potential to exacerbate inequities—that have been designed to create an interpersonal power dynamic between children and their guardians. They analyse children taking political action and, in some cases, leading movements in gun control and in confronting global climate change. Part IV, “Intersectional Global Perspectives: Globalization and Transnationalism” considers intersectional methodologies in research on globalization and transnationalism. Ghassan Moussawi argues that multiple and different scales are required in intersectional methodologies used in research on gender, sexuality, or other categories located in international, regional, or global levels of analysis. Drawing from his research on sexuality in Lebanon as a case in point, Moussawi illustrates how he used multiple scales for different categories. Gabriella Sanchez illuminates ways that migrant smuggler narratives are perpetuated in government policies, policy publications based on secondary sources, as well as in some smuggling research. The narratives maintain the gendered, sexist, and racist images of violent men of color. An overview of how she employed intersectional methodology in her own studies of smuggling points to migration regimes manufactured to practice smuggling in the European Union, and how characterizations of violent and hypersexual African and Arab men as smugglers facilitate the dominant narrative. While acknowledging the significant contributions intersectionality has made in knowledge production, Bandana Purkayastha and Miho Iwata question the ability to create intersectional, relational, and social justice, without engaging with the Global South and scholars contending with decoloniality. To advance intersectionality, they critique methodological nationalism and knowledge hierarchies and identify issues to be addressed. Anjana Narayan and Erica Morales discuss the obstacles to use intersectional research conceptualized in the US and the challenges of employing those methods in transnational research. Drawing from scholarly writings on decolonial transnational feminist methodology and knowledge hierarchies, they illustrate a transnational research project, The “Women Living Hinduism and Islam Project,” rooted in a decolonial understanding of intersectionality. I hope this Handbook informs scholars and students interested in ways of doing intersectional research. It is intended to address some of the challenges posed in moving from theory to practice. Hopefully studies will be designed with a wide range of methods and issues to consider. Each contributing author offered their experiences and expertise in incorporating
Introduction 11 intersectional research methods within the confines of their disciplines, as well as pushing the boundaries to integrate interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches. Chapters illustrating how intersectionality can broaden feminism, settler-colonialism, and colonialism also articulate how an intersectional gaze can challenge or eliminate US-centric blinders and acknowledge the global range of marginalized knowledge. Reconsidering the ways we do research as scholar-activists in opposition to traditional value-free and notions of objectivity, as well as hierarchical relations with individuals and communities we study. A continued commitment to social justice moves us closer to producing meaningful research and to transforming knowledge.
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12 Research handbook on intersectionality Crenshaw, Kimberlé W.1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43: 1241–99. Cuádraz, Gloria H., and Lynet Uttal. 1999. “Intersectionality and In-depth Interviews: Methodological Strategies for Analyzing Race, Class and Gender,” Race, Gender & Class 6 (3): 156–86. Davis, Kathy. 2008. “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” Feminist Theory 9 (1): 67–85. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1920. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1991. Women in Sociology, A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press. Dill, Bonnie Thornton, and Ruth Zambrana (eds.). 2009. Emerging Intersections: Race, Class and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. Durfee, Alesha. 2021. “The Use of Structural Intersectionality as a Method to Analyze How the Domestic Violence Civil Protective Order Process Replicates Inequality,” Violence Against Women 27 (5): 639–65. Gill, Victoria Singh. 2016. “Everyone Else Gets to Be Normal”: Using Intersectionality and Ms. Marvel to Challenge ‘Normal’ Identity,” The ALAN Review 44 (1): 68–78. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Go, Julian. 2017. “Decolonizing Sociology: Epistemic Inequality and Sociological Thought,” Social Problems 64: 194–9. Grazanka, Patrick (ed.). 2019. Intersectionality, Foundations and Frontiers. New York: Routledge. Green Mark A., Clare R. Evans, and S.V. Subramanian. 2017. “Can Intersectionality Theory Enrich Population Health Research?” Social Science & Medicine 178: 214–16. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (1): 63–79. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2013. “Empirical Intersectionality: A Tale of Two Approaches,” University of California Irvine Law Review 3: 259–96. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Itzigsohn, José, and Karida L. Brown. 2020. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois, Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. New York: New York University Press. Jones, Butler A. 1974. “The Tradition of Sociology Teaching in Black Colleges: The Unheralded Professionals.” In Black Sociologists, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, 121–63. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lengermann, Patricia Madoo, and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley. 1998. The Women Founders, Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Lutz, Helma, Marai Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik (eds.). 2011. Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept of Gender. London: Routledge. Mahler, Sarah J., Mayurakashi Chaudhuri, and Vrushali Patil. 2015. “Scaling Intersectionality: Advancing Feminist Analysis of Transnational Families,” Sex Roles 73 (3–4): 100–12. May, Vivian M. 2015. Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. New York: Routledge. McCall, Lesley. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal for Women in Culture and Society 30 (3): 1771–800. Misra, Joya, Celeste Vaughan Curington, and Venus Mary Green. 2021. “Methods of Intersectional Research,” Sociological Spectrum 41(1): 9–28. Morris, Aldon. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Patel, Leigh. 2021. No Study without Struggle, Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Patil, Vrushali. 2013. “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38: 847–67. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Times: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Introduction 13 Rodé-Zárate, Maria, and Marta Jorba 2022. “Metaphors of Intersectionality: Reframing the Debate with a New Proposal,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 29 (1): 23–38. Romero, Mary. 2020. “Sociology Engaged in Social Justice,” American Sociological Review 85 (1): 1–30. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, Lynn, and D. Para-Medina. 2003. “Intersectionality and Women’s Health: Charting a Path to Eliminating Health Disparities,” Advances in Gender Research 7: 181–230. Wright, Earl II. 2020. Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology. Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press. Wright. Earl II. 2016. The First American School of Sociology: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory. London: Routledge/Ashgate. Yuval-Davis. Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage. Yuval, Davis Nora, and Pnina Werbner (eds.). 1999. Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books.
PART I FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
2. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist Lori Amber Roessner
INTRODUCTION Scholars have traced intersectional approaches to the antislavery lectures of Maria Stewart in the 1830s (Faulkner and Parker 2012; Collins 2021). Vivian M. May (2012, 18) contended: while the late twentieth century certainly marks the emergence in the critical lexicon of the term intersectionality … it is inaccurate to suggest that the past forty years constitute the only historical moment in which the examination of intersections among systems, identities and politics has been pivotal in the history of feminist thought in general and within black feminist thought in particular.
The “origin story” would remain invisible except that May (2012) called for historians to engage in a genealogy of intersectionality and offered a new intellectual origin story in her examination of Black feminist activist Anna Julia Cooper. Rather than examining race, gender, and class as separate categories of analysis, historians with an intersectional approach explore the multiple aspects of identity as interconnected, interdependent, inseparable, and unstable constructions that signify relationships of power. Moreover, they contend that engaging in a critical intersectional approach will “transform major themes in history” and offer more credible and complicated constructions of the past (Faulkner and Parker 2012, 2). Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), like Cooper, was “a woman born into slavery” six months prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and as one of her earliest biographers Paula Giddings (2008) chronicled, her lived experience involved enduring racism, sexism, and classism that accompanied the rise of the Jim Crow regime. Wells learned the cruel reality and legacy of slavery firsthand and wrote of “the original fourteen slaves [who] became four millions” in order to contextualize the “beasts of burden,” their creation of “the vast wealth … [that] made the United States one of the mighty nations of the earth,” and the sustainment of white wealth and privilege through the disenfranchisement of Black people by way of the “twin infamies,” the convict leasing system and lynch law (Wells 1910, 43). Wells-Barnett became a dedicated crusader employing journalism and mass communication to pursue social justice and human rights. She relied upon scientific and empirical data to explore systemic interrelations of sexism, racism, and classism. She pinpointed binary identity constructions that were obstacles to justice, equity, and inclusivity. Moreover, her lived experience straddled the suffrage movement and the early freedom struggle; Wells-Barnett recognized that addressing racism was imperative to advancing women’s rights and that attending to sexism was crucial to making gains in civil rights. She used journalism and communication to expose the history of systemic oppression and offered enfranchisement as ways to effect change (Guy-Sheftall 1995). Describing her own experience as a Black woman in journalism, Lucy W. Smith contested the marginalization and erasure of Black women from popular histories. The Black journalist and social justice activist outlined the “double bind” that Ida B. Wells encountered as a Black 15
16 Research handbook on intersectionality woman in the predominantly males-only sphere of journalism (Gines 2011). Smith (1895, 100) wrote: Miss Ida B. Wells, “Iola” has been called the Princess of the Press, and she has well earned the title. No writer, the male fraternity not excepted, has been more extensively quoted, none struck harder blows at the wrongs and weaknesses of the race. Her readers are equally divided between the sexes. She reaches the men by dealing with the political aspect of the race question, and the women she meets around the fireside.
After her 1887 election as assistant secretary of the Negro National Press Association in Louisville, Kentucky, Wells confided to Smith that, despite navigating what late twentieth-century scholars would refer to as multiple jeopardies, she found “no agency so potent as the press in reaching and elevating a people” (ibid.). The resolute 36-year-old Wells, at the apex of her national fame, appeared in an illustration alongside Black male leaders of the race, including New York Age editor T. Thomas Fortune, author and orator I. Garland Penn, educator Booker T. Washington, and statesman Frederick Douglass, over the caption that read: “lecturer, defender of the race” (Gibson 2016). Wells richly earned the accolade associated with manliness and masculinity after launching a transnational social justice crusade to expose inequities in emerging segregated public spaces. She referred in her 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors, to the “twin infamies” of lynch law and the convict leasing system. The early years of Wells’s “crusade for justice” prompted the Reverend Norman Barton Wood to compare the “fiery reformer, feminist, and race leader” to the Old Testament Biblical prophet Deborah, a Judaic female military leader and judge (quoted in A. Duster, 1970, xv). Likewise, in the decade ahead, she would be celebrated in Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender as the greatest “race … leader among the feminine sex,” “The Modern Joan [of] Arc,” for her part in integrating the 1913 inaugural Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, despite the “scorn of her Southern sisters” (quoted in Roessner 2018, 68). Despite Wells-Barnett’s ongoing activism in the realm of women’s and civil rights, less than two decades later she had been largely written out of emerging historical narratives surrounding anti-lynching efforts and the women’s suffrage movement by sexist, patriarchal Black men, and racist white women (DuRocher 2016; Roessner and Rightler-McDaniels 2018). By 1927, when asked to articulate why “Iola, the Princess of the Press” oft was compared to Joan of Arc, a young Black woman from Chicago drew a blank, prompting the 66-year-old Wells-Barnett (1970/2020) to write herself back into the historical record in response to the erasure of Black women. However, amid a failed bid for an open Illinois Senate seat in 1930, Wells-Barnett’s effort to integrate her story into our history remained incomplete. In 1931 she succumbed to kidney disease at age 68 and her untimely death went relatively unnoticed in national news outlets (DuRocher 2018). Feminist scholars and historians have contended that as a militant, Black middle-class feminist activist, Wells-Barnett was relegated to footnotes in our whitewashed US history and sexist, patriarchal Black history until the 1970s. Only after the release of her autobiography, posthumously published by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster, did a generation of historians and biographers contextualize her life and career within nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s and civil rights social movements (Tucker 1971; Sterling 1979; Giddings 1988). After the long collective silence surrounding her life—caused by a cultural amnesia from overt racist omissions by white supremacist US historians and covert acts of forgetting in sexist, patriarchal Black communities, did scholars inspired by
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 17 the rich tradition of Black feminism restore the account of Wells-Barnett to the national narrative (DuRocher 2016, 2018; Locke 2017). Moreover, with collective research into the life histories of early Black feminists at the center of their minds, sociologists employed Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality to weave the contributions of Wells-Barnett into the “origin story” of the intersectional framework and analysed the proto-intersectional expressions embedded in her and her contemporaries’ work (including King 1988; Collins 1990; Guy-Sheftall 1995; V. Smith 1998; May 2007; Gines 2014; Romero 2018). Wells noted, at the beginning of her decades-long crusade against injustice, that she found agency to offer intersectional critiques about multiple jeopardies that Black men, women, and children encountered by shining “the light of truth upon them” (quoted in DuRocher 2016, 81). Moreover, as Collins contended: Without doubt, Wells-Barnett was an activist, and an extremely effectively one for her times. During her adult life, she participated in an impressive constellation of antiracism and women’s rights initiatives. Wells-Barnett also used her journalistic career, her speeches, her leadership in political organizations, her position papers, and her pamphlets to advance innovative analyses concerning the connections between African American disempowerment and the need for social justice. Because her activism and her intellectual work were so interconnected, she offers a window into the workings of Black women’s intellectual activism. (2019, 160)
As Collins suggested, Wells-Barnett’s work offers a model of flexible solidarity within Black women’s community work that might be implemented in intellectual activism and provided insight into the “testimonial authority” of lived experience as a form of “epistemic resistance” “to highlight the point of view of subordinated people” (ibid., 160–7). Furthermore, her use of tools of investigative and data journalism, including empirical evidence like firsthand accounts, and statistics, provides a prototype for responsible activist journalism (Broussard 2018; Vogt 2018). After offering context about Wells’s early life, this chapter re-examines five key moments during which she drew upon “her clarion voice and ready pen” to focus critical attention on categories, structures, and systems of domination and violence that contributed to the reification of social constructs and the multiple dimensions of difference and subjugation of her race and her sex (cited in Cooper 2014, 241–7). The historical essay thereby offers insight into ways in which the social justice activist applied a critical intersectional approach by recognizing that journalism and mass communication constituted knowledge-production apparatuses in “regimes of truth” (Tagg 1988, 189). Drawing upon the emerging endorsement of positivistic approaches and “objective” methods, Wells utilized empirical evidence: data and statistics, eyewitness accounts, and her own lived experience, to problematize inequities bound within the discriminatory practices of segregated education and transportation. She contested stereotypical narratives, including “the old threadbare lie,” the myth of male sexual crimes assaulting the “purity” of white womanhood (Wells 1892, 1). This was the blood libel propagated to maintain the barbaric practice of lynching as a mechanism to police and discipline Black bodies. She also critiqued unlawful and unjust practices, particularly the “twin infamies” of lynch law and the convict leasing system (Wells 1893 [1999], 19), to contextualize oppression by laying bare relations and operations of power. She simultaneously envisioned agency through a social justice crusade and addressed gaps and erasures in journalistic and historical accounts (Kuhl 2012; Forde 2021). My chapter is intended to formulate what French theorist Michel Foucault called “a history of the present” that makes visible lingering forms of oppres-
18 Research handbook on intersectionality sion and offers suggestions for a genealogy of intersectional approaches and future directions for repositioning a critical intersectional lens on our map of the past (cited in D. Garland 2014).
RAISING UP A “MODERN DEBORAH” Drawing upon the language of God-fearing from his standpoint as a white Christian ally involved in the persistent freedom struggle, Rev. Wood (1897, 381–2) wrote: We believe that the same God who raised up Moses and Joshua to deliver Israel from Egyptian bondage … has raised up this courageous and eloquent young woman that in the language of the prophet, she might cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions and sins.
Wood demonstrated his commitment to justice throughout his career as an historian. In 1897 he compared Wells to the Hebrew prophetess who inspired her people to victory over their oppressors. He beseeched his primarily white audience to embrace his primary objective, human equality, that he considered to have been the central mission of the Apostle Paul (ibid.). More than half a century later, Wells-Barnett’s youngest daughter, Alfreda Duster, selected the credible endorsement from a prestigious white ally as an excerpt to reframe her mother, not as the Defender’s modern Joan of Arc, but as a modern Deborah, in her introduction to her mother’s autobiography, one that she would struggle to publish due to the discriminatory practices of white publishers. Publishing companies were reluctant to promote the life history of a militant Black woman amid the radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement (Ochiai 1992). Nevertheless, Duster’s powerful forward was eventually published in the posthumous autobiography that repositioned her mother as a fearless social justice crusader. In her own intersectional analysis, modeled after her mother’s journalistic and historical accounts, she critiqued Wood’s white side of a Black subject and the knowledge-production apparatus. She used her mother’s primary source to re-contextualize the testimonial and make a greater point: “the odds against [Ida] were in many ways even greater” than those the French peasant girl faced “in rallying a generally sympathetic French people to a common patriotic cause” (A. Duster 1970, xv, xxxi). Wells faced worse persecution as she “was not only opposed by whites, but some of her own people were often hostile impugning her motives [and] fearful that her tactics and strategy might bring retribution on them, some actually repudiated her” (ibid., xxxi). After reclaiming and centering Wood’s religious analogy, Duster turned to her mother’s time-tested tools, empirical data and firsthand accounts, to share her intersectional insights about germinal moments in her mother’s life history, including: the condition of slavery into which her mother and her grandparents were born; the emphasis that her grandparents had placed on religion and education; her mother’s opening battles against racial discrimination in public spaces; Wells-Barnett’s embrace of journalism as agency when the legal system failed her and her people, her national and international anti-lynching campaign and social justice crusade, and her local organizing and agitation to address injustices faced by Black men, women, and children that came to dominate the lives of her family members. Drawing upon documentary evidence from her mother’s diaries and memoir and her own lived experience as her daughter, Duster contended that the “fire and zeal of her mother’s character,” which often was maligned as “militant” or “radical” by members of her own race, had been passed down to Ida from her grandparents. Grandmother Elizabeth “Lizzie”
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 19 was “a deeply religious woman whose convictions about the essential dignity of man[kind] developed under the cruelties of slavery,” and grandfather James “Jim” Wells was “a man of independent spirit even in slavery, [who] sought and attained his full independence in the period following emancipation” (A. Duster 1970, xv). Both parents taught their firstborn the importance of their Christian faith and education in the pursuit of equity and social justice (M. Duster 2021). Before addressing her mother’s career and legacy with empirical evidence from primary and secondary sources, Duster shared a painful chapter in her family history—the untimely deaths of her grandparents and one of her mother’s siblings in the years surrounding the 1878 yellow fever epidemic (M. Duster 2021). Her mother was “steadfastly determined to keep her family together,” and like many of her sex who were “thrown upon their own resources” (quoted in Roessner and Rightler-McDaniels 2018, xxix), Wells turned to teaching, the most gender-appropriate profession of the era for ladies of the emerging middle class. Again, drawing from her mother’s diaries that detailed testimonial firsthand accounts of a Christian Black, middle-class woman, she shared Wells’s struggle “to earn a living and to assert herself as an independent young woman” after passing her teaching examination (A. Duster, 1970, xxx). Duster contended that Wells faced obstacles as one of only 20 or so Black public school teachers in a poor, rural school system with segregated, overcrowded classes and inadequate facilities. She remained steadfast in her pursuit of social justice in the face of the emerging Jim Crow system. Black feminist Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1995, 417) asserted that “such achievements within a generation of slavery did not inspire an ideology of racial equality” but of difference, largely based in attitudes about Black women, myths designed to maintain white supremacy. Thus, as Collins wrote: the search for social justice has constituted a necessary and defining feature of Black feminist thought, one that shapes intersectionality and flexible solidarity as important dimensions of this knowledge project. It is no accident that Ida Wells-Barnett’s autobiography is titled Crusade for Justice. (Collins 2019, 275)
Wells-Barnett’s testimonial autobiography revealed the systemic oppression that she encountered because of racial oppression and patriarchy among Black men and white women. In the roughly seven decades that comprised her life and bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she experienced the racial and gender discriminations that pervaded the US South and urban centers like New York and Chicago.
“NO PEACE, NO JUSTICE IN THIS LAND?”: THE INTERSECTION OF RACE, GENDER, AND CLASS ON THE CHESAPEAKE, OHIO AND SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY In 1883, Wells was denied a seat in the “lady’s” car on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railway. Four decades after the incident the 64-year-old Wells-Barnett still remembered the headline in the white supremacist Memphis Appeal Avalanche, “announcing the fact—Darky Damsel Gets Damages [What It Cost to Put a Colored Teacher in a Smoking Car … $500]” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 17–18). For a moment it appeared as if the twenty-something Wells had scored a major legal triumph after the repeal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act that banned
20 Research handbook on intersectionality racial discrimination in public spaces. However, her victory against the injustice of the emerging separate but (un)equal Jim Crow system was short-lived. The Tennessee State Supreme Court reversed the decision and ordered Wells to pay $250 in court costs. Wells, “a well-dressed model of bourgeoisie womanhood,” sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in September 1883 after being ordered by a white male conductor to remove herself from the lady’s car, accommodations which were afforded by her purchase of a first-class ticket and be placed in the second-class smoker’s car (Green 2018, 3). Though “citizens of every race and color [were] entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of accommodations … in practice, however, the car set aside for [Black people] also was occupied by second-class white passengers whose smoking, profane language, and behavior went largely unchecked” (ibid., 13). During the years following the Civil War, the place of respectable middle-class Black women in public spaces was under contestation, and as Wells-Barnett later recalled, “encouraged by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car,” the conductor, a baggage person, and a bystander enacted violence upon her unmoving Black body, viciously dragging her from her seat (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 17–18). Wells sought to appeal to the legal system for justice, and when that justice was denied, she turned to the pen, describing the defeat for her race in her diary: The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court in my behalf, last week. Went to see Judge G [Greer, her lawyer] this afternoon and he tells me that the four of them [the judges] cast their personal prejudices in the scale of justice and decided in face of all the evidence to the contrary that the smoking car was a first class coach for colored people as provided for by that statute that calls for separate coaches but first class, for the races. I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? (Quoted in DeCosta-Willis 1995, 140–1)
Wells had been encouraged to widely share her story of battling an emerging separate but (un)equal system, later codified in the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. She gained much publicity amid her case’s litigation and appeal, but ultimately, her disappointment was made more bitter by the lack of support that she, as a woman, had received from a patriarchal Black community. “None of my people had ever seemed to feel that it was a race matter and that they should help me with the fight. So I trod the winepress alone,” she wrote (quoted in Green 2018, 8). Nevertheless, amid her legal battle that delved into sociocultural divisions bound up in constructions of race, gender, and class, Wells discovered the power of intersectional analysis, amplified by her voice and her pen, a mode that she repeatedly relied upon to fight barbaric violence and systemic injustice that her race and her sex continued to encounter in communities across the United States. Wells’s voice and its location, as Crenshaw (1991, 21) noted in her germinal essay, “Mapping the Margins,” “draws our attention to the margins as a site of knowledge and resistance and to lived experience as a criterion of meaning.” Being Black and female revealed the multiple oppressions along the margin of the Deep South during the interlude between the periods of federal Reconstruction after the Civil War and what white Southerners referred to as “Redemption,” or the return of white supremacist rule that eliminated many rights of recently freed Black people (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020). Through Wells’s testimonial, we gain insight into three guiding premises of intersectionality theory, as articulated by Collins (2019, 44):
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 21 (i) Race, class, gender, and similar systems of power are interdependent and mutually construct one another; (ii) Intersecting power relations produce complex, interdependent social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, ability, and age; (iii) The social location of individuals and groups within intersecting power relations shapes their experiences within and perspectives on the social world.
Moreover, over the course of Wells-Barnett’s career as a social justice crusader, we come to understand that solving social problems within any existing context requires intersectional analyses.
EXPOSING THE “OLD THREADBARE LIE” AND COMBATTING THE “TWIN INFAMIES” THROUGH ACTIVIST JOURNALISM AND A SOCIAL JUSTICE CRUSADE After experiencing racist discrimination during her hearing in the legal system, Wells increasingly turned to other means, namely, as Chicago Defender historian Elizabeth Lindsey Davis later suggested, wielding her press-amplified “clarion voice and ready pen” to expose injustice. She assumed the pseudonym “Iola,” in keeping with class and gender traditions in literary and journalistic circles of the day. Wells had “train[ed] [her] pen” as a freelance contributor and editor for a variety of religious publications, including the weekly journal The Evening Star, and still believed in the powerful agency of the press “in reaching and elevating a people.” When offered the editorship of a local newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, Wells accepted the opportunity to become the “only Black woman of record to be an editor in chief and part owner of a major city newspaper.” She set out to effect change in her community through the knowledge-production regime of journalism (quoted in Green 2018, 9–11). But, shortly after accepting the position, as Wells-Barnett later recalled, “there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the whole course of my life” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 47). The multiple lynchings in March 1892 murdered her good friend and local postman-turned-entrepreneur, Thomas Moss, and his two associates Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell. Sometime prior they had opened the flourishing People’s Grocery at “the Curve” in Memphis. In retaliation for business success a scuffle was orchestrated by their direct business competitor, the white grocery proprietor William Barrett. After learning of the lynching Wells wrote a series of editorials that called out the murderers and the 75,000 inhabitants of Memphis for not demanding justice for the victims and their families. She exposed the real reason for the lynching as economic retaliation not “the old thread-bare lie,” the myth “that Negro men assault white women,” and suggested protests in the form of boycotts to the urban transit system and mass migration to the West. She was undeterred by threats from her detractors, which included prominent city leaders, among them Black preachers (Broussard 2018; Haywood 2021). Through her public testimonial prompted by firsthand knowledge and her personal relationships, Wells advanced an intersectional analysis through her activist newspaper that exposed how the perpetuation of the myth of the Black male rapist in white mainstream newspapers was the driving force in the continued subordination and economic exploitation of Black people (Guy-Sheftall 1995; Collins 2019). As Guy-Sheftall (1995, 69) noted, Wells deconstructed notions of “white womanhood and black sexuality” and exposed the powerful interconnection between binary constructions of race and gender. She exposed the central myths: white Southern gentleman, brute Black male rapist, the chaste Southern
22 Research handbook on intersectionality white lady, and the immoral, hypersexual Black Jezebel. She revealed the patriarchal and racist systemic oppression maintained through lynching, violence, and economic reprisal. In retaliation for her courageous editorials, Edward Carmack, editor of the local white newspaper The Memphis Commercial, agitated for mob violence against the author of the fiery editorials, contending that “the fact that the [B]lack scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is … evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it,” which resulted in a threat to Wells’s life and the destruction of The Free Speech on May 27, 1892 (Wells 1892, 1–2). Wells found temporary refuge in New York, where T. Thomas Fortune not only offered the radical social justice activist a haven, but also a national forum to continue her nascent anti-lynching crusade writing in the New York Age. From this site and through the aid of her Black male ally, Wells continued to expose the “old thread-bare lie” through fiery editorials that circulated to Black and white audiences alike, above and below the Mason Dixon line, and through a regional lecture circuit, centered in major urban hubs, including New York and Boston. Wells produced resistant knowledge that challenged dominant narratives and was grounded in her own standpoint: public testimonials, lived experiences, firsthand sociological accounts, and scientific data. Though not credited as such in the “great [white] men’s history of public relations [and journalism],” Wells engaged in nascent public relations strategies that involved research, campaign planning, pamphlet writing, and a lecture series. Her work employed techniques of investigative journalism first developed in white mainstream newspapers of authoritative record, such as the repurposing of credible, reliable empirical evidence and eye-witness accounts that documented lived experiences of oppressed and subjugated members of her race (Broussard 2018, 40). As Collins suggested, in pamphlets, such as Southern Horrors (1892), The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), The Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), Wells, with some assistance from Black and white allies, exploited intersectional sociological techniques and emerging industry best practices in journalism and public relations, including “the power of testimonial authority to highlight the view of subordinated people” and the empirical credibility of raw data and statistics to hold individuals in power accountable and to sway public opinion (Collins 2019, 161). Giddings contended that in her first pamphlet alone Wells turned the existing “paradigm on its head, with empirical evidence gathered from her investigation of the circumstances of 728 lynchings that had taken place over the previous decade. Her meticulously documented findings … completely challenged the period’s assumptions. Black men weren’t rapist, white men were; Black women weren’t doing ‘what nature prompted,’ white women were” (quoted in Guy-Sheftall 1995, 421). Though Wells’s anti-lynching research came to dominate much of her professional life as a journalist and social justice crusader, she also exposed other injustices rooted in intersecting constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She exposed the prevailing interpretation of Black masculinity that contributed to the acceptance of the convict leasing system, and as Collins (2019, 162) suggested, through her intersectional investigations, she offered a model for future analyses that “emphasize how social structures interlock to shape particular outcomes.” For instance, in her first two pamphlets, Southern Horrors (1892) and The Reason Why (1893), Wells explored the rule of elite Anglo-Saxon men and women to maintain the status quo. The “twin infamies” of lynch law and the convict leasing system operated to perpetuate oppression and subjugation of Black people. Her pamphlets denounced well-known orator Henry W. Grady, a University of Georgia graduate and managing editor of the Atlanta
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 23 Constitution, condemning his “progressive, New South” for what it was: a new version of the Old South: Henry W. Grady in his well-mannered speeches in New England and New York pictured the Afro-American as incapable of self-government. Through him and other leading men the cry of the South to the country has been “Hands off! Leave us to solve our problem.” To the Afro-American the South says, “the white man must and will rule.” There is little difference between the Ante-bellum South and the New South. (Wells 1892, 26)
Grady did not listen (Forde 2021, 31). Instead, he built and maintained his vision of the New South upon the backs of Black men through dangerous stereotypes about Black masculinity that served as the foundation of the convict labor system, which as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon (2008) acknowledged was “slavery by another name,” and through the promotion of lynch law, to intimidate any Black person with mob violence and barbarous lynching if they threatened the white status quo. Despite threats and jeopardies as a radical Black feminist from a middle-class Christian background, Wells attracted additional allies and deployed intersectional techniques in her social justice crusade that continued throughout the remainder of her life.
“WHAT A COLORED WOMAN SAID”: IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT AND MULTIPLE JEOPARDIES Approximately a decade before Wells-Barnett was born, at the international Woman’s Rights Convention of 1851 in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth cried out against the “double bind” that Black women endured under the institutions of slavery and patriarchy (King 1988). Based in her lived experience, Truth offered public testimony on the intersectional front in the battle to sway public sentiment in favor of granting enfranchisement and equal rights for all US citizens (Truth 1998). Four decades later, still engaged in the persistent struggle for “equal participation with [white] men” and justice for her race and her sex, Wells continued the primary strategy in the arsenal of abolitionists and suffragists; she delivered her public testimonial through a press-amplified lecture circuit to influence national and international public opinion against white supremacist practices in the United States (McMillen 2007, 9). As Wells-Barrett (1970/2020, 31) explained in her autobiography, “we, as a race, cannot get a hearing in the United States,” where both the white owned-and-operated press and pulpit were silent and complicit in immoral lynch law. Thus, she followed Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s model crusading throughout Great Britain from 1893 to 1894 for US anti-lynching legislation, amplifying her message in the commercial and advocacy presses, including two leading Chicago newspapers, where she served as correspondent: the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean and Ferdinand Barnett’s Chicago Conservator, the oldest Black-owned newspaper in the city (Broussard 2018). Recognizing that the white-owned and -operated commercial press and the advocacy Black press had differing levels of cultural authority within the communal urban hubs, Wells sought to address audiences at all community intersections with news of her international speaking tour. Ultimately, she hoped international coverage from British newspapers of authority might influence public sentiment and affect change particularly in her birthplace, the US South.
24 Research handbook on intersectionality Within contested, male-dominated journalistic spaces, the radical Black feminist embraced a macro-level intersectional approach to highlight micro-level relational hypocrisies. In the international court of public opinion, she critiqued white American moral reform leaders, most notably the renowned suffragist and the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard, for failing to repudiate the barbarous lynching of Black people. For instance, when first asked directly about Willard, in 1893, Wells affirmed to reporters that Willard never “said anything to condemn lynching; on the contrary she had seemed to condone it in her famous interview after returning from her first visit in the South” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 97). From her intersectional standpoint as a Black Christian woman, Wells recognized that though many white Christian women and feminist activists expressed disdain toward racism, Black people remained “objects” in public discourse, and she sought agency. The journalistic authority of leading newspapers reconstructed the narrative surrounding lynching by embracing “strong objectivity,” as Gigi Durham (1998, 117) later called it. Wells called out Christian women and feminist activists for their complicity in lynch law because of their failure to condemn the barbaric, unlawful, and unjust practice (Frances Willard House Museum). Moreover, after encountering press-amplified challenges and condemnation from the circle of elite white activists for her criticism, Wells recognized that information is not neutral, but a source of power and a form of resistance; she armed herself with empirical evidence in advance of her second lecture circuit in February 1894. She carried a newspaper clip from the October 23, 1890 edition of the New York Voice, the temperance newspaper that first carried Willard’s controversial remarks after her appearance at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Atlanta convention in 1890 (ibid.). Wells continued to draw attention to the ways that supposed white Christian allies not only failed to condemn lynching, but also perpetuated dangerous tropes about Black men. Stereotypes of Black male sexuality were spread through the commercial periodical press and used, in the absence of evidence, as justification for the lynching of Black men. As Wells wrote in her March 24 Chicago Inter-Ocean column, Willard and some of her contemporaries published “utterances in confirmation of this slander,” namely that “old threadbare lie” that falsely claimed that “[Black] men were despoilers of the virtue of white women” (Frances Willard House Museum 1894). To substantiate her claim, Wells arranged to reprint Willard’s Voice interview in an upcoming issue of the antiracist British magazine Fraternity so that the world might see for themselves how Willard reinforced the myth of the drunken, menacing Black male rapist who threatened “the safety of [white] woman[hood], of childhood [and] of the home” (Frances Willard House Museum 1893). Wells’s (1894, 8) most powerful contention was many white people “made the mistake of judging the negro by what his accusers say of him and without hearing his side of the story.” Wells unleashed a two-year war of words in the press with Willard, who viewed Wells’s actions as an assault to her Christian reputation, but as Wells acknowledged, any risk to personal reputation was well justified, considering that “the life of [her] people … [was] at stake” (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 176). In an international forum Wells used her agency to call out the apathy of supposed white allies, in hopes that, pressured by British public sentiment, prominent white Christian reformers might change their position and demand federal anti-lynching legislation. Wells stated clearly in a letter to the editor that she penned to the Westminster Gazette:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 25 The fact is, Miss Willard is no better or worse than the great bulk of white Americans on the Negro question. They are all afraid to speak out, and it is only British public opinion which will move them … (ibid.)
Wells’s macro-level intersectional strategy proved effective—her agitation in international public forums, amplified by credible newspapers of authority, contributed to the passage of anti-lynching resolutions within national and international organizations and spurred the decline of racist mob violence and murderous lynching. Unfortunately, that was insufficient in halting the barbarous act, fueled by vicious racism, which proved more difficult to mitigate through the passage of federal anti-lynching legislation than Wells or any of her contemporaries could ever imagine (Wells 1910).
“HOW ENFRANCHISEMENT STOPS LYNCHING”: WELLS-BARNETT ENTREATS THE INTERSECTIONAL AUDIENCE OF FORMER ABOLITIONIST TO UNITE AGAINST INJUSTICE After yet another lawless, brutal act of mob violence against a Black man, in spring 1910 Wells-Barnett wielded her pen to entreat the new intersectional audience of former abolitionist Charles Lenz to unite (Wells 1910). Since the brutal murder of her three friends at the Curve in Memphis in 1892, Wells-Barnett had amplified her voice to speak to macro-level national and international audiences in her crusade against the “horrors of lynching.” Through activist newspapers, pamphlets, and lecture circuits and with great effect, as she reported, the barbaric practice had decreased annually over the next decade (Moses 1988, 129). However, in the first decade of the twentieth century Wells-Barnett witnessed a steep increase in lynching, particularly in her adopted state of Illinois. The latest act of violence, the lynching of William “Froggie” James, who was “accused of the usual crime—that of assaulting white women,” in Cairo, Illinois, on November 9, 1909 was “one of the most inhuman spectacles ever witnessed in this country.” That prompted Wells-Barnett to redouble imploring a primarily white national audience to help mold public sentiment in favor of anti-lynching legislation (Wells 1910, 45–6). In the June 1910 issue of Original Rights Magazine, Wells-Barnett highlighted the power of journalism as the first version of public history, and history as part of the knowledge-production regime. Acknowledging that the national historical record was wholly incomplete and inaccurate, she staged her own historical intervention and intersectional treatment of “the Negro question,” which she contended had been present since “the landing of the Dutch Slaveship in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619” (Wells 1910, 42). Five years after the release of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s (1905) bestselling book, The Clansman, Wells-Barnett offered an alternative narrative, rooted in sociological data and lived experience, that reminded her national and international intersectional audiences of how, amid Klan violence and domestic terrorism, the U.S. government repealed civil rights legislation and affirmed Jim Crow policies, “removing in every way possible constitutional guarantees to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Wells 1910, 44). Without civil rights protections in place, white supremacists subjugated the Black race to inferior schools and unequal protection under the law. “With no sacredness of the ballot there
26 Research handbook on intersectionality can be no sacredness of human life itself,” Wells-Barnett (1910, 45) explained, reminding her primarily white upper-class audience that they all might aid in efforts to secure the ballot and abolish lynching. “Individuals, organizations, press and pulpit should unite in vigorous denunciation of all forms of lawlessness and earnest, constant demand for the rigid enforcement of the law of the land” (ibid., 52).
“MODERN JOAN [OF] ARC” PROMOTES “UNITED WOMANHOOD” Though Wells-Barnett encountered racism time and again at the micro-level in private circles and public spaces in her two-decade career as a women’s rights activist, including assaults suggesting that “Black women were incapable of ‘true womanhood,’” she returned to the notion of “united womanhood” at the meso-level within local, state, and national suffrage organizations. She sought middle grounds linking macro political-economic analyses with individual actions and psychological effects. In the 1910s the Alpha Suffrage Club was a mode to promote flexible solidarity among Black women and their white allies in local and national efforts to gain universal enfranchisement. The goal was to stop the steady rise of racial violence and lynchings. Nevertheless, sustained racism of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) made Wells struggle to convince Black women to join in the Illinois state chapter WSA. She later reflected in her autobiography: I had been a member of the Women’s Suffrage Association all during my residence in Illinois, but somehow I had not been able to get very much interest among our club women. When I saw that we were likely to have restricted suffrage … I made another effort to get our women interested. (Wells-Barrett 1970/2020, 345)
As the Municipal and Presidential Voting Act was being debated, Wells-Barnett and white suffragist Belle Squire decided to form an integrated, non-partisan suffrage club to promote the passage of a bill that would grant limited suffrage to approximately 1.5 million women in Illinois. That prospect was particularly important to Wells-Barnett, who “believed that the club [promoting united womanhood] might become a viable force for the advancement of members of her race and her gender” (Roessner and Rightler-McDaniels 2018, 63). “When I saw that we were likely to have restricted suffrage … I made another effort to get our women interested … I showed them that we could use our vote for the advantage of ourselves and our race” (quoted in DuRocher 2018, 67), she recalled years later. To that end, Wells-Barnett and Squire established the Alpha Suffrage Club in January 1913 for “all women interested in knowing how to become good citizens” (quoted in Roessner 2018, 67). Under the banner of “united womanhood,” the nearly 200 members of the Alpha Suffrage Club convened on a weekly basis nearby the headquarters of the Negro Fellowship League (NFL), the social club that Wells-Barnett formed shortly after the 1908 Springfield race riot. The NFL was in Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and promoted the club and its mission regularly in the pages of the Chicago Defender and through the Alpha Suffrage Club newsletter. Wells-Barnett recognized early in her career that racial injustice intersected with gender oppression, and as Collins contended, through the knowledge-construction power of the advocacy press and in pamphlets and newsletters, Wells-Barnett in her role as an organ-
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 27 izational leader drew upon “intersecting systems of power to solve racial problems” (Collins 2019, 162). Though women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony long ago had expressed that women and Black people should be granted the same voting rights as white men “irrespective of race, color, sex or class” (L. Garland 2005, 61), Wells-Barnett encountered lingering racism within the ranks of NAWSA leadership head on in what proved to be a direct challenge to a commitment to “united womanhood” (Giddings 2008). In March 1913, Wells-Barnett traveled to Washington, DC, with other members of the integrated Illinois Woman’s Suffrage Association, to march in the inaugural Woman’s Suffrage Parade to be held in conjunction with president-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, but national parade organizers Alice Paul and Lucy Burns sacrificed “united womanhood” to comply with demands of white supremacist Southern NAWSA chapters, who demanded that Black delegates march at the back of a segregated procession (Dodd 2008; Giddings 2008; Roesner 2018). Appreciating the implications of the threat of a Southern boycott to the success of the event, Illinois Equal Suffrage Association president Grace Wilbur Trout conferred with Wells-Barnett about complying with the demands, and amid the recognition that the women’s rights movement continued to put gender before race, Wells-Barnett remained true to her convictions and integrated the Illinois delegation during the procession. “If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost …,” Wells-Barnett retorted. “I was asked to march with the other women of our state, and I intend to do so or not take part in the parade at all” (quoted in Giddings 2008, 517). Much to Wells-Barnett’s chagrin, however, even Squire, who proposed that she walk alongside delegations of Black women from the Alpha Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta at Howard University and the National Association of Colored Women, was willing to compromise understandings of “united womanhood” to appease Southern white supremacists (Roessner 2018, 68). When the editorial staff at Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender heard of her courageous act, Wells-Barnett once again was lauded as the greatest woman race leader. Though the writer succumbed to the heteropatriarchal attitudes of the time, they lauded Wells-Barnett as a “Modern Joan [of] Arc” in an above-the-fold, page-one headline. In comparing Wells-Barnett to the French heroine-martyr, the Defender paid tribute to the radical militant, acknowledging her courage and strength in the fight for racial equality (ibid.). Wells-Barnett had once again encountered the shortcomings of uniting women at the national macro-level and the Illinois Woman’s Suffrage Association and the Alpha Suffrage Club at the meso-level contributed to the passage of the Municipal and Presidential Voting Act that July. The voting act success culminated with the “Women’s Independence Day” in Chicago, a 2,000-person parade procession down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue (ibid., 69). After celebrating at the event, under Wells-Barnett’s leadership Alpha Suffrage members focused on collective civic education initiatives that encouraged Black women to recognize themselves as a class subjected to multiple types of oppression and hierarchies of power. The class was formed by interconnected factors: race, gender, and social class, and sought to “stick together” and “to unite their strength for their own advancement” to elect a “conscientious race man” in local elections (ibid., 70–1). In the short term, Wells-Barnett’s efforts were successful as the Alpha Suffrage Club helped elect Oscar DePriest, Chicago’s first Black alderman, but Wells-Barnett recognized that once in office, politicians did not always remember the identity-based power bloc of Black feminist constituents that helped get them there. Nevertheless, as Collins (2019) suggested, Wells-Barnett’s “united womanhood” provided
28 Research handbook on intersectionality a model for flexible solidarity for Black women’s community work. In the case of her work with the Alpha Suffrage Club, Wells-Barnett not only helped uplift the local Black community by promoting “conscientious” Black race men as governmental leaders, but also directly intervened in what was referred to in the local and national press as “the Colored Boy Problem.” She organized a series of “mother’s meetings” to address the mass incarceration of Black youth for petty crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and trespassing (Roessner 2018, 73). Through coordinated efforts of the Alpha Suffrage Club and the NFL Wells-Barnett helped ensure the survival of Black youth. Likewise, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Wells-Barnett’s latter-day efforts established the Third Ward Women’s Political Club, which encouraged Black women to enter politics, helped transform local, state, and national politics, and has provided a model for present-day social justice movements (Giddings 2008).
NO LONGER “OVERLOOKED”—MONUMENTS TO THE MEMORY OF “MAGNIFICENT [BLACK] WOMEN” Even as she wrote tirelessly on her memoir, so that children’s generations later might remember why she once had been referred to as the “Modern Joan [of] Arc,” leading white women and Black men of her generation continued to write Ida B. Wells-Barnett out of the historical narrative. Perhaps this was latent racist and patriarchal beliefs, but also because of her positionality as a militant middle-class Black woman without extensive higher education (Dickerson 2018; Roessner 2019). From their positional standpoints and social positions, her contemporaries Ida Tarbell, Ida Husted Harper, Mary White Ovington, and W.E.B. Du Bois minimized and otherwise discounted Wells-Barnett’s impact as a muckraking, investigative journalist, and her role as a leader within the women’s suffrage and anti-lynching movements (DuRocher 2018). Even the “father of Black History” Carter G. Woodson, then editor of the Journal of Negro History and director of National Negro History Week, neglected to mention Wells-Barnett’s role in the anti-lynching campaign in his history of the race (Woodson 1931). Wells-Barnett noted that fact as she prepared for a January 1930 “meeting of the local Negro History club” (DuRocher 2018, 93). This sexist omission vexed Wells-Barnett, who as president of the Negro Fellowship League provided Woodson with a forum for his talks some 15 years prior. Other era scholars who wrote about the history of lynching followed Woodson’s patriarchal cue. As other historians have suggested, due to Wells-Barnett’s status as a militant Black woman, elitist reform leaders within both the women’s rights movement and the freedom struggle marginalized Wells-Barnett and minimized her accomplishments (DuRocher 2016, 2018). Despite continued activism in the waning years of her life, she was the first Black woman probation officer and worked to limit the mass incarceration of Black people, and her encouragement for women to enter the political arena through the Third Ward Women’s Political Club, Wells-Barnett’s death was little noted. Her untimely death from kidney disease on March 25, 1931 (Dickerson 2018) attracted little notice in the primarily white-owned andoperated national press, even as reports noted with veneration the passing of her white ally Belle Squire eight years later (New York Times 1939). “We didn’t exist in the other papers,” Chicago Defender and Associated Negro Press reporter Vernon Jarrett recalled in Stanley Nelson’s award-winning documentary “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords.” “We
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and journalist 29 were neither born. We didn’t get married. We didn’t die …. We were truly invisible, unless we committed a crime” (California Newsreel 1998). Wells-Barnett’s life narrative exposed the persistent truth of “unbearable blackness,” Jared Sexton’s (2015, 162) term describing Afro-pessimism and political life; she offers a model of agency through advocacy journalism, social organizations, and public history. Her passing was unobserved except by her closest friends and loved ones and the initial commemoration efforts of individuals from local organizations, including the Chicago Defender (Giddings 2008) that demonstrated the potential for agency through advocacy journalism. True to its name, the Black activist newspaper protected the collective memory of Wells-Barnett, offering a tribute to the local woman that they once had praised as the “Modern Joan [of] Arc,” and as a “transnational social justice crusader” (Roessner and McDaniels 2018, xxxii). Defender journalist Rebecca Stiles Taylor continued to restore Wells-Barnett’s image as a pioneer in the Black freedom struggle and women’s rights movements. Her work as a militant martyr was worthy of being honored with a monument of brick and stone. From her own standpoint as a Black social justice activist, educator, and journalist, Taylor embraced an intersectional strategy to prevent the historical erasure of Wells-Barnett and other magnificent Black women. Relying on firsthand accounts from Defender historian Elizabeth Lindsey Davis to reconstruct a history of Wells-Barnett and other Black women, Taylor envisioned a future time when “the women of Mississippi and Tennessee and Illinois [might] join hands and together with those of the rest of the country and build to the memory of Ida B. Wells-Barnett some form of monument commensurate with the heroic service rendered by her” (Rosessner 2018, 108). Until the materialization of that monument, still nearly a century away, Taylor constructed an “intangible, abstract monument” relying upon a bricolage of memories and lived experiences, including the printed words of Davis, the former secretary of the Ida B. Wells Club. Davis, remained committed to “lifting as we climb,” the motto of the National Association of Colored Women. Taylor offered a nuanced intersectional characterization of Wells-Barnett’s standpoint and social status that extended beyond those that only remembered her as a Black feminist and social justice crusader. Teacher, writer, editor, lecturer, club woman, church and social worker, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a woman of strong character, forceful personality, and unflinching courage. Her clarion voice and ready pen were always waged vigorously in agitating and protesting any force of segregation and discrimination affecting the oppressed. (Quoted in Roessner 2018, 108)
Unfortunately, aside the handful of local tributes to Wells-Barnett, her life story remained incomplete for roughly the next half century. Her great granddaughter, Michelle Duster (2020), recently wrote in the afterword to a second edition of Crusade for Justice that amid entrenched racism and sexism, predominantly white and male book publishers in the 1960s remained hesitant to publish the posthumous autobiography of a militant Black woman, like Wells-Barnett. Nevertheless, a tribute to the persistence of these early Black feminist historians, who protected memories for their local communities, and to the continued saliency of Wells-Barnett’s intersectional approach and courageous social justice crusade, historians in the 1970s rescued Wells-Barnett’s life history from the footnotes. Duster acknowledged in her afterword the decades-long efforts to properly remember and memorialize her great grandmother, Wells-Barnett became something of a cultural touchstone for a generation of Americans committed to the ongoing freedom struggle. After decades of overlooking Wells-Barnett and her pioneering intersectional “reporting techniques that remain
30 Research handbook on intersectionality central tenets of modern journalism,” mainstream white news industry organizations, such as the New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize Board, eventually recognized Wells-Barnett for her “outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching” (Equal Justice Initiative 2020). We live in a world in which Ida’s refrain, “no justice, no peace,” remains incredibly germane in our collective freedom struggle; thus, when many of us ask ourselves, “what would Ida do?” we know with certainty that “she would blog. She would tweet. She would take to the streets” (Clark 2018, 155).
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32 Research handbook on intersectionality Ochiai, Aloko. 1992. “Ida B. Wells and Her Crusade for Justice: An African American Woman’s Testionial Autobiography,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75 (2/3): 365–81. Roessner, Lori Amber. 2018. “‘The Modern Joan [of] Arc’: Press Coverage of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Campaign for Women’s Suffrage.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, 63–80. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Roessner, Lori and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels (eds.). 2018. Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Sexton, Jared. 2015. “Unbearable Blackness,” Cultural Critique 90 (90): 159–78. Smith, Lucy. 1895.“Miss Ida B. Wells.” In The College of Life; or, Practical Self Educator: A Manual of Self-Improvement of the Colored Race, edited by Henry Davenport Northrop, 99–101. Chicago, IL: Chicago Publication and Lithograph Company. Smith, Valerie. 1998. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge. Sterling, Dorothy. 1979. Black Foremothers: Three Lives. New York: The City Press of New York. Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Truth, Sojourner. 1998. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Introduction by Neil Painter. New York: Penguin Classics. Tucker, David M. 1971. “Miss Ida B. Wells and Memphis Lynching,” Phylon 32 (2): 112–22. Vogt, R.J. 2018. “Pioneering Advocacy Journalism: What Today’s Journalists Can Learn from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Methodology.” In Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, edited by Lori Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler, 137–55. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wells, Ida. 1892. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Wells, Ida. 1893/1999. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. The Afro American’s Contribution to Colombian Literature. Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett. Edited by Robert W. Rydell. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wells, Ida. 1894. “Ida B. Wells Abroad: Speaking in Liverpool against Lynchers of Negros,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, April 9, University of Chicago Library, Ida B. Wells Papers, 1884–1976. Wells, Ida. 1910. “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching,” Original Rights Magazine, June, 42–52. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/pdf/ibwells-0008-008-05.pdf. Accessed May 3, 2022. Wells-Barnett, Ida. 1970/2020. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wood, Norman B. 1897. The White Side of a Black Subject. Chicago, IL: American Publiction House. https://blackwomenssuffrage.dp.la/collections/ida-b-wells/ibwells-0008-010-12. Accessed May 3, 2022. Woodson, Carter G. 1931. The Negro in Our History. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers.
3. Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): intersectionality and activism Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
And when farther on in the same section our train stops at a dilapidated station, rendered yet more unsightly by dozens of loafers …; looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with “FOR LADIES” swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other; while wondering under which head I come … (Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South 1892)
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), in a long career, anticipated, as the above passage shows, many of the premises of contemporary intersectionality theory: (1) analysing as a scholar-activist the crisis of her time—the threat to Black existence posed by White domination; (2) employing standpoint epistemology to speak from the standpoint of the oppressed— as “a Black Woman of the South”; (3) explaining power in terms of systems of privilege and oppression that working together create its pathological configuration—domination; and (4) using narratives to illustrate the intersection of race, gender and class in individual lives and in macrosocial structures. To claim her as one of the foundational voices of intersectionality theory—a term Cooper did not use, we need to address a question central to all social science: when is the same the same? (Winch 1958). We do so by asserting a clear sameness between the problems Cooper confronts and the problems we identify today as intersectionality operating in society. The term “intersectionality” in this chapter describes a process, ubiquitous in social life, in which a society’s stratificational structures and practices, that is, its institutionalized ways of unequally distributing socially produced goods and services (e.g., through class, race, gender, ethnicity, age), relate to each other to shape how power is experienced in individual lives and in interactions, groups, formal organizations, and social institutions. We use “intersectional” as an adjective to suggest a stratificational category or practice that, by its relation to other such categories, has a material effect on the life chances of a person or group. This chapter is based in Cooper’s scholarly work and in major commentaries on that work. Cooper’s most important book, A Voice from the South (1892), is available in several editions—an early reprint by Negro Universities Press (1969), the Schomburg (1988) replica with a fine introduction by Mary Helen Washington, an online ebook by Google, an open access edition by Project Gutenberg, and in the essential collection of Cooper’s work, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (1998) edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan. Cooper’s 1925 dissertation L’Attitude de la France a L’Egard de L’Esclavage pendant la Revolution (1925) is available in Frances Richardson Kellor’s 2006 English translation Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists along with Kellor’s commentary. Biographical studies of Cooper include Leona Gabel (1982) and the definitive Anna J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1981) by Louise Daniel Hutchinson, prepared as the catalogue for the exhibit of the same title co-sponsored by the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. The major work of interpretation is Vivian M. May’s Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist 33
34 Research handbook on intersectionality (2007). Other useful commentaries include Karen Baker-Fletcher (1994), Janice Y. Ferguson (2015), Katherine T. Gines (2015), Karen A. Johnson (2009), and Vivian May (2009, 2012). Cooper’s scholarship and activism draw on her life as a member of two overlapping and remarkable cohorts, the first generation of Blacks to grow to maturity after the Civil War and the first generation of college-educated women (White and Black). Cooper’s work reflects this education in her research for case studies of the US and France/Haiti, including official statistics, archival materials reporting debates in the French Assemblies over slavery and the status of Santo Domingo (aka San Domingue and “Haiti”) and in her immersion in classical Greek and Latin, modern and medieval French, English and European literature and history, and contemporary American literature. Our chapter has five parts: “Life,” “Scholar-Activism,” “Standpoint,” “Social Theory,” and “Presentation.”
LIFE My mother was a slave and the finest woman I have ever known … Presumably my father was her master, if so I owe him not a sou. She was always too modest & shamefaced ever to mention him. (Anna Julia Cooper n.d. in Hutchinson 1981, 4)
While noting the concern expressed by other scholars that Black intellectuals often have their ideas neglected in favor of a focus on their biographies (Gines 2015; Gordon 2018; May 2007), we agree with May (2007, 52) that “it is essential to account for the contested political contexts in which [Cooper] lived.” We summarize Cooper’s biography in terms of four patterns: changes in US society in her lifetime, macrosocial constraints imposed on Black Americans, a chronology of her life, and moments of high intersectional pressure. Macrosocial Changes Over Cooper’s lifetime—1858–1964—American society moved from a rural-agrarian economy to a capitalist urban-industrial one; from a semi-peripheral, relatively isolated position in the world to global leadership; from a government preserved largely for the interests of wealthy White men to one where women, people of color, and the working class sought an active role in the state; and from a world where daily life was patterned by home-produced goods and entertainment to one where daily life was repatterned by mass production of goods and the technological breakthroughs that created the automobile, telephone, refrigeration, radio, movies, and television. Constraints on Black Americans These changes during the period from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act (1864–1964) impacted everyone living in the US, but Black Americans, besides coping with these and seizing what opportunities they could, were forced into constant struggle by the deep contradictions in US policy and attitudes toward them (Alexander 1995; Ferguson 2015). A prime example of these contradictions is the volatility of Civil Rights law from 1865 to 1896. In 1865, when Cooper would have been about seven years old, the states of the Confederacy, seeing defeat close, began enacting “Black codes” restricting former slaves from jury duty, owning property, conducting business, buying or leasing land, or freely moving in public
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 35 spaces. The US Congress responded to these codes with the Civil Rights Act of (March 1) 1875, declaring “equality of all men before the law” and forbidding discrimination in public places (e.g., restaurants and railway transportation). A year later, the contested Presidential election of 1876 was settled by the Democrats (then associated with the Confederate cause) giving Republicans (seen as “the party of Lincoln”) the Presidency in exchange for agreeing to withdraw Federal troops from the South, opening the way for more White supremacist legislation. In 1883 the Supreme Court decision declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional further accelerated the passage of Jim Crow legislation. Repeatedly challenged in the courts by Black plaintiffs like Cooper’s contemporary, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (see Chapter 2 in this volume), these laws were often overturned in the lower courts—Wells-Barnett, for instance, won there—and then that victory was reversed on appeal. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court ruled 7–1 that “separate but equal facilities” are constitutional and that states have the right to regulate railroad travel. The “separate but equal” frame became the law of the land. (Plessy v. Ferguson was finally overturned in 1953 in Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas which held that “separate facilities are inherently unequal.” Cooper, who had spent her life teaching in segregated school systems, was 95 years old.) Chronology Anna Julia Cooper was born “Annie Julia Haywood,” August 10, 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina to an enslaved mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood; Cooper believed her father to be her mother’s enslaver. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Cooper attended St. Augustine’s (Episcopal) Normal School founded to educate newly freed slaves. A precocious student, she excelled in school and was happy there. In 1877, she married her tutor in ancient Greek, George Cooper, who died shortly after being confirmed as an Episcopal priest in 1879. Widowed at 20, Cooper taught at St. Augustine’s until 1881, when she applied to Oberlin College, explaining her situation—widowed, with little money, but willing to work and with good references. At Oberlin she lived with the family of (White) Professor Charles H. Churchill, did paid tutoring, and excelled in her classes. After graduation in 1884, she taught at Wilberforce University, returned home at her mother’s request, and taught again at St. Augustine’s. Through Oberlin connections, she was hired in 1887 to teach math and science in Washington, DC at the M Street School, the largest high school for colored youth in the US. The period 1887–1905 was one of outstanding productivity for Cooper: she self-published A Voice from the South (1892); was a frequently invited guest lecturer, most notably at The Congress of Representative Women, Chicago World’s Fair (1893); made lasting friends— especially The Reverend Francis Grimké and his wife Charlotte Forten; volunteered through service organizations and became principal of the M Street School (1902)—a singular honor for a woman. But that position drew her into the growing controversy over whether colored youth should follow a vocational or a classical curriculum; her firm stance, that the school should offer both, led to her losing her contract and moving to Lincoln University in Missouri (1906–10). In 1910, she returned to Washington, teaching Latin at the M Street School. Between 1910 and 1925, she took summer courses in France, and started work toward her doctorate, first at Columbia University and then, running afoul of their residency requirement, at the Sorbonne. In 1915, she became the legal guardian for her widowed nephew’s five children, occasioning her purchase of a larger home. By careful management and shrewd risk taking, she was able to put the children into private schools, allowing her to visit France to continue her disserta-
36 Research handbook on intersectionality tion research on French attitudes toward slavery during the Revolution. But the DC School Administration foreshortened her leave, which necessitated her hiring a “collaboratrice” to copy documents and send them to her at the Library of Congress; in March 1925 she defended the dissertation in Paris, in French (see The Third Step, Cooper’s autobiographical pamphlet self-published in her eighties; in Lemert and Bahn 1998). Retiring from the DC Schools in 1930, she became President of Frelinghuysen University, a pioneering night school for working-class Black adults, where she served in various capacities and lent her home for classes into the 1950s (Johnson, 2009). She lived to see the modern Civil Rights Movement March on Washington in 1963 and died peacefully at her home on T Street NW in 1964. Intersectionality Intersectionality permeated Cooper’s life. Remembering her parentage, she acknowledges her origins in one of the most monstrous practices of intersectionality—the sexual abuse of her slave mother by her owner. She recalls as a girl at school having to fight for opportunities that boys were granted easily, such as studying Greek. Her years at Oberlin College were marked by a growing awareness of “how the other half lived”—that “other” included both the Churchill family and classmates (but not friends) from the fledgling Black bourgeoisie—Mary Church (Terrell) and Ida Gibbs (Hunt) who led typical collegiate lives while Cooper, slightly older, a widow, living off campus, was doing paid tutoring. While teaching in Washington she seems to have traveled frequently by train, probably home to Raleigh, at the time Southern states were creating Jim Crow cars. She wrote about that experience in great detail as one defined by status inconsistency between her race and her class. Her professional rise at the M Street School, finally reaching Principal, engulfed her in the widespread and acrimonious debate about classical versus vocational education that came to involve personal attacks by the White supervisor of the colored school system and Black colleagues perhaps jealous of her prominence (Hutchinson 1981, 67–83). Her quest for the PhD, first at Columbia and then at the Sorbonne, was punctuated by recurring obstacles arising from her status as a “non-traditional student” before that concept was institutionalized. When she was working on her doctorate, the Library of Congress located her in a small private room, the main reading room being barred to Blacks. Her 1925 defense in Paris was done under threats of dismissal for absence from the DC school system—which would have meant loss of salary and retirement pension. Even the achievement that had perhaps meant the most to her—her career as an educator—was dependent on the workings of intersectionality: only as a widow could she teach, married women being barred.
SCHOLAR-ACTIVISM I may say honestly and truthfully that my one aim is and has always been, so far as I may, to hold a torch for the children of a group too long exploited and too frequently disparaged in its struggling for the light. (Anna J. Cooper in Hutchinson 1981, 131)
The role of scholar-activist was Cooper’s response to the pressures and opportunities of her life: education gave her upward mobility and a critical understanding of what was happening to Black Americans; religion strengthened her resolve to do justice, which meant to increase
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 37 opportunity for others. As a professional educator in Washington, she lived the cultivated life she had experienced while boarding with the Churchills in Oberlin, creating a home for entertaining friends who shared interests in art, literature, and music, joining the Black Women’s Club Movement, building a reputation as a public speaker within the Black community. But she was not content to settle into the role of a member of the Black bourgeoisie. She understood Black Americans were in the fight of their lives, facing domination, the organized and unjust use of power—and her duty was to make that the object of her activism. Cooper brought to her activism an extraordinary aptitude for education which yielded broad cultivation, research skills, talent in writing and public speaking. She had, too, the character traits for activist leadership—will, confidence, eloquence, and steadiness (Ferguson 2015). Cooper’s scholar-activist role was of a distinctive type. Never a participant in visible protests, the path taken by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, she was a “loner” choosing her activist projects carefully: the cause of Black Americans, especially the poor; of women in general, but of Black women in particular; and the cause of African American youth, especially urban youth. She expressed this activism through critical scholarship, commitment to education, and duty to community service. Choosing activism posed risks, both financial and professional. Widowed at 20, she lived close to the bone on the modest salary she earned at the M Street School, responding on occasion to the needs of poorer relatives and assuming the expenses of the guardianship, when she was 55, for five great-nephews and nieces. Critical Scholarship Cooper shared her understanding of the crisis facing Black America through publications and lectures: ● “Womanhood—A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” at the Convocation of Colored Clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Washington, DC in 1886; ● “A Response to Fannie Barrier Williams” at the Congress of Representative Women at the Columbian World’s Fair, 1893; ● a reflection on education at the Second Hampton Negro Conference, Hampton, Virginia, 1894; ● “The Negro Problem in America,” Pan-African Congress, London, 1900; ● “The Ethics of the Negro Question,” Biennial Session of Friends’ General Conference, Asbury Park, New Jersey, September 5, 1902; ● “Ideals and Reals or What do You Want?” First Baptist Church in Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1909 (Hutchinson 1981, 82). Some of these lectures are incorporated into her highest achievement in activist scholarship, A Voice from the South. Education Cooper saw education as the major route for the empowerment of Black Americans to challenge White domination, and the second major strand in her contribution to Black resistance, one she pursued from about age 11 when she tutored adult students at St. Augustine’s, through decades of teaching in the DC Colored Public Schools, and, then, as President, registrar, and
38 Research handbook on intersectionality teacher at Frelinghuysen University for Colored adult workers where she founded the Hannah Stanley Opportunity School, in honor of her mother, for the least advantaged of adult learners, and fought to preserve it into her nineties. Cooper had a systematically developed philosophy of education: (1) it should be life-long, focused not on producing chemists or welders but human beings; inclusive across lines of sex, race, age, class, career goals, aptitudes, and respected by all sectors of the Black community as their best investment; (2) students should choose their curricular focus based on their “appreciation” of the subject matter; (3) vocational training should be valued for what it did for the student and for the Black community in building bridges to the White world; (4) the ultimate test of the success of a society is the kind of person its school systems produce. She paid a high price for her commitment to this philosophy by insisting, as Principal of the M Street School (1902–06), on dual tracks of vocational and classical education, charting a middle position in the complex debates among White and Black school administrators and community members over Booker T. Washington’s call for vocational education and W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument for classical education of the “talented tenth.” When her classical curriculum students won scholarships to “Harvard, Brown, Oberlin, Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth and Radcliffe” tension increased between Cooper and the White superintendent of Washington High Schools Percy Hughes who wanted to shut down the classical program (Hutchinson 1981, 67–8). In the end, Cooper was “out of a job” with all that meant for her as a single Black woman but, as she noted, the program was saved at least temporarily. Community Service Aware that most Black Washingtonians lived in dire poverty, Cooper worked with others to establish organizations to address that need. The Colored Women’s League, started in 1894, lobbied for better living conditions, especially for the city’s alley dwellers (Cooper became Chair of the Alley Sanitation Committee and corresponding secretary of the organization); the League instituted training for kindergarten teachers, provided emergency services for the indigent, and helped spearhead alliances with other clubs around the country that climaxed in the 1904 incorporation of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. The Colored Women’s League helped found the Colored Settlement House (1902) for which Cooper was an active volunteer and authored an article describing its origin and functions—providing daycare, nurseries, after school programs, savings programs, food for infants, sports and clubs for boys and girls, and summer camp. Cooper helped found the Black YWCA (known as the Phyllis Wheatley branch, 1906), which had an early project of housing women and girls seeking work in Washington, DC, and at which she started a Black Campfire Girls Camp in 1912. An Integrated Effort The categories we have made here, of course, are not how Cooper lived her life. Her various activist commitments frequently merged in a single project as when at the conferral ceremony in December 1925, she describes her PhD as an act of service: “I take from your hands … this diploma, not as a symbol of cold intellectual success … but with the warm pulsing heart throbs of a people’s satisfaction in my humble efforts to serve them” (Hutchinson 1981, 142).
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 39
STANDPOINT Only the Black Woman can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” (Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South)
A Voice from the South begins with an act of genius—the identification on the title page of authorship, “BY A BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH”; Cooper’s name appearing only once in the book—on the copyright page: Copyright 1892 BY Anna Julia Cooper We agree with Lemert and Bhan (1998, 48) that Cooper made a very deliberate move in constructing the persona of the author, her “decision not to sign her book was anything but false modesty or some other empty virtue.” And while they are also probably correct that “She very likely used the signature of the ‘Black Woman of the South’ instead of her own, because she was so very well aware of the power that could move the society when individuals assume a potent collective office,” the decision is not only political but aesthetic and not only aesthetic but sociological. Cooper is claiming “power” not for herself but as a representative of a group who stand at an intersection of race, gender, and region that made them perhaps the most disempowered group in US society. In her prologue, “Our Raison d’Être,” Cooper plunges this archetypal figure, the book’s speaker, and sometimes main character, into the drama of US race relations in the 1890s which she describes as “the clash and clatter of our American Conflict” (p. i). Cooper imagines an ongoing lawsuit over “the colored man’s inheritance and apportionment … still the somber crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation” in which everyone has been heard from except “the Black Woman.” Cooper then says that for a fair verdict, “truth from each standpoint [must] be presented at the bar” and so she speaks because “the ‘other side’ has not been represented by one who ‘lives there’” (boldface ours). Without using the label “intersectionality,” she suggests one operation of the process: the different sides have not experienced each other’s lives, the White lawyer cannot speak for the Black man nor the Black man for the Black woman (Cooper 1892, i–iii). The proof of Cooper’s assertion that the Black man cannot serve as a spokesperson for the experience of the Black woman can be found in the original source of the title “The Black Woman of the South,” an 1883 speech by Alexander Crummell, a Cambridge-educated African clergyman, who, although moved by the cruelties endured by this woman under slavery, describes her after Emancipation as almost irredeemably “coarse” in every aspect of her life, needing uplift through education in “industrial boarding schools … limited to reading, writing, arithmetic and geography” and domestic skills “for the raising up of women meet to be the helpers of poor men, the rank and file of black society” (Crummell 1883, 105–7). Cooper acknowledges Crummell’s precedence in the first chapter of A Voice but her argument suggests that he cannot speak from the standpoint of the Black Woman of the South as she, Cooper, can, because she is that person. In “Our Raison d’Être,” Cooper claims the validity of standpoint epistemology in the quest for truth, arguing that standpoint matters in general, and that the representation of different
40 Research handbook on intersectionality standpoints is a criterion for critical social investigation. Further, Cooper presents any standpoint as resulting from the intersection of vectors of oppression and privilege, placing directly on the table the ways race, gender, and region interact in the lives of different groups to create a stratificational hierarchy. Cooper’s self-presentation as “A Black Woman of the South” seems at first to omit the third part of what Mary Romero (2018, 1) describes as “the holy trinity” of much social research— class. The issue of class, or its absence, in A Voice has been dealt with by several critics. Mary Helen Washington (1988, xxx) sees Cooper maintaining a “discreet distance” from the lives of poor Black women. In contrast, May (2012) argues that Cooper is vitally concerned with the lives and fates of all Black people, but especially of poor Black working women. Our position is that Cooper, in taking on the very political act of speaking “as a Black woman of the South,” must navigate the problems of intraracial class antagonism and of White disparagement of Blacks as at best, poor and ignorant, and at worst, indigent and stupid. As she negotiates these issues, she is writing not only for “the Black race” but for herself, expressing what she understands of her own class position. What Cooper chooses to do by naming “A Black Woman of the South” as the author is to present herself as the educated person she is and by extension of the title “a Black Woman” what many Black women are—familiar with the struggles of Black people but also educated, professional, self-supporting human beings who mean to be listened to as such. This representation is of a class to which Black mothers and fathers may aspire for their sons and daughters and shows that Cooper’s class position is authentic and the aspiration, legitimate—an issue important to both Blacks and Whites. Even positive reviews of A Voice sometimes reflected the low opinion of Blacks held by white critics as when the Boston Transcript notes that Cooper writes “in excellent English”—a comment illustrating the shrewdness of Cooper’s choice in allowing class position to become clear in the work itself. In the voice of a Black Woman of the South, Cooper is energized, critical, confident, lyrical. But in her second major work, Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists (1925 [2006]) (hereafter Slavery), that voice is missing, replaced by one that is cautious and objective in its description of the positions taken by key groups debating what Cooper recognizes as the anomaly of the persistence of Black slavery in the French-Caribbean colonies even as the French Revolutionists were rallying around the cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” There are several possible reasons for what May (2007, 111) calls Cooper’s “somewhat subdued voice”: at age 65, after earlier disappointments, she is eager to crown her educational achievement with the PhD; she is writing not to a general public but to a small committee of prestigious French scholars at the Sorbonne; she is communicating in French, a language in which she is proficient but probably not colloquial; her knowledge of her topic comes not from her personal experience but from French archival sources, and accessing them is repeatedly interrupted by Washington school authorities, forcing her to delegate much of the archival search to her collaboratrice. Perhaps unsure about the completeness of her data, she produces a cautious, largely value-neutral document, which shows her skill at reading an audience. The dissertation defense required, in addition to the dissertation submitted in French, two essays, also in French, on topics set by her examiners, those essays—“Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement” (1925) and “Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States: 1781–1850 (1925)—written under extreme time pressure during the week before the oral examination, are much more in the critical, energized voice we identify with her.
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 41
THE SOCIAL THEORY There are two kinds of peace in this world. The one produced by suppression, which is the passivity of death; the other brought about by a proper adjustment of living, acting forces. (Cooper, A Voice from the South)
The problematic of Cooper’s life and work is understanding the relationship among four stratificational variables—gender, race, class, and region. Most of her attention is focused on gender and race as factors in her life and in the life of the US in her time; class and region frame that central concern. The exact nature of this relationship ultimately eludes her but the effort to find it defines her career as a social theorist and the organization of her major theoretical work, A Voice from the South—by a Black Woman of the South. She organizes the book into two parts (plus the prologue “Our Raison d’Être”). She titles Part I “Soprano Obligato”— “obligato” meaning a part of a musical score “that must be performed as written without omission” and “soprano” indicating that this is the woman’s part. That is the exact message Cooper wishes to deliver, that the woman must be attended to, that she is an integral part of the race and of the nation. Part I moves from an opening chapter that considers the role of women “in the regeneration of the race,” to a chapter on discrimination against women in education, to the tour de force of the entire volume “Woman vs. The Indian,” her complex commentary directed especially toward White feminists on multiple experiences of gender and race discrimination, and concludes with the “Status of Woman in America” tracing the often invisible but vital contributions made by women, both White and Black, from the beginning of the nation, concluding with a note of rejoicing: “But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages” (1892, 144). Part II where Cooper turns increasingly to macro analysis is entitled “Tutti ad Libitum”— “ad libitum” denotes that the music is to be played “without restraint” and “tutti” means that all are to be free to participate. Widening the lens through which she studies America, Cooper shifts focus not to men but to the Black community in the US. The first chapter in Part II, discussed shortly, is her most general statement of social theory; the next two chapters examine the place of Blacks in American literature and in the post-Civil War economy, and, conversely, in the final chapter, the place of religion in human but especially in Black life. Cooper’s sociological theory emerges as answers to the title questions of the first chapter of Part II: “Has America a Race Problem; If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?” She embeds her answers in the fundamental issue of social order, asserting “Progressive peace in a nation is the result of conflict; and conflict, such as is healthy, stimulating, and progressive, is produced through the co-existence of radically opposing or racially different elements” (1892, 152). Drawing examples from the natural world and history, she endorses French historian Francois Guizot’s argument that diversity is necessary to progress—and that the experience of diversity must be managed by an equilibrium among the multiple forces in a situation: “European civilization has within it the promise of perpetual progress … While in other civilizations the exclusive domination of a principle (or race) led to tyranny, in Europe the diversity of social elements (growing out of the contact of different races) the incapability of any one to exclude the rest, gave birth to the LIBERTY which now prevails …” Cooper concludes, “This is enough to show that the law holds good in sociology as in the world of matter,
42 Research handbook on intersectionality that equilibrium, not repression among conflicting forces is the condition of natural harmony, of permanent progress, and of universal freedom …” (boldface ours) (1892, 159–61). Thus, Cooper’s first answer to her title question is that “yes,” America has a race problem, but it is not a problem of diversity, of the presence of so many “foreign” elements, most especially Black people, as the popular mind has it—it is a problem of domination. Within this theory, the essential social unit is the group—people understood as individuals who share a common experience and identity within the stratificational practices of a society in which they are defined, and frequently self-define, as “different” from other groups. While Part I focused on the intersection of gender and race (with class and region as contributing factors), in Part II, the focus is on racial groups, again, with gender, class, and region as contributing factors. Groups have different projects and degrees of power, born out of their different locations in social stratification—the process we today name “intersectionality.” For Cooper, as for intersectionality theory, power becomes the issue. Cooper takes as one principle of social order that diversity makes collisions of interests a permanent feature of social life—and by diversity in this context, she means “stratificational placement.” To think of a moment when conflict ceases is really to imagine the erasure of that diversity, possible only under practices of monstrous tyranny (a theme she returns to in a circa 1942 essay “Hitler and the Negro” (Lemert and Bhan 1998, 262–5)). The solution to the problem of domination is to achieve sufficient empowerment of all parties in a negotiation so that conflict is minimized, and compromise is sought—in other words, to achieve a situation of equilibrium. The specific problem Cooper sees confronting America and its so-called “race problem” is that one group, Whites (or “Anglo-Saxons” as Cooper frequently prefers) are essentially not willing to share and live peacefully with another group, Black Americans—or with a number of other groups (the Chinese, Native Americans, immigrants). Whites in general, but Southern Whites especially, are constantly working to achieve domination—the situation in which their group always gets its way in negotiation or conflict. Much of Cooper’s theoretical work is devoted to understanding and explaining two potentially contradictory processes—how domination is achieved and how to arrive at equilibrium—that is, she explores how power works and how its excesses can be resisted and reformulated. This is not just a theoretical but a practical problem for her; understanding domination is a prerequisite to undermining a system bent on destroying her group, Black Americans. Domination To solve this problem, Cooper explores four factors that undergird domination—material resources, ideology, manners, passion—giving an analysis of power from the standpoint of the disempowered. ● Cooper explores the restriction of access to material resources through the Black worker’s experience of being denied a job at a decent wage. Looking at the North, Cooper sees White control exercised primarily by the resistance of White workers, unions, and immigrants who collectively or singly act to marginalize the Black man, denying him access to apprenticeship programs and threatening to boycott the employer who hires him (1892, 255). In the South, she sees that while “the colored man virtually holds the labor market,”
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 43 the traditions of slavery persist and leave him unable “to demand anything like a fair share of the products of his toil” (1892, 256–7) and as a tenant farmer in debt to the White owner who pays him “fifty cents per day, … often … in tickets convertible into meat, meal and molasses at the village grocery, owned by the same ubiquitous employer!” (1892, 252–3). Domination in the labor market is a White versus Black issue based in White antipathy. ● Whites, particularly White Southerners, elaborate an ideology representing Black people as “Other”—beings unlike oneself and one’s group. This ideology spreads through personal contacts and through mass media built on deliberate distortion by the White Southerner “giv[ing] object lessons with his choicest specimens of Negro depravity and worthlessness” to illustrate “the stupendous and atrocious mistake of reasoning about these people as if they were just ordinary human beings” (1892, 108). Mass media—government documents, like the census, textbooks, novels, newspapers, magazines—present accounts that are fundamentally racist, as when the census gives crime figures but not labor figures for the Negro. The history of slavery and the Civil War are forbidden topics, anyone raising them “quickly told … that he is waving the bloody shirt” (1892, 106). ● Cooper presents manners as a method for prescribing, routinizing, and reproducing in everyday enactments dominant superiority and subordinate inferiority, the former through acts of avoidance and the latter through rituals of deference. Cooper lays the responsibility on the White woman for White manners: “With all her vaunted independence, the American woman of to-day is as fearful of losing caste as a Brahmin in India. That is the law under which she lives … the lesson which she instils into her children with their first baby breakfasts” (1892, 86–7). ● Passion is the mobilization of emotion for conflict and domination which rests on a desire for absolute control, a self-feeding, ever expanding pathology. This passion is intensified by any manifestation of autonomy by the subordinate, for within the emotional framing of the caste system of race, the subordinate’s autonomy triggers the dominant’s guilt-induced terror of reprisal, as Cooper shows in White poet Maurice Thompson’s poem “A Voodoo Prophesy” where he has a Black man say, “Within my loins an inky curse is pent/To flood/ Your blood/And stain your skin and crisp your golden hair/As you have done by me, so will I do/By all the generations of your race” (cited in Cooper, 1892, 215). This thesis of passion as the motivator for domination challenges the idea that rational discourse can be the solution to racial antagonism. Equilibrium For Cooper, the solution to domination, that she as a scholar-activist can effect, lies in identifying sources of power that the subordinate must access in order to establish a possible equilibrium. She gives special attention to five sources: self-knowledge, labor, education, alliances, and belief. In Cooper’s view, self-knowledge must begin with an honest assessment of the answer to the question “What Are We Worth?” that must be answered by calculating how much the world has paid to produce an individual and how much the individual has repaid. But this assessment must be set in historical context, especially of slavery, “As colored wage-earners, we are today under a double disadvantage destined sorely to try our fitness to survive … we are ‘let go’ to start from zero—nay, from a chasm infinitely below zero, to build up our fortunes” (1899).
44 Research handbook on intersectionality Against this environment, Black Americans must set themselves to adopt what Cooper herself seems to have taken much to heart, the Oberlin College motto— “Labor and Learning.” Cooper argues that “Work must first create wealth” (1892, 261) and that creation may lessen prejudice: “The average American is never too prejudiced, I think, [not] to have a keen appreciation … of the purchasing power of a dollar” (1892, 267–8). The key to work creating wealth lies in education; Black needs of formal education is in part a result of White prejudice that works to marginalize the Black worker in the labor market: “the only effective preparation for success [in labor] … lies in the establishment of industrial and technical schools for teaching our colored youth trades … a colored child can secure a trade in no other way … [For] to-day skilled labor is steadily drifting into the hands of white workmen—mostly foreigners” (1892, 260–1). At any point that she discusses education, Cooper brings to bear the underlying principles of her philosophy of education: that “education which is truly ‘educative’ must strengthen, develop, ‘lead out, these faculties … of the human soul … the power to think, the power to appreciate, and the power to will the right and make it prevail” (Cooper c. 1930s [1998], 251); that “The power of appreciation is the measure of an individual’s aptitudes; and if a boy hates Greek and Latin and spends all this time whittling out steamboats … try him at a trade” (1892, 259). In giving educational opportunities to people of the race, Black people practice the best kind of self-help, turning out skilled workers of all types, who will bear witness by their very character to the effectiveness of the Black worker in the world. The subordinate must also reach out to form alliances across lines of difference with other people who are in a subordinated status. Black women are especially well positioned to reach out to other women and to the growing White woman’s suffrage movement. Cooper attempts to take a lead in building this alliance in her conclusion to “Woman versus The Indian” which she repeated in her address to the Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World’s Fair: Now, I think if I could crystallize the sentiment of my constituency, and deliver it as a message to this congress of women, it would be something like this … not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; … not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won—not the white woman’s, nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman’s wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might … (Cooper 1893 [1998], 204–5)
Cooper argues that the dominant’s passion for absolute control can be answered with an equal source of energy if subordinates hold onto their beliefs: “The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit … I do not mean by faith the holding of correct views … To me, faith means treating the truth as true” (1892, 297–8). Cooper did not believe that the practice of these principles would bring certain success but that “we may be sure, the colored man in America will one day be judged in the cool, calm, unimpassioned, unprejudiced second thought of the American people” and “Our only care need be the intrinsic worth of our contributions … If we contribute a positive value in those things the world prizes, no amount of negrophobia can ultimately prevent its recognition” (1892, 284–5).
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 45 Testing the Theory In Slavery (1925 [2006]) Cooper, analysing an event that occurred over 100 years earlier, during the French Revolution, bases her account on many of the same concepts developed in A Voice: complex struggles over the arrangements of power among multiple groups, each shaped by distinctive intersections among the variables of class, race, and regional location; the tension between economic interests in the wealth produced by a plantation economy in Haiti and the revolutionary claims of liberty, equality, brotherhood propelling the French Revolution. Groups seeking to keep the colonial relation of domination over Haiti were White—the wealthy planter class, the poor petit blancs of service providers and transient adventurers, and a large portion of France’s own government. Groups challenging the structures of domination enslaving the large Black labor force working on Haiti’s sugar plantations included an amalgam of non-Whites and Whites—mulattoes, free Blacks, and slaves, the last represented in France by a group of progressive Whites, “the Friends of the Blacks.” Cooper’s account portrays relations between these two warring alliances as involving material advantage, racist ideology, mannered enactments of super- and subordination, and passion for or against the aspirations aroused by France’s revolutionary rhetoric. Her model in this test case excludes two important factors from Voice—gender and equilibrium. In Slavery, it is the passion of the subordinate that wins through a violent slave uprising, leading to France’s loss of its most valuable colony, and, to contemporaries, the extraordinary creation of a new nation by Black people who claimed freedom and equality, an event that traumatized White slave owners in the US and presented a challenge to the colonial empires of the European nations. Cooper’s model of groups, intersectionality, domination, equilibrium, and power resources had had its second empirical test.
PRESENTATION [W]hat is needed … to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter. (Cooper, A Voice from the South)
The ultimate effectiveness of Cooper’s work perhaps lies in “her presentation,” that is, the way she makes the experience of intersectionality ubiquitous in her writing, expressing the simultaneous presence in a life of conflicting threads of identity, oppression and privilege. In doing this, she is true to that fundamental principle of composition that “one must show not tell.” We want to use this last section of our chapter to try to identify for current intersectionality scholars in the social sciences what Cooper does to achieve these effects—how she “shows.” One, she is at ease with a particularly modern research method, the autoethnography—in which the writer reports on their own biography (auto) in writing (graph) in to order to tell the story of a group or people (ethno). Autoethnography was formally proposed using that name in 1979 as an answer for sociologists’ discontent with the state of much sociological research that failed to utilize one of sociology’s most available resources, the stories people told in the course of investigation, rewarding instead ethnographic practices of “entering a culture, exploiting cultural members, and then … leaving to write about the culture for monetary and/or professional gain, while disregarding relational ties to cultural members” (Ellis, Adams, Bochner 2011, 1). These critics “were self-consciously value-centered” rather
46 Research handbook on intersectionality than value-neutral and saw that “stories were complex, constitutive, meaningful phenomena that taught morals and ethics, introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others” (Ellis et al. 1–2). If we measure what Cooper achieves against the concerns of autoethnographic proponents, we see that she has on her own done much of what they seek. She is writing about herself but about herself as part of a community; she is not doing that writing for money or advancement—she self-publishes as a part of her project to join in the defense of her oppressed group, using stories from her own and other group members’ experiences to show readers, both group and non-group members, what is really happening. She takes her work back to the community, regarding relational ties as central, and allowing group members to test by their own experience the validity of what she shows. The non-group members among her readers who have experienced such events— possibly as unwilling or indifferent witnesses—are called to accountability. Her work is not value-neutral but value-centered. In other words, Cooper, not knowing the project of autoethnography, catches for us here many of its promised benefits for the researcher. A second quality, somewhat tied to the autoethnographer’s wish for disciplinary freedom, is what Hutchinson (1981, 32) insightfully attributes to Cooper— “candor.” Candor is used today primarily to indicate “directness” or “openness” but also an attitude in which one exercises fair judgments, seeking only to present a clear statement of facts—and in Cooper’s case, one’s values and feelings are facts. Anyone writing for an academic audience knows the power of self-censorship that may work against candor in the interest of making a good impression, of saying what is expected rather than what is true. Hutchinson’s (1981, 32) comment is made in describing Cooper’s 1881 application letter to Oberlin, as done “with her characteristic directness and candor.” That letter shows a young Cooper, who perhaps has never been out of North Carolina, negotiating across lines of difference—gender, race, age, class—and looking for commonalities, here the love of learning: I am the widow of an Episcopal clergyman (Colored), Rev. G.A.C. Cooper, who died in Sept. ’79. I have for a long time, earnestly desired to take an advanced course in some superior Northern college, but could not see my way to it for lack of means. However, I am now resolved to wait no longer, if there is any possibility of my accomplishing my purpose. I am now teaching a two months summer school in Haywood: Southern schools pay very meanly, but I expect to have money enough to keep me one or two years at your College, provided I can secure a favor mentioned by Mrs. Clarke [an intermediary], of free tuition and incidentals … Please let me know if you think it likely that I can get any way of keeping myself after I come, by teaching, or something similar, during vacation. I desire to remain to be able to complete the course, if possible. Please let me know the lowest rate at which I can get suitable accommodations; also the examinations required for entering. I am extremely anxious to accomplish this long cherished wish, and will feel grateful for any kindly interest taken in my behalf. Yours respectfully, Annie J. Cooper
Cooper, the letter writer, while she needs help, does not present as a beggar but as a person, an agent, with active desires seeking ways to execute her projects. There is no apology for her condition. This practice in her own life, of facing things squarely, is a quality May (2007, 61) notes Cooper ascribing to the Black Woman, that of being “‘open-eyed’ … a phrase that connotes simultaneous awareness and agency, past and present … Rather than eyes lowered in
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 47 submission or closed in denial, an open-eyed person is alert and perceptive—she takes in the world’s ugly or denied realities as much as its wonders.” In this vein, Cooper uses her moment as a speaker at the 1893 Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World’s Fair to speak candidly about the condition of Black women. Cooper was invited to respond to the main address by Fannie Barrier Williams, a light-skinned and affluent woman of the North who some Black women feared would give an ingratiating address to the racially mixed audience; although she focused on the problems of Northern women of color aspiring to middle-class life, Williams did venture briefly into uncomfortable topics, warning “While I duly appreciate the offensiveness of all references to American slavery, it is unavoidable …” (1893 [1998], 21). Cooper, following, takes a different tack, emphasizing slavery’s cruelty and Black women’s heroism and placing intersectionality clearly before her audience—gender, race, location, class—at this proclaimed historical moment that was the Fair: [A]ll through the darkest period of the colored women’s oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle … The painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a fee simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the despairing fight, … to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish the material for epics … I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears … (Cooper 1893 [1998], 201–2)
Cooper’s third quality is her ability to follow her own advice and become “the lion who turns painter”—a phrase she generates when objecting to distortions of Negro life presented in American novels: “What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man … as seen from the Negro’s standpoint … [W]hat is needed … to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter” (1892, 224–5). Assuming the mantle of the lion turned painter, Cooper produces a text that in describing life as A Black Woman of the South defies many “dominant” conventions of writing—a practice May (2009) labels “genre-bending.” In “Woman versus the Indian” Cooper’s narratives range in tone from gentle sarcasm, to painful revelations of embarrassment, rage at the duplicity of Southern politicians, disappointment in White feminism and a concluding exhortation to White feminists to see the light (see above “Equilibrium”). What holds these varying tales together is that they all turn in some way on intersectionality—frequently with one variable being the “problem” that puts the character at risk. In the most cited of these, a largely first-person narrative, A Black Woman of the South traveling by train in the Jim Crow era is shown as having to prepare for every eventuality—and the difficulty of never being able to be prepared enough, a dilemma of intersectionality illustrated with a series of vignettes. In one, the Black Woman thinking “she is quiet and unobtrusive in her manner, simple and inconspicuous in her dress, and can see no reason why in any chance assemblage of ladies, . . . she should be signaled out for any marked consideration,” finds the conductor, after assisting White ladies in disembarking, turning his back and leaving her “to alight—bearing her satchel, and bearing besides another unnamable burden inside the heaving bosom and the tightly compressed lips. The feeling of slighted womanhood is unlike every other emotion of the soul … Its poignancy … is holier than that of jealousy, deeper than indignation, tenderer than rage …” (1892, 90–1). In another story, the Black Woman is considering how to respond if a conductor tells her she must leave the Ladies car which is for Whites
48 Research handbook on intersectionality only; she works out in her mind the appropriate attitude toward someone who must execute a hostile policy that he had no part in creating but then, “a great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in, and throwing a roll of tobacco into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the paper I am reading, ‘Here gurl,’ (I am past thirty) ‘you’d better git out ‘m dis kyar ‘f yer don’t, I’ll put yer out’” (p. 95). The series climaxes with, which we began this chapter, the Black Woman’s arrival “at a dilapidated station, rendered yet more unsightly by dozens of loafers …; and when, looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with “FOR LADIES” swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other; while wondering under which head I come …” (p. 95). These episodes are among her most effective analyses of intersectionality’s multiple vectors—simultaneously present in interactional situations and seen from the perspective of the lion. For Cooper’s fourth quality we borrow a phrase from May, though we may use it not quite as she intends it; Cooper practices “rhetorical activism” (2007, 52). What we mean by this is Cooper takes the potential risk of being misunderstood and uses language not only to give an accurate description but to give a value-centered one that excites a response—partly for what is said and partly in the way it is said. These instances of rhetorical activism are, in Cooper, achieved through word choice and tone, especially understatement. We give one example here—a long clause in a complicated sentence. Cooper is writing about the distortion of Black life in much of current American literature and the punchline is in an aside: Now, owing to the problematical position at present occupied by descendants of Africans in the American social polity, —growing, I presume, out of the continued indecision in the mind of the more powerful descendants of the Saxons as to whether it is expedient to apply the maxims of their religion to the their civil and political relationships,—most of the writers who have hitherto attempted a portrayal of life and customs among the darker races have belonged to our class II … (Cooper 1892, 185, italics ours)
The portion we italicize is in many respects Cooper at her best as a rhetorical activist— crystalline clarity, scoring emphasis through understatement, managing to cut to the quick in a perfectly controlled, devastating periodic phrasing that delivers its meaning only at its very end; it can be paraphrased: Black people in America are having a hard time because White people can’t make up their minds whether they have to apply Christian principles to the relations they are forced to share with Black people in commerce and governing. But what is lost in translation are the judgments implied in key phrases: “the problematical position” may refer to the difficulties facing African Americans or to the fact that the Negro is being constantly identified as a problem; “at present occupied” suggests a moment in history, subject to change; “continued indecision” implies a sense on the part of “more powerful … Saxons” that their understanding of the situation may not be exactly right rather than that they are hopelessly intransigent in their views; and then, the coup de grâce, the word “expedient,” “whether it is expedient to apply the maxims of their religion to their civil and political relationships” is a candid judgment on the moral quality of the thoughts of White Americans—for religious maxims are surely not a question for the believer of “expediency”; the maxim is either true or not true and Cooper will in her concluding chapter, “The Gain from a Belief,” make absolutely clear her definition of faith—“Faith means treating the truth as true” (1892, 298). Cooper is clever in her comment here but she is also candid, this is her judgment about the problems confronting the Black race in America in 1890.
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) 49
CONCLUSION Cooper in her 1925 dissertation defense faced one of the challenging issues for intersectionality theory today—taking as axiomatic the idea of a fundamental equality among all people, despite the distortion of that idea by practices of domination. In one part of that defense Cooper addresses the problem of the basis on which one asserts a doctrine either of “elite” and subordinate statuses or of egalitarianism. Speaking on a topic, the question of egalitarian ideas in democratic movements, set by one of her examiners, Celestin Bouglé, the pre-eminent figure on her examining committee, Cooper links the topic to Bouglé’s 1899 thesis “Les Idées Égalitaires” and two arguments therein, that the ideals of democracy and, its corollary, equality, are only found in “a certain culture known as Occidental Civilization” and that in understanding equality we must be “purely realistic and dissociated from moral sanctions as to whether it is either right or realizable” (Cooper 1925/1945 [1998], 291). Despite her consuming desire for the doctorate (she is 65 and cannot reasonably hope for another chance), she challenges the basic assumption of racial hierarchies. A better hypothesis it seems to me would be to postulate that process in the democratic sense is an inborn human endowment—a shadow mark of the Creator’s image, or if you will an urge-cell, the universal and unmistakable hall-mark traceable to the Father of all, that In the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings and it is that “Something”—that Singing Something, which distinguishes the first Man from the last ape, which in a subtle way tagged him with the picturesque Greek title Anthropos, the upward face, and which justifies the claim to equality by birthright from a common Father for the “Backward” no less than the “Advanced” among his varying but undeniable progeny. (Cooper in Lemert and Bhan, 1998, 292–3)
Cooper’s answer presents “the upward face,” as a universal human capacity to imagine in the face of injustice the possibility of good, a principal undergirding today’s scholar-activist confronting the processes of intersectionality and domination.
REFERENCES Alexander, Elizabeth. 1995. “‘We Must Be about Our Father’s Business’: Anna Julia Cooper and the In-corporation of the Nineteenth-Century African-American Woman Intellectual,” Signs 20 (2): 336–56. Baker-Fletcher, Karen. 1994. A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper. New York: Crossroad. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1892/1988. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. New York: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Anna Julia.1892/1988. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. Reproduced by Project Gutenburg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61741/61741-h/61741-h.htm Cooper, Anna Julia. 1893/1998. “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation: A Response to Fannie Barrier Williams.” In Lemert and Bhan, 201–5. Cooper, Anna Julia.1899/2006. “Colored Women as Wage Earners.” Originally appeared in Southern Workman, August 1899. http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2006/11/colored-women-as-wage-earn ers-essay-by.html Cooper, Anna Julia. 1902/1998. “The Ethics of the Negro Question.” In Lemert and Bhan, 206–15.
50 Research handbook on intersectionality Cooper, Anna Julia.1925/1998. “Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement.” In Lemert and Bhan, 291–8. Cooper, Anna Julia.1925/1998. “Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States: 1787–1850.” In Lemert and Bhan, 299–304. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1925/2006. Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists. Trans. Frances Richardson Keller. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cooper, Anna Julia. c. 1930s/1998. “On Education.” In Lemert and Bhan, 248–58. Cooper, Anna Julia. c. 1945–51. The Third Step (privately printed autobiographical booklet). In Lemert and Bhan, 320–30. Crummell, Alexander. 1883. “The Black Woman of the South.” n.p. https://archive.org/details/bla ckwomanofsout00crum/page/n1/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater Ellis, Carolyn, Tony A. Adams, Arthur P. Bochner. 2011. “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 12 (1): 1–18. https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/ view/1589 Ferguson, Janice Y. 2015. Anna Julia Cooper: A Quintessential Leader. Dissertation. Antioch University. Gabel, Leona C. 1982. From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life & Writings of Anna J. Cooper. Intro. Sidney Kaplan. Northampton, MA: Smith College Department of History. Gines, K.T. 2015. “Anna Julia Cooper.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/anna-julia-cooper/ Gordon, Lewis. 2018. “Black Issues in Philosophy: On Teaching Anna Julia Cooper’s ‘What Are We Worth’ in Introductory Courses.” https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/05/30/black-issues-in-philosophy -on-teaching-anna-julia-coopers-what-are-we-worth-in-introductory-courses/ Hutchinson, Louise Daniel. 1981 Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Johnson, Karen A. 2009. “‘In Service for the Common Good’: Anna Julia Cooper and Adult Education,” African American Review 43 (1): 45–56. Lemert, Charles and Esme Bhan (eds.). 1998. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper—Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers and Letters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. May, Vivian. 2007. Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist. New York: Routledge. May, Vivian. 2009. “Writing the Self into Being: Anna Julia Cooper’s Textual Politics,” African American Review 43 (1): 17–34. May, Vivian. 2012. “Historicizing Intersectionality as a Critical Lens: Returning to the Work of Anna Julia Cooper.” In Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, edited by Carol Faulkner and Allison M. Parker, 17–50. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Williams, Fannie Barrier. 1893/2002. “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” In The New Woman of Color—The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918, edited by Mary Jo Deegan, 17–27. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge.
4. Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality Matthew W. Hughey
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is arguably best known for The Souls of Black Folk, in which he penned: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (1903 [1994], v). Many have analysed, dissected, and interpreted this text and its celebrated line. Most settle comfortably on the conclusion that the Du Boisian “problem” of race is the principle organizing force of social life. For example, no less than Max Weber wrote a letter to Du Bois in which he stated, “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world” (Weber 1904; cf. Hughey and Goss 2018). And in their Du Boisian-inspired and field-changing Racial Formations, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986, 61–2) argued that race is the “central axis of social relationships which cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader category or conception.” Wedded to these interpretations, race is the primary force that pulls apart, pits against, and pools together. But did Du Bois isolate or incorporate other dimensions of social life to complicate the color line? And if so, how did Du Bois empirically document and theorize the multiple, divergent, and contradictory variables of social advantage and disadvantage—what we understand today as “intersectionality”? While there is little argument that Du Bois conceptualized race as a primary organizing structure within society, there is less consensus over when or how Du Bois incorporated other structures to enhance or diminish analyses of racialized vulnerability. In The Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris claims that Du Bois “was the first sociologist that engaged in intersectional analysis” (2015, 220). Yet, this claim is tenuous, given the intersectional sociology in Harriet Martineau’s writings as early as the 1830s (Adams 2018), Ida B. Wells’s 1890s sociologically informed journalism, and both Anna Julia Cooper’s and Jane Addams’s explicit sociological scholarship of the 1890s.1 Additionally, while many have defended Du Bois’s intersectionality, particularly in his approach to gender (Balfour 2011; Lemons 2009) and class (Marable 2015; Yuan 1998), so too have many critiqued it. Willard B. Gatewood (1994, 310) wrote that Du Bois possessed “a strong sense of elitism that influenced his personality, relationships, and thought.” Annie Menzel (2019, 34) found Du Bois to possess a “deeper logic of gendered and classed racial exclusion.” And Reiland Rabaka (2010, 88) opined that Du Bois often displayed a “palpable elitist disdain.” Moreover, Hazel Carby (1998, 12) wrote that Du Bois suffered a “complete failure to imagine black women as intellectuals and race leaders.” Joy James (1997, 35) argued that “a masculinist worldview influences his writing to diminish his gender progressivism.” And Celena Simpson (2015, 53) bluntly stated, “We should cease calling Du Bois a feminist.” In this chapter, I do not seek a coup de main in which I pronounce Du Bois’s sociology either a pure or essential “intersectional.” Nor do I argue whether he was the absolute first to use “intersectionality” among sociologists. Plenty of ink has already been spilled in these debates. Instead, I aim first to show the latent roots of intersectionality in Du Bois’s thinking. I next demonstrate the manifest foundations of intersectionality in Du Bois’s scholarship, indicating how his understanding of structural influences on action and order, coupled with 51
52 Research handbook on intersectionality his “outsider within” epistemology, created an intersectional leaning. Third, I cover Du Bois’s intersectional understandings of social life with particular attention to his theorization and empirics on race, class, and gender.
THE LATENT ROOTS OF DU BOIS’S EMPIRICAL INTERSECTIONALITY While at Harvard (1888–91 and 1894–96), Du Bois was influenced by many scholars, such as Royce, Santayana, Shaler, and Hart. But it was only the pragmatist, William James, whom Du Bois would describe as a “friend” (Ambar 2019, 367). James advocated a “double-barreled” approach to truth: one ascertains facts through both inductive “sense data” and through one’s internal deductive references to data—together the “thick” experience described in The Principles of Psychology (1890). But James also advocated a relationship between faith and empiricism. James wrote that it was acceptable to believe in an object without sufficient evidence if the conditions required answers to urgent moral or metaphysical questions (such as the existence of God or free will). Moreover, James argued that acting on belief could create the object of belief: “faith in a fact, based on need of the fact, can create the fact” (James 1896, 343). Hence, James used a pragmatic test—to live as if the object in question did exist. While Du Bois was highly influenced by James’s approach, he was not an uncritical devotee. Du Bois’s early directions reveal an initial uneasiness with his friend’s “as if” pragmatism. For Du Bois, such faith was too untethered from the plainly observable world (Taylor 2004). Du Bois thus sought out inspiration for a more rigorous and “pure” form of scientific empiricism. At Harvard in 1890, Du Bois found such a figure in Leonardo da Vinci. Calling Da Vinci “the founder of modern experimental science” (1890, 1), the young Du Bois went on to write that Da Vinci was “completely given to empirical investigation of nature … His method is wholly inductive—scarcely a single proposition can be found in his manuscripts which is not supported by a fact” (1890, 41; cf. Besek et al. 2020). The attraction to empirical scholars, opposed to supposedly superficial and naive assessors, whom Du Bois would later derisively call the “car-window sociologist … the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries” (1903 [1994], 94), was a guiding force as Du Bois began a march away from philosophy toward the social sciences. After receipt of a master’s degree from Harvard in 1891, Du Bois traveled in Europe for a year before studying at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (now the University of Berlin) in 1892–94. The burgeoning field of sociology, with a focus on inductive empiricism, was ascendant in Berlin. However, German empiricism was de-naturalized. Facts mattered, but only in context. Wilhelm Dilthey’s anti-positivism proved influential on Du Bois’s thinking. In opposition to the British Spencerian sociology that applied biological principles to social life, Dilthey argued that inductive empiricism clarified the natural world, but fell drastically short in explaining human values, ideals, and norms. Hence, a deductive science of interpretation or “verstehen” was necessary (Besek et al. 2020). Du Bois migrated away from the extreme induction of Da Vinci and came to adopt Dilthey’s demarcation between the natural and social sciences. But he would jettison neither deduction nor induction as outside the bounds of sociological inquiry, seeing both as necessary to “geisteswissenschaften” (“sciences of spirit” or social sciences) (cf. Gooding-Williams 2009, 48). Du Bois’s encounter
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 53 with German idealist interrogations of empirical social science were of fundamental import to his growing sociological imagination (cf. Barkin 2005; Holt 2008). Du Bois returned to the United States in the summer of 1894. Just as James published “The Will to Believe” (1896), Du Bois finished his doctorate in history at Harvard and was well equipped with a theoretical toolkit inclusive of inductive empiricism and deductive idealism (Lewis 1994, 95–6). Du Bois set to both illumine the heterogeneity of Black communities and to critique the waxing biological determinism of scientific racism. Toward this end, Du Bois published a methodological manifesto on the study of “Negro Problems” in the crown jewel of academic journals, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In that 1898 essay, Du Bois revealed his early insistence on what we now call “intersectionality”: Now first we should study the Negro problems in order to distinguish between the different and distinct problems affecting this race. Nothing makes intelligent discussion of the Negro’s position so fruitless as the repeated failure to discriminate between the different questions that concern him … and yet each calls the problem he discusses the Negro problem, leaving in the dark background the really crucial question as to the relative importance of the many problems involved. Before we can begin to study the Negro intelligently, we must realize definitely that not only is he affected by all the varying social forces that act on any nation at his stage of advancement, but that in addition to these there is reacting upon him the mighty power of a peculiar and unusual social environment which affects to some extent every other social force [my emphasis]. (1898b, 9–10)
Du Bois’s contention that social forces not only affect the “Negro” but also “every other social force” is indicative of his sociological understanding that social variables enable and constrain Black lives. But also, Du Bois made clear that these variables interact to change one another. “Intersectionality” has only emerged in the past three decades as an interdisciplinary approach toward the co-constitutive interaction of race, gender, class, and other organizing structures of society. A key component of this approach is neither to document or fetishize varied identities, nor is it an “additive” approach that stacks marginalized statuses. Rather, focus is on the unique nexus of structural susceptibilities. As Kimberlé Crenshaw made clear at the “Women of the World Festival” in 2016: “Intersectionality is not primarily about identity. It is about how structures make certain identities the consequence of, and the vehicle for, vulnerability.” While Du Bois’s attention was arguably always focused on the polyvariant exposures of “Negro” people to violence, his stance was perhaps no more cemented then by a fateful experience in 1899 as he walked the streets of Atlanta: At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet … Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking … one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved. (Du Bois 1940 [2007], 67)
Aldon Morris (2017, 12) contends, “contemporary scholars devoted to the intersectionality paradigm … argued that it is impossible to separate science and politics.” With focused attention to the intersected experiences of Blackness, Du Bois presaged this devotion and gave up the quest for a supposedly unbiased, objective Truth, but dared not jettison empiricism. Du Bois’s ascendant empiricist and intersectional sociology was deeply interdisciplinary; he embraced the idealism of Hegel (Harris 2021) and Royce (Fontaine 1968) and the metaphysics of Dilthey (Gooding-Williams 2009). He echoed Schmoller’s and Meitzen’s emphasis
54 Research handbook on intersectionality on empiricism to inform policy (cf. Jakubek and Wood 2018, 16). And he blended the spirituality of Santayana (cf. Curry 2014, 391) with his old friend James’s “as if” pragmatism which gave ethical beliefs “a foothold in a universe” (James 1896, 341). By the turn of the twentieth century, intersectionality was germinating in Du Bois’s thoughts—a sociology with attention to race, class, and gender. This thinking would yield an academic and activist career attentive to what is (the empirical), what could be (the ideal), what might be (the policy), and a synthesis of what should be with what he believed to be (the ethical and spiritual).
THE MANIFEST FOUNDATIONS OF INTERSECTIONALITY IN DU BOISIAN THOUGHT Regardless of how consistent or generalizable such intersectionality was within Du Bois’s larger oeuvre, Du Bois was an early proponent of studying how an intersected relationship to varied structural inequalities of race, class, gender (and more) made for varied life chances. Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript “Sociology Hesitant” (c. 1905) formalized this approach. Critiquing sociologists for tendencies toward both abstract theories and overly broad generalizations, Du Bois advanced a notion of society as a “mystical whole” (c. 1905). Composed of both determinist rules and free will hazards, Du Bois argued that society has “a primary rhythm” (e.g., death rates) and “a secondary rhythm” (e.g., willful actions of a social group) that requires the assumption of “Law and Chance working in conjunction” (cf. Harris 2021). Recounting his “Sociology Hesitant” essay in a 1956 letter to the historian Herbert Aptheker, Du Bois (1978, 395) clarified: I assumed the existence of Truth … Also, of necessity I assumed Cause and Change … I proposed to make a scientific study of human action, based on the hypothesis of the reality of such actions, of their causal connections and of their continued occurrence and change because of Law and Chance. I called Sociology the measurement of the element of Chance in Human Action.
This dual attention to “Law” and “Chance” reveals Du Bois’s focus on the likelihood of one’s vulnerability relative to one’s position in the racialized, gendered, and classed stratification of social life—a core pillar of intersectionality. Such an approach to intersectionality percolated even earlier in Du Bois’s life and was borne not only from his studies at Harvard and Berlin, but during his time at Fisk and summers in Tennessee. While pursuing his first bachelor’s degree at Fisk (1885–88), Du Bois spent two summers (1886 and 1887) teaching Black secondary school students at the Wheeler School in Alexandria, Tennessee. He recounted that experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903 [1994], 41): I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it, and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together, but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.
Here Du Bois signaled how the racial structure of “isolation” endemic to “the Veil” intersects with the economic structure of “poverty, poor land, and low wages” to fundamentally impact the chances of “Opportunity.” Du Bois wrote not simply of racial exclusion, but the unique
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 55 character of racialized poverty in the tenant farming system of 1880s Tennessee. For Du Bois’s students, these dual components of agricultural life fundamentally limited “the element of Chance in Human Action” (Du Bois 1978, 395) and were not just the added weight of poverty plus racism, but synthesized to create a unique set of limitations: “their weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim” (Du Bois 1903 [1994], 42). Of clear import to Du Bois was the documentation of the heterogeneous experiences of Black people as their lives were cross-cut by their shifting locations in varied social structures. Blackness could neither be entirely reduced to, or fully explained by, racism. As Marcus Hunter (2015, 231) writes: “Du Bois’s use of heterogeneity demonstrates the importance and influence of the economic and political regimes of cities, religious diversity, and variations in social class while also affirming and asserting the importance of race, history, and Black agency.” Du Bois would emphasize the roles of urbanity, rurality, education, religion, health, crime, politics, and more in differently shaping the lives of Black Americans. No doubt mindful not to reproduce a pathologizing discourse about Black life, Du Bois was careful to address how structural intersections both constrained and enabled the development of Black America. The keystone to Du Bois’s understanding of intersectional sociology is his particular use of standpoint epistemology, or what Du Bois called “second-sight” and “double-consciousness.” Du Bois linked the insights of African Americans to structural opportunities, once again in The Souls of Black Folk: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, [my emphasis] … It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being OK cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face [my emphasis]. (1903 [1994], 5)
For Du Bois, the African American experience afforded liminal knowledge production. Wisdom from this third space possessed a unique worldview. “Du Bois conceives of world as a kind of onto-ethical mode of being. Through a world, a given people come to share a peculiar aesthetic and ethical outlook, identity, and social structure” (Mittiga 2019, 184). Du Bois would later expand upon the insights afforded Black Americans, especially as they gazed upon the White world. In “Souls of White Folk” in Darkwater (1920 [1999], 17), Du Bois wrote: High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage … Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious! They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped, —ugly, human.
56 Research handbook on intersectionality While this chapter echoes Du Bois’s earlier 1899 transition from armchair scientist (“high in the tower”) to engaged scholar (watching from “unusual points of vantage”), it also posits an ability to apprehend what others either try to hide or do not know themselves. This second-sight is quite literally a privileged insight that promises to illumine and reveal what was previously unknown or unwanted (cf. Hughey 2020, 2021). This acumen was not without its costs. “Throughout his career,” Anthony Appiah (2014, 79) wrote, Du Bois “struggled with the parallax that arose from sharing the insider’s perspective and the outsider’s perspective.” The combination of the insider and outsider perspective was captured in Du Bois’s reminiscences of his time at Harvard: “I was quite voluntarily and willingly outside its social life [my emphasis] … had my ‘island within’ [my emphasis] and it was a fair country” (1940 [2007], 18). If we take Du Bois’s notion of being simultaneously “outside of its social life” and having an “island within” as a point of departure, we witness Du Bois’s attempt to navigate an “outsider within” (Collins 1986) status. As Collins (1986, S29) wrote, “outsider within status seems to offer its occupants a powerful balance between the strengths of their sociological training and the offerings of their personal and cultural experiences. Neither is subordinated to the other.” This place of knowledge production is situated betwixt and between “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1903 [1994], 2). Such a stance is unequivocally a form of standpoint theory, which provides the foundation for intersectional analysis. Accordingly, in “W.E.B. Du Bois: Intellectual Forefather of Intersectionality?” Ange-Marie Hancock (2005, 76) contends: Du Bois first foreshadows Black feminist theory, which emerged prior to more general forms of intersectionality theory, through his expression of a particular standpoint: the outsider within. Patricia Hill Collins identifies the origins of the outsider within perspective in Black women’s status as both workers and Black women.
Employing the tool of racial double-consciousness, Du Bois was well able to employ intersectionality to “critique an oppression that is not his own” (Dennie 2020, 2): “As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite the noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers,” Du Bois wrote, “I instinctively feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really count” (1920 [1999], 179). Whether or not we call Du Bois an “intersectional theorist” or label Du Boisian sociology “intersectional,” I have above shown a manifest foundation of intersectionality in Du Bois’s work. His understandings of structural influences on action and order, as well as his “outsider within” epistemology, laid a necessary groundwork for an intersectional approach.
RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN DU BOISIAN SOCIOLOGY The Uncomfortable Intersectionality of “The Talented Tenth” Much of Du Bois’s understandings of race, class, and gender begin with his discussion of “The Talented Tenth.” Published as a chapter in Booker T. Washington’s The Negro Problem (1903), Du Bois advocated that one out of every ten (hence, the “talented tenth”) Black men had cultivated their ability to uplift the Black community through a classical education in arts and sciences. Du Bois (1903, 33) wrote:
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 57 The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.
Du Bois’s chapter was a vicious critique of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,” in which Washington advocated that Southern Blacks, newly freed from slavery, would not pursue a classical education but would limit themselves to agriculture and labor. As a consequence, many White Southern segregationists and White Northern philanthropists praised Washington as a prophet and decried Du Bois as a radical agitator. A prevailing logic of post-Bellum civil rights initiatives, the “talented tenth” strategy was coined not by Du Bois, but by Henry Lyman Morehouse (for whom Morehouse College is named).2 Du Bois’s commitment to lettered Black men as the agents of social change found expression even earlier. In his 1897 essay to the American Negro Academy entitled “The Conservation of Races” Du Bois wrote: Negroes of some considerable training, of high minds, and high motives … the talented, unselfish men, the pure and noble-minded women, to fight an army of devils that disgraces our manhood and our womanhood. There does not stand today upon God’s earth a race more capable in muscle, in intellect, in morals, than the American Negro, if he will bend his energies in the right direction. (Du Bois 1897, 13)
From this passage, Du Bois seems inspired by the social hierarchy of Plato’s The Republic. Du Bois’s model places the educated class of Black men as the rulers qua decision-makers for the race. Moreover, Du Bois’s gendered depiction seems equally influenced by the “cult of true womanhood” in which women’s worth (and Black women specifically) is measured by their proximity to moral purity and pious intellectualism. As Nneka D. Dennie (2020, 1) writes of Du Bois’s essay, “These were not simply rhetorical claims, but gendered declarations of Du Bois’s conceptualization of race leadership and racial progress.” Du Bois’s approach was mutually constrained and enabled by his training at Harvard and in Germany. The elitist circles in which he traveled gave him revolutionary ideas, which he brought to bear on American racism. Yet, even as he remained, as Ange-Marie Hancock (2005, 81) writes, “firmly committed to the liberation of Black people,” Du Bois demonstrated a naive expectation for “his fellow members of the Talented Tenth to do the same.” This was Du Bois’s early intersectional understanding of class, gender, and race. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” offered not a democratic vision, but an aristocratic mission in which educated Black men of the universities were responsible for leading “Negro” people. As Robert Gooding-Williams (2009, 32) puts it, “I wish to stress that Du Bois here envisions the cultured and civilized members of the talented tenth as issuing precepts to Negro communities: that is, as issuing commands, or injunctions, for the members of those communities to obey.” To avoid ahistoricism, it is important to contextualize Du Bois’s theorization as underpinned by his structural sociology and pragmatism, which considered the landscape of Black America at the turn of the century. By 1900, the illiteracy rate (for persons 14 years or older) for Blacks was 44.5 percent (compared to 10.7 percent for Whites), only 30 percent of Blacks ages 5–19 were enrolled in school, and less than 00.02 percent (approximately 2,000 out of 8.8 million Black people) earned college or graduate degrees (US Department of Commerce 1992).
58 Research handbook on intersectionality But Du Bois’s understanding of the talented tenth was not static. He reflected on, and greatly revised, the classism of the “Talented Tenth” argument in a 1948 meeting at Wilberforce University with the elite Black fraternity Sigma Pi Phi (known as “The Boulé”). In that speech, Du Bois doubled-down on the idea that university-educated African Americans were the key to liberation. However, he argued that such education should be made accessible to not just a “Talented Tenth” but to all, or what he called a “Guiding Hundredth”: It has been said that I had in mind the building of an aristocracy with neglect of the masses … It is clear that in 1900, American Negroes were an inferior caste, were frequently lynched and mobbed, widely disfranchised, and usually segregated … I looked upon them and saw salvation through intelligence leadership; as I said through a Talented Tenth …This, then, is my re-examined and restated theory of the “Talented Tenth,” which has thus become the doctrine of the “Guiding Hundredth.” (1948, 1–2)
He then boldly chastised the organization to whom he was speaking for failing to align their interests with the totality of the race: What the guiding idea of Sigma Pi Phi was, I have never been able to learn. I believe it was rooted in a certain exclusiveness and snobbery for which we all have a yearning even if unconfessed … we assume on the one hand our identity with the poor and yet we act and sympathize with the rich, an unconscious and dangerous dichotomy. (1948, 8–9)
As Stephanie Shaw (2013, 70) wrote, “It is no wonder that Du Bois sat alone on a bench on the college campus after his speech; it must have deeply offended his hosts, many of whom undoubtedly (mistakenly) saw themselves as true representatives of the Talented Tenth.” While Du Bois’s early model of race leadership was class-exclusionary and gender-restrictive, it was nonetheless an intersectional approach, as it synthesized his understandings of race, class, and gender within a theory of social change (Carby 1997). Urban and Rural Intersectionality: From Philadelphia to Farmville Before the problematic expressions of class and gender in “The Talented Tenth” (1903), Du Bois offered a rather robust and progressive form of intersectionality in his examinations of Black heterogeneity in an urban context. On the heels of his multidisciplinary training in Germany, Du Bois accepted an invitation from the University of Pennsylvania to study the predominantly African American community of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia from August 1896 to December 1897. Du Bois meticulously catalogued the intersections of Black experiences in the Seventh Ward (bounded by Spruce and South streets and extending from 7th Street to the Schuylkill River). Just shy of 30 years of age, Du Bois “settled in one room over a cafeteria … in the midst of an atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty and crime. Murder sat on our doorstep, police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with periodic advice” (Du Bois 1968, 194–5). Within this context, Du Bois collected nearly 5,000 door-to-door survey interviews (Holt 2008; Hunter 2014)—what was later published as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899a). Du Bois’s structural understanding of race and class intersections shines brightest in his critiques of Black homogeneity:
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 59 There is always a strong tendency on the part of the community to consider the Negros as composing one practically homogeneous mass. This view has of course a certain justification: the people of Negro descent in this land have a common history, suffer to-day common disabilities, and contribute to one general set of social problems. And yet if the foregoing statistics have emphasized any one fact it is that wide variations in antecedents, wealth, intelligence and general efficiency have already been differentiated within this group These differences are not, to be sure, so great or so patent as those among the whites of to-day, and yet they undoubtedly equal the difference among the masses of the people in certain sections of the land fifty or 100 years ago; and there is no surer way of misunderstanding the Negro than by ignoring manifest differences … And yet well-meaning people continually do this. (Du Bois 1899a, 309–10)
Du Bois supplanted conceptions of a singular racial consciousness, culture, and class among Black Philadelphians, demonstrating the intersections of socio-economic stratification, educational attainment, political involvement, religiosity, and more. Du Bois’s greatest focus was on class, as he distilled the major cleavages of Black socio-economic life, with an emphasis not simply on a “talented tenth” but a “submerged tenth”: Grade 1 Families of undoubted respectability earning sufficient income to live well … Grade 2 The respectable working-class; in comfortable circumstances … Grade 3 The poor; persons not earning enough to kep them at all times above want; honest, although not always energetic or thrifty, and with no touch of gross immorality or crime. Including the very poor, and the poor … Grade 4 The lowest class of criminals, prostitutes, and loafers; the “submerged tenth.” (Du Bois 1899a, 310–11)
In other pages, Du Bois unpacks the variations of Black political activity, such as demarcation of “three classes of Negro voters” composed first, of a “large majority of voters who vote blindly at the dictates of the party and, while not open to direct bribery, accept the indirect emoluments of office or influence in return for party loyalty.” Next is a “considerable group, centering in the slum districts, which casts a corrupt purchasable vote for the highest bidder” and third is a “very small group of independent voters who seek to use their vote to better present conditions of municipal life” (Du Bois 1899a, 373). Whether in consideration of economy or polity, these are not simply typologies of behavior, but are articulations of how Black life is understood from the standpoint of each of these intersected factions. Du Bois was well attuned to the tendency of White America to pathologize the Black community. Du Bois would later identify White views of Black folks as a “tertium quid” (a being between man and animal) in Souls (1903 [1994], 55): “God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil.” And while he took no shortcuts in describing Black urban corruption and vice, he was quick to explain how each group formed, how it each changed, and the relationships that structured behavior, making a robust and antiracist intersectional sociology that exploded White America’s view of the “Negro” as a tragic figure situated between man and monster. This driven intersectional approach is also apparent in Du Bois’s consideration of religious institutions. Of the “Negro church,” Du Bois wrote: Is the peculiar and characteristic product of the transplanted African … Its tribal functions are shown in its religious activity, its social authority and general guiding and coordinating work; its family functions are shown by the fact that the church is a centre of social life and intercourse; acts as a newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the center of amusements—indeed, is the world in which the Negro moves and acts. (1899a, 201)
60 Research handbook on intersectionality Du Bois then highlighted that the Black institution of religion is both the hub of intra-Black social circles and is itself a complex and intersected institution that supports Black organizational life: Each church forms its own social circle, and not many stray beyond its bounds. Introductions into that circle come through the church and thus the stranger becomes known … Negro churches were the birthplaces of Negro schools and of all agencies which seek to promote the intelligence of the masses; and even to-day no agency serves to disseminate news or information so quickly and effectively among Negroes as the church. (Du Bois 1899a, 204, 207)
Bookending Du Bois’s focus on urbanity was his study of rurality. While still at the University of Pennsylvania on May 5, 1897, Du Bois wrote to Carroll D. Wright, the US Commissioner of Labor, to propose a study of the “industrial development of the Negro … after one or two experiments the whole inquiry might take the form of a series of simultaneous investigations” (Du Bois 1973, 41–3). Wright approved funding and Du Bois set out to conduct five studies on Black rural life (Du Bois 1898a, 1899b, 1901, 1904).3 Du Bois hoped “the results … could be published and would by allaying false notions & prejudices prepare the public mind for the larger work” (Du Bois 1973, 41). That “larger work” would become, at least in part, the yearly conferences, and publications which he would organize as a professor at Atlanta University, where he began work after completing data collection for The Philadelphia Negro in the fall of 1897. The first of these studies was “The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study” (1898a). Conducted in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in July and August 1897, Du Bois studied demographic changes, census tracts, archival material, institutional influences, and engaged in participant observation, taking detailed notes on housing and environmental conditions. These data points helped Du Bois to unpack the intersectional dimensions of Black community life, or as Du Bois put it, “as near an approach to scientific accuracy as possible, the real condition of the Negro” (1898a, 1). For example, echoing his evaluation of Black religious institutions of the 7th Ward in Philadelphia: Du Bois held that such institutions had not only religious significance, but also affirmed social ties and organized social life in places such as Farmville … Noting that cultural institutions such as “secret and beneficial societies” also had “considerable influence,” Du Bois’s analysis of Black life in Farmville, prefigured his concern with the ways in which indigenous institutions played a significant role in the socio-spatial organization of Black life. (Hunter 2015, 221)
Writing of the intersectional parallels between The Philadelphia Negro and Du Bois’s Bureau of Labor studies, Reiland Rabaka (2020, 45, 49) argues, “Du Bois’ discourse, above all else, has to do with his extraordinary early emphasis on what we call currently ‘intersectionality’ or, rather, ‘intersectionalism’ … ‘The Negroes of Farmville’ is something of a Rosetta Stone in terms of deciphering, not simply Du Bois’ contributions to rural sociology, but also his innovative offerings to urban sociology.” Accordingly, Du Bois was careful to document how age, education, labor, migration, and gender intersected to drive poverty, strip rural areas of talent, impose excess stress on families, and limit potential marriage partners. For instance, Du Bois noticed a trend of high school dropouts among rural Black boys, the relocation of industry and wages from rural areas to urban centers and concluded that “Farmville acts as a sort of clearinghouse, taking the raw country lad from the farm to train in industrial life and sending north and east more or less well-equipped recruits for metropolitan life” (1898a, 5). In an ana-
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 61 lysis of Du Bois’s research for the Bureau of Labor, Jakubek and Wood (2018, 22) concluded: “Du Bois’ community case studies illustrate his early attempts at analyzing the intersection of social class, race, and labor markets.” Of Wages and Women: Intersectionality in Black Reconstruction The early twentieth century class and race intersectionality of Du Bois found maturity in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). The influence of Marxist thought is evident in its pages, but its analysis is not reducible to historical materialism. As Itzigsohn and Brown (2020, 82) note, “Du Bois modifies Marx’s class analysis by introducing the analysis of the intersections of race and class, and the fracture that these intersections create along class lines.” Du Bois (1935, 700) thus wrote, “The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite … this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove a wedge between the white and black workers.” Du Bois was clear to articulate the varied dimensions of this “wedge.” His theory did not mirror Marxist conceptions of laborers who, under the spell of “false consciousness” due to the influence of private property, pursue goals antithetical to their interests. Nor did Du Bois pathologize Black Southern laborers as either unknowing or unwilling dupes of the bourgeoise. Rather, Du Bois articulated how White laborers reaped real social benefits and privileges beyond those extended from the private ownership of the means and modes of production. Du Bois charted how working-class Whiteness was intersected by a freedom of movement in the public sphere that was cross-cut by status, education, policing, politics, and media—what historian David Roediger called the “wages of whiteness” (1991). Du Bois (1935, 700–1) wrote: It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage [my emphasis]. They were given public preference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this has small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.
While most concentrate on these race and class intersections, there also lurks within Black Reconstruction a gender-attentive analysis of the racial and class dimensions of slavery and the Civil War. Du Bois notes the exploitative system of chattel slavery depended on the acquisition of cheap land and labor. In regard to labor, Du Bois’s gendered and sexualized intersectionality finds expression. In the first chapter Du Bois (1935, 11) wrote: Human slavery in the South pointed and led in two singularly contradictory and paradoxical directions—toward the deliberate commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit and toward the intermingling of black and white blood. The slaveholders shrank from acknowledging either set of facts, but they were clear and undeniable.
62 Research handbook on intersectionality Here Du Bois emphasized the sexual violence toward the literal reproduction of slave economies. He returned to this analysis in the third chapter: The “slaveholder and landlord,” Du Bois (1935, 41–3) argued, was forced, unless willing to take lower profits, continually to beat down the cost of slave labor … One method called for more land and the other for more slaves … surrounded it with certain secrecy, and it was exceedingly bad taste for any … planter to have it indicated that he was deliberately raising slaves for sale … that was a fact … A laboring stock was deliberately bred for legal sale.
While Du Bois’s gender-focused intersectional critiques of slavery pulled no punches, they were often bantamweight strikes whose force was blunted by Du Bois’s own gendered assumptions. According to Alys Eve Weinbaum (2013, 443–4), Du Bois’s understanding of such “sexual chaos” (Du Bois 1935, 44), exhibits both his understanding of slave women’s particular exploitation and an all-too-familiar sexist and bourgeois concern … As Du Bois’s moral ire surfaces, in other words, it undercuts the feminist potential of the analysis that precedes it. And yet, undercutting duly noted, what comes before—Du Bois’s account of sexual and reproductive exploitation as foundational to the interstate slave trade— remains of utmost importance.
Du Bois repeatedly returned to the brutality inflicted upon enslaved Black women in Black Reconstruction, but his intersectional analysis is particularly double-edged. On the one hand, Du Bois articulated a trenchant structural analysis of slavery centered on Black women’s reproductive rights. On the other hand, the toll of slaved-based violence on women’s lives was framed as a robbery of Black women’s ability to be unsullied mothers, wives, and daughters rather than as fully-fledged contributors to, and makers of, society. Du Bois’s analysis rendered a picture of slavery as revolving around Black women’s exploitation, while Black women still circumambulate around men. Gendering the Uplift of the Race Apropos Du Bois’s discussion of gender in Black Reconstruction, Barbara McCaskill (2003, 73) notes of Du Bois and many Black male writers of the early twentieth century: “African-American men were impressed into a patriarchy that disclaimed women’s equality to men in the political and professional spheres while simultaneously mythologizing this same sisterhood’s moral and domestic superiority over their brothers.” Despite this inclination, Du Bois occasionally exhibited a more robust intersectionality that assumed wide-ranging options and rights for Black women. This stance is perhaps no better expressed than in “The Damnation of Women,” a chapter in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920 [1999]). Darkwater was published the same year as the ratification of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which gave the de jure right to vote to women but did not de facto apply to Black women. In prescient fashion, Du Bois argued for the coincident significance of race and gender: What is today the message of these black women to America and to the world? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 63 now, two of these movements—woman and color—combine in one, the combination has deep meaning. (1920 [1999], 187)
Du Bois positioned race and gender parallel to one another. While we might grant that Du Bois came to see that “the categories of race and gender matter simultaneously—a central claim made by intersectionality theorists of all stripes in the 21st century” (Hancock 2005, 78), these parallels do not intersect (cf. Harris forthcoming). Moreover, Du Bois did not use the chapter to make any claims of race and gender as co-constitutive. Yet, he did write that gender and race qua “woman and color” somehow do “combine in one.” While Du Bois’s supposed “intersectionality” in “The Damnation of Women” has “deep meaning” (1920 [1999], 187), that meaning is ambiguous. This is striking given more explicit intersectionality in earlier work by Du Bois. For instance, in “Of the Meaning of Progress” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903 [1994]) we encounter the character of “Josie.” A placeholder for a plight of the average working-class, Black women’s position in the United States, Josie is a “girl of twenty” (1903 [1994], 38), struggling to navigate occupational, familial, religious, educational, gendered, and raced social forces. Du Bois described these in detail through his encounters at Josie’s homestead: I loved to go to Josie’s, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was “mighty little” wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it “looked like” they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how “mean” some of the white folks were. (1903 [1994], 41)
A decade later, Du Bois returned to discover Josie has died. “Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired, —worked until, on a summer’s day, some one [sic] married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child and slept—and sleeps” (1903 [1994], 43). Josie’s intersecting identities related to race, class, gender, and more, made for a highly vulnerable social location that eventually took her life in her early 30s. Yet, Du Bois never fully emancipated himself from the “cult of true womanhood,” which curtailed his excavation of the “deep meaning” (Du Bois 1920 [1999], 187) of gender and race intersections (cf. Simpson 2015). His view of Josie in The Souls of Black Folk as embodying “moral heroism” (1903 [1994], 39) whose ultimate role was “the centre of the family” (1903 [1994], 38) and his evocation in Darkwater of “dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces, and the darker, fiercer Zinghas” as well as the “gentle Phillis [Wheatley]; Harriet [Tubman], the crude Moses; the sibyl Sojourner Truth; and the martyr, Louise De Mortie” (1920 [1999], 97) all seem to idealize Black femininity through both celebrating Black motherhood and bemoaning its limitations: “All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tried to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins” (Du Bois 1920 [1999], 96). Reiland Rabaka (2003, 42) notes, “by viewing black women primarily as mothers or essentially in their maternal mode, Du Bois also limits black women to a biological function or ‘sex role’ and, in a sense, quarantines them to the domestic.” Relatedly, Celena Simpson (2015) found comparable conflations of motherhood and femininity to invade even Du Bois’s fictional writing, as she points out in her analysis of Du Bois’s historical fiction trilogy, The Black Flame (Du Bois 1957 [1976], 1959 [1976], 1961).
64 Research handbook on intersectionality These limitations notwithstanding, Du Bois managed to occasionally pivot from Victorian gender ideals to evoke a feminist perspective and intersectional thesis predicated on Black women’s agency. For example, Du Bois cited Anna Julia Cooper, “Only the black women can say ‘when and where I enter … without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me’” (1920 [1999], 100–1). Du Bois recognized the gendered contradictions that offer the forced choice of domestic labor (inclusive of intensive mothering) or employment outside the home, or the burden of what Hochschild (1989) would call the “second shift”). Moreover, Du Bois wrote with a concern for Black women’s relationship to motherhood that was fundamentally different than early (White) feminism’s quest for White women to enter the workforce. Black women had been denied their own motherhood and forcibly thrown into the workforce via slavery and Jim Crow. Black women thus advocated to both labor and mother “when and where” they wished. Du Bois unapologetically argued: The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuse to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them if they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women. (1920 [1999], 96)
Lines later, he summarized: “The future women must have life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right to motherhood at her own discretion” (1920 [1999], 96). This is an approach centered neither on a Black male elite cadre of the “talented tenth” nor of working-class Black women whose worth is inextricably tied to the roles as wife or mother. Rather, Du Bois occasionally places Black women at the epicenter of his intersectional sociology.
CONCLUSION In this chapter, I addressed the latent intersectionality in Du Bois’s thinking, the manifest foundations of intersectionality undergirding his scholarship, and specific instances of intersectionality in his writings. I hope to have demonstrated that Du Bois’s intersectionality was both fierce and fraught. One is hard pressed to view a singular Du Boisian intersectionality, free of ideological or institutional distortion. Rather, Du Boisian intersectionality, if there is such a thing, is kaleidoscopic. Du Bois’s views on race, class, and gender morphed, becoming fractured at one moment and harmonious the next. And they were always multi-hued. If anything, Du Bois’s thinking was no less than an earthquake that shook the ground of the twentieth century. His writings rippled far and wide; they destabilized essentialist and homogenizing narratives even as these shockwaves formed cracks and fissures among the shared terrain of social movements. Today, the words of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois still reverberate, reminding us to carefully blueprint a new house, intersectional and undivided.
Du Boisian sociology and intersectionality 65
NOTES 1. Adams (2018, 128) finds “intersectional considerations of race and gender” in Harriet Martineau’s work; Carby (1987, 96) remarks that “Both [Anna Julia] Cooper and [Ida B.] Wells theorized the relationships among race, gender, and patriarchy in their writing,” and Sarvasy (2010, 300) writes of Jane Addams’s ability to “construct what feminists today call an intersectional location.” 2. Morehouse (1896, 1) wrote, “Concerning Negro education … ordinary education may answer for the nine men of mediocrity: but … The tenth man, with superior natural endowments, symmetrically trained and highly developed, may become a mightier influence, a greater inspiration to others than all the other nine …” 3. One of Du Bois’s studies, “The Sharecropping System in Lowndes County, Alabama” was “censored by the Department of Labor and never published, because, Du Bois believed, it was too critical of the social sources of rural poverty and social inequality in its findings” (Jakubek and Wood 2018, 18).
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5. The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
This chapter has three purposes: to bring the lens of intersectionality theory to bear on an extraordinary moment in US history and the history of sociology—the American Social Settlement Movement of the Progressive Era, 1885–1920; to contribute to the project suggested by Patricia Hill Collins in her description of “intersectionality as a critical social theory in the making” (2019, 15); and to note the benefits to scholarship of using intersectional analysis on an established body of knowledge, the Social Settlement Movement in America, and its scholarly extension “settlement sociology” (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2002). The Settlement Movement was an experiment in which a class-privileged group set out to interact as neighbors with groups of relatively disadvantaged people, with the goal of ameliorating those disadvantages and reforming the social conditions that produced them. After a brief introduction of key concepts—intersectionality, social settlement, the Settlement Movement, activist scholarship, we present our analysis in five propositions. Our data come from four sources: Robert A. Woods and Albert Kennedy’s 1911 Handbook of Settlements whose time frame (1885–1910) loosely sets the period analysed in this chapter; publications by settlement activist-scholars listed in the Handbook, most especially Jane Addams, head of the Hull-House settlement in Chicago; accounts of Black settlement experience by Anna Julia Cooper (1913 [1998]), Sarah Collins Fernandis (1905), Ida B. Wells (1970), and Fannie Barrier Williams (1904, 1906); and later studies, most especially, Margaret C. Berry, The Settlement Movement 1886–1986 (1986), Joyce E. Williams and Vicky MacLean, Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Era (2016), and our publications (1998 [2007], 2002, 2007, 2018). Our studies have consistently shown that settlement activists and scholars identified their work as part of the new discipline of sociology and, in many cases, themselves as sociologists. This “settlement sociology” constituted a particular school within the-then emerging discipline of sociology, giving sociology clear roots in a social justice tradition.
KEY TERMS Intersectionality The term “intersectionality” is used in this chapter to describe a process, ubiquitous in social life, in which a society’s stratificational structures and practices—its institutionalized ways of unequally distributing socially produced goods and services by class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, etc.—interact to shape how power affects individual lives, relationships, groups, formal organizations, and social institutions. The concept intersectionality, originating in the experiences of African American women, was formally introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé 69
70 Research handbook on intersectionality Crenshaw in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and expanded by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (1990). Both theorists rejected the conventional mode of explaining discrimination through “a single axis framework” (Crenshaw) or through “additive models of oppression” (Collins), advocating instead for a “multi-dimensional” (Crenshaw) or “interlocking model” (Collins) of stratificational variables that oppress people of color. From these beginnings, the idea of intersectionality spread, becoming a major concept in sociology, other social sciences, and in society at large. Collins (2019) worries that the increasing use of the concept has led to a loss of its critical edge. Addressing confusions over the concept’s use, sociologist Mary Romero (2018, 37) warns, “For a moment, it might help to make clear what intersectionality is not … Intersectionality is not concerned with ‘diversity’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but with power relationships, specifically the ways in which difference embeds domination and oppression.” This warning leading us to look critically at whether the settlements and the Settlement Movement confronted—or were blind to—the ways “intersectionality” functioned in the settlements themselves, and in their relation to their impoverished neighbors. The Social Settlement “Social settlement” refers to an invention of the late 19th century designed to address what that age called “the social problem,” the growing gap between rich and poor, by providing a mechanism for bridging class divisions by privileged-class people taking up residence— “settling”—in a poor neighborhood for extended periods of time and interaction with their impoverished neighbors. The residents sought to offer what help they could and to learn from the experience so that they might be informed voices in the battle to alleviate the horrific living conditions that evolved with the shift to an industrial economy which produced squalor and destitution for many of its workers while offering growing prosperity to other parts of the population. Central to this invention was the settlement house itself, typically a large building located in a poor neighborhood, that could accommodate a number of residents as well as provide meeting space for activities the residents might offer the community—childcare, classes, lectures, club meetings, debates, professional consultations, and social gatherings. Originally proposed by Canon Samuel Barnett, the first settlement, “Toynbee Hall,” opened in the desperately poor Whitechapel neighborhood of London, on Christmas Eve, 1884, with Barnett and his wife Henrietta as directors. The idea spread rapidly to the United States carried by a generation of young American college graduates inspired by Toynbee Hall—including Jane Addams, Stanton Coit, Jean Fine, Julia Lathrop, Helen Rand, Vida Scudder, Graham Taylor, Robert Woods, Charles Zueblin (McCabe 1893; Reinders 1982). Between 1885 and 1895, this cohort created settlements in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where Jane Addams’s Hull-House became the archetypical settlement. While following the basic Toynbee Hall model, the US effort differed in the prominent role played by women and the initial impulse to establish “a neighborly relation” with the local inhabitants—disadvantaged workers and their families, who were frequently new, non-English-speaking immigrants. The residents lived together, paying for room and board in the settlement house, run by a “director” or “head resident.” This cross-class contact led to the discovery by residents that what was needed was practical help rather than cultural uplift and they turned to offering a staggering number of practical services: lessons in English; childcare, kindergartens, nursery schools, playgrounds; housing for single
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 71 working women and men; libraries, district nurses, legal aid, dining halls serving nutritious meals; lessons in sewing, woodwork, citizenship, debating and conducting meetings; meeting places for neighborhood clubs, unions, political groups, celebrations of major holidays, and a rich offering of lectures (Addams 1893b; D. Moore 1897 [1990]). Residents’ work was supported by many non-resident volunteers and by donors who gave resources ranging from money to whole buildings. The Social Settlement Movement Throughout this chapter, we draw on the general language of social movement theory to describe some key elements in the social settlement phenomenon that gripped the US in the period 1885–1920, shown in the rapid adoption of the settlement idea across the US—from three settlements in 1889 to 74 (1897), 103 (1900), 204 (1905), 413 (1910), and 500 (1920) (Woods and Kennedy 1911 [1970], 1922 [1990]). Those elements are ● diffuse but widespread concern about a perceived social problem; ● biographical availability of some people to give time and energy to addressing this problem; ● formulation of explanations for the causes of the problem and, usually, a solution; ● differentiation of the adherents into an organized, stratified effort of visionaries, leaders who spread their ideas, organizers of actions, activists, supporters, and allies; ● institutionalization over time into a recognized feature of the society—and always the threat of decay and disappearance. The US Settlement Movement became a large, geographically dispersed network of collective actors ranging from very small one-resident operations, to middle-sized, reasonably resourced institutions, to the large, well-resourced “core” institutions. The project of all these settlements was to establish “a neighborly relation” with the community around them and to deliver services to that community as the opportunities arose in the natural course of living side-by-side. This theme of neighborly relation is the common thread among all the settlements, along with the remarkable uniformity of the services they offered. Activist Scholarship “Activist scholarship” describes the settlements’ pioneering research into social problems and solutions for the people in their neighborhoods and for society. This literature takes four broad forms—research reports, policy recommendations, theoretical discussions, and memoirs and autobiographies. It is marked by ingenuity in conceptualization of the problem, creativity in research method and design, quality in the data produced, and sheer volume of works produced by these volunteer organizations. Settlement sociologists assumed that one contribution their movement could make to the solution of the social problem was accurate descriptions of the conditions of life for groups living in dire poverty—immigrants, domestic servants, African Americans, the indigent, elderly, disabled, sick, or mentally ill. The residents were aware of the various intersecting factors that can place people in this peril and focused particularly on oppressive working conditions, investigating key spaces—factories, stock yards, tenement sweatshops, department stores, employment bureaus, schools, saloons, public spaces, courts, police stations; witness-
72 Research handbook on intersectionality ing and participating in labor unions, strikes and protests; and interacting with the people involved in order to understand what the experiences meant to them and for their lives. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder of Greenwich Settlement in New York (1902), summarized the significance of this work for the settlement endeavor in her autobiography, Neighborhood (1938): The realism of the settlement [is] its understanding that, before any help can be given, the situation must be felt, realized and understood at first hand … Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others. The chief mission of the settlement has always been its accenting of contact as fundamental. At the university, one learned that scholarship is a sincere effort to get at truth … In the settlement one learned much the same thing, but in the first case it was through contact with minds and in the other by contact with people and situations. The settlement is, indeed, from this aspect a graduate school. (1938, 39)
Major settlement research reports include: 1895 Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House, research directed by Florence Kelley 1898 The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates of the South End House (Boston), principal researcher Robert Woods 1899 The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. DuBois with Isabel Eaton (College Settlement of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania) 1904 Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment, Frances Kellor (Henry Street Settlement) 1905 Five Hundred and Seventy Four Deserters and Their Families: A Descriptive Study of Their Characteristics and Circumstances, Lillian Brandt (Greenwich House Settlement and The Survey) 1909–14 The Pittsburgh Survey in six volumes, directed by Paul Kellogg (Kingsley House, Pittsburgh) and the Russell Sage Foundation) Women and the Trades, Pittsburgh 1907–1908, Elizabeth Butler (1909) Homestead: The Households of a Milltown, Margaret Bynington (1910) Work Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman (1910) The Steelworkers, John Andrews Fitch (1910) The Pittsburgh District Civic Frontage, Paul Kellogg (1914) Wage-Earning Pittsburgh, Paul Kellogg (1914) 1910 Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, Emily Green Balch (Denison House, Boston) 1911 Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York, Mary White Ovington (Greenwich House) 1917 The Immigrant and the Community, Grace Abbott (Hull-House) 1923 The Zone of Emergence: Observations of the Lower Middle and Upper Working Class Communities of Boston 1905–1914, Robert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy (South End House) 1936 The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935, Edith Abbott (Hull-House) Besides these well-known works, settlement sociology also produced thousands of smaller studies published as pamphlets, government reports, reports to the settlement, and journal or magazine articles. Settlement activists frequently followed a research report with policy recommendations to local, state, or federal government, or a special interest group. Prime examples of this
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 73 activist scholarship at work are the accomplishments of Crystal Eastman and Florence Kelley (Proposition V below). Above all, the Settlement Movement was held together by a theoretical explanation of “the social problem” and a recommended path for its solution. Five American settlement leaders— Addams, Kelley, Simkhovitch, Graham Taylor, and Robert A. Woods—are noteworthy for their work in constructing an activist theory for the Settlement Movement. Pre-eminent among these is Addams, the charismatic and central leader of the American Settlement Movement whose general social theory is outlined in Proposition II below. Settlement social theory often emerged in the memoirs written by settlement residents; this fact is critical in an intersectional analysis because in those memoirs the reader can see the positionality of the writer in terms of their neighbors—and the theorist/memoirist’s understanding of the issue of positionality.
INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS The five propositions in this section bring together the American Settlement Movement and intersectionality theory, enriching our understanding of both. Proposition I: Intersectional analysis both complicates and clarifies the established account of the American Social Settlement Movement, in two ways—first, by having us recognize the limits of the data that account is based on; second, by raising questions about the presence of intersectionality in the internal organization of the Settlement Movement itself. The established account, the one given in the first section, is told, mainly, from the perspective of residents of the earliest, most celebrated settlements (Kogut 1972)—those located in major metropolitan areas, supported by wealthy donors, and publishing much of the activist literature that provides the data used by scholars of this history. Of the 413 settlements listed by Woods and Kennedy (1911 [1970]) about the top dozen or less than 5 percent are the source of the information on which the established narrative is based. These, which we call the “core” settlements are listed in Table 5.1. But about 400 settlements—which we call “secondary settlements” in the movement are known to us primarily through their entries in the Handbook, many of these fairly brief. Settlement Handbook entries consist of statements by the settlement offering the name, address, date of founding, description of the “neighborhood”—usually demographic and occupational data of ethnicity/race and typical employment of the neighbors, sometimes supplemented by character assessments; the “activities” in terms of services and participatory events like classes; the names of the residents, and then the literature the settlement had produced. These secondary settlements were of two main types—those started by individuals or a small group of friends, often on the proverbial “shoestring,” and those sponsored by large established formal organizations, for example, churches (including the Salvation Army), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Charity Organization Society (COS), the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), and various nurses’ associations. The Handbook shows that of these 400, 59 were settlements run for minority ethnic or racial groups—31 by and for Jews; 26 for African Americans—including branches of major White settlements, settlements founded, funded, and supervised by sympathetic Whites, and 12 founded by Blacks for Blacks; two settlements run by White residents focusing on Chinese immigrant workers; no Latinx neighbors are named as clients of settlements services, but
74 Research handbook on intersectionality Table 5.1
Core settlements
Settlement
Location
Date founded
Current Head as of 1910
Chicago Commons
Chicago
1894
Graham Taylor
College Settlements Association
Boston
1890
Board of college women
College Settlement
New York City
1889
Jean Fine
College Settlement (aka “St Mary’s”)
Philadelphia
1892
Anna Freeman Davies
Denison House
Boston
1892
Helena S. Dudley
Greenwich House
New York City
1902
Mary Simkhovitch
Henry Street
New York City
1895
Lillian Wald
Hull-House
Chicago
1889
Jane Addams
Kingsley House
Pittsburgh
1893
Kate A. Everest
South End House
Boston
1891
Robert A. Woods
University of Chicago Settlement
Chicago
1894
Mary E. McDowell
University Settlement
New York City
1885
Robbins Gilman
several settlements in Texas and California include “Mexicans” or “Spanish” as part of the neighborhood population; there is only one mention of Native Americans as neighbors. The remaining approximately 341 settlements were founded and run by Whites, most apparently Christians, largely Protestant, some Catholic—with a scattering of self-proclaimed secular (most of the core fall into this category but it was less represented in the secondary settlements). The Handbook shows the overall dominance of women in the movement with 1,077 women residents and 322 men; 5,718 women volunteers and 1,594 men; 216 women as head residents and 85 men. Of the core elite settlements, nine were headed by women—all WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) except Lillian Wald at Henry Street. Other minority women head residents were in the 400 less visible settlements—including about a dozen Black and 14 Jewish women. Within the secondary settlements, the women residents, even when formally listed as “head,” were often reporting to a male-dominated board, usually church related and in the case of the Black settlements, they many times were reporting to a White male board—except for those started and maintained by Black women for Black people. The most obvious differences between the smaller settlements and the core settlements are quantitative—fewer residents, volunteers, activities, funds, and, especially, publications, where many managed only an annual report. Lack of publication may have reflected not only lack of time but of contacts with formal organizations in publishing. Yet these secondary settlements did seem, through means not always clear to us, to take their lead from the core settlements, adopting both defining watchwords of the movement, for example, neighbor, neighborhood, the neighborly relation, morality, ethics and sociology, and the model of services offered to their neighbors, for example, childcare, temporary housing for working women, clubs aimed at specific groups in the population, milk stations. What emerges is a movement composed of 413 separate voluntary organizations, centered in different neighborhoods throughout the US, performing remarkably similar services, and communicating in terms of a common vocabulary of practical aims and social ideals. Besides a broad agreement on the purpose and spirit of the settlement, two other factors not uncommon to social movements held them together. The first was the role of its visionary leader, Jane Addams—always to be allowed for is the fact of her and Hull-House’s overwhelming presence. Her recurrence in the data seems a genuine reflection of her almost inestimable significance to this movement, resting heavily on her remarkable facility as a writer, a quality increasingly realized and commented on (e.g., Kathryn Joslin, Jane Addams, a Writer’s
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 75 Life 2004; Lengermann and Niebrugge 2022). Over the course of her career at Hull-House (1889–1935) Addams gave literally hundreds of evocative sketches of the settlement and the neighbors it served and was able both to position herself as an actor and to engage the reader in the narratives she crafted. In the terminology of social movement theory, Addams combined in her person the roles of visionary, leader, and activist. The second factor was the creation of a formal organization, the National Federation of Settlements, in which all the 413 separately governed settlements had membership, and which formally gave and assumed equality among its members. But, in fact, the core settlements exercised power over the others in terms of strategy and decision-making, as we show in a brief example of the process that set in motion the creation of the Handbook on which researchers so heavily rely. It was … decided to arrange for a series of settlement discussions at the following National Conference, which was to take place at St. Louis with Miss Jane Addams as its president. To these meetings every settlement house and neighborhood center in the country was invited to send representatives. Three sessions were held, and a national committee of ten was appointed to gather and collate the results of settlement experience as to the most needed and most promising directions of service, and to present a year later (1911) at a similar series of meetings in Boston a platform for united action. (Woods and Kennedy 1911 [1970], 1)
The Settlement Conference organizers, despite their experience of disadvantaged people, must have felt that by inviting “every settlement house and neighborhood center in the country … to send representatives,” they were being as inclusive as possible. But an invitation does not automatically enable attendance. So, in the seemingly fairest of ways, the Conference reproduces itself, getting members who, like the organizers, had the resources to attend the meeting. And they might be surprised to consider their actions an exemplar of Collins’s observation (2015, 16), “The complex social inequalities fostered by intersecting systems of power are fundamentally unjust, shaping knowledge projects and/or political engagements that uphold or contest the status quo.” But certainly, what we have here is the shaping of a knowledge project for all, and for subsequent generations, decided by a few. Intersectional analysis directs scholars to investigate this process. But having said this, we admit that in the remaining propositions we draw largely on data provided by the core settlements. Proposition II: Intersectionality Theory and Settlement Sociology share a common understanding that social inequality is a cause of human suffering; but their responses to inequality are framed differently. Intersectionality theory interprets inequality formally, identifying it as a core structural problem. Collins (2015, 14) centers on the concept of “complex social inequalities” as the product of power operating in a social system: “Intersecting systems of power catalyze social formations of complex social inequalities that are organized via unequal material realities and distinctive social experiences for people who live within them”—and are, as noted in Proposition I, “fundamentally unjust.” Romero illustrates this fundamental injustice with the concept of “unearned privilege”: “Intersectionality is interested in exposing the unearned privileges certain groups receive by simply being socially assigned or identified as white, male, heterosexual, or a citizen, or being non-disabled” (2018, 59). Settlement residents would have been uneasy about the facts, though not necessarily the concepts, of social inequality and unearned privilege, debating the practical implications of those terms. For the Settlement Movement issued into a world where White supremacy, male
76 Research handbook on intersectionality superiority, class privilege, and racial discrimination were accepted and practiced, a world in which Rudyard Kipling’s (now infamous but then widely approved) poem “Pick Up the White Man’s Burden” (1899) was being read into the Congressional Record and in which the norms of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era confronted each other. These were ideas settlement workers could not completely escape. The American public worried about the growing gap between rich and poor but their sense of the causes and remedies for this gap covered the range of political possibilities. Settlement workers were united by a desire to alleviate suffering but divided on what to do about social inequality—except perhaps agreeing to limit its most deleterious effects which so urgently needed remedy that internal settlement discussions and public statements were often focused on finding the best practical solution to them. In what was to become one of her most cited addresses, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements” (1893a), Addams provided a theoretical framing for a practical and far-ranging approach to social inequality that would become the understanding of the Settlement Movement. Her approach to the problem of inequality is both pragmatic and ethical: “the good we secure for ourselves is fragile and uncertain … until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life” (1893a, 7). The movement grew to act on this idea of sharing as the antidote to social inequality in the services and policies it advocated. This call to share the good was not only consistent with the period’s linkage of privilege to duty but with Addams’s social theory that saw ethics, rules for right relations with others, as an essential social structure and the absence of an appropriate system of ethics as the primary explanation of the existence of inequality in its present form of “poverty amidst riches.” The latter phrase, from Beatrice Potter Webb, was what most troubled people about the current shape of inequality—the starkly unjust contrast between so much abundance and so much misery that the new industrial economy was producing. Addams’s turn to ethics as a social structure rests on her understanding of the human being as motivated by emotional as well as material interests. She believes that emotionally people want sociability, to be in relationship for the sake of relating. Collectively, this desire gives rise to structures of ethics that offer guidelines for relating in satisfying and appropriate ways. A society’s ethics and its organization of material production are typically congruent. The crisis of her day, the intensifying growth of material inequality, arose from the lack of a system of ethics appropriate to the advanced production of capitalist organization, which Adams (1895, 184) explained as “the discovery of the power to combine,” the ways that capitalism organized large numbers of workers to produce an extraordinary surfeit of goods and services. But people still acted out of earlier “belated ethics”—the militaristic ethic, the family claim, and the individual ethic. Addams calls for “social ethics,” rules for right relation reflecting the principle of the power to combine, that the way to secure one’s own good is to work for it to be available for everyone, to identify with the needs not only of one’s own social circle but the larger neighborhood, community, society. Misalignment between production and ethics had broken the frame for sociability: The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great cities. Many of the people living there are very poor … without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence … They live … side by side, [but] without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind … We find working-men organized into armies of producers because men of executive ability and business sagacity have found it to their interests thus to organize them. But these working-men are not organized socially … they are living without a corresponding social contact. (Italics ours) (Addams 1893a, 4)
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 77 The answer to this break in social contact is the social ethic which requires that people act to help secure for others the goods they have secured—or desire—for themselves. This can be accomplished in myriad ways—organizing labor, developing cooperatives, acting collectively to produce libraries, health services, parks; legislating improved wages and living conditions for workers, and treating large corporations as “public trusts.” This practical and ethical change is the duty of the Settlement Movement both through large-scale projects (Proposition V) and in face-to-face interactions with neighbors (Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2014). The complexities of sharing across lines of difference can be illustrated by one example, chosen deliberately for its simplicity and concreteness—Christmas at Hull-House. In her late-in-life memoir of her childhood as a Polish Jewish immigrant in the shadow of Hull-House, Hilda Satt Polacheck (1882–1967) tells of an Irish playmate asking her when she is about 12 or 13 to go to the Hull-House Christmas; remembering the violence directed toward Jews in Poland at Christmas, she declines saying “I might get killed!” The playmate, incredulous, says that is impossible; Hilda eventually attends and is overwhelmed by a feeling of safety as she sees how many kinds of people are there, relaxed and having a good time: “We were all poor. Some of us were underfed. Some of us had holes in our shoes. But we were not afraid of each other. What greater service can a human being give to her country than to banish fear from the heart of a child?” (Polacheck 1989, 52). And yet, after Hilda leaves this wonderful event— which she remembers as making her “a staunch American”—she “still hesitated telling mother where I had been. I was glad that she did not ask me” (Polacheck 1989, 52). In the space available we cannot “unpack” the attempt by Hull-House to “secure for others by incorporating … into the common life” the experience of a Christmas essentially rooted in the English-speaking tradition—a little religion mixed with Dickens and an experience, for one day, of bounty. Intersectionality theory would call attention to the biased, assimilationist current, the seeming blindness to the issues of whose choices, of the too simple approach to defining good or a too limited imagination of possible reactions, and of the ways this “happy” occasion might include elements of oppression. Settlement residents would argue that power in this event is agency, the ability to set and execute the projects, here the project is sharing as one neighbor might with another (see Proposition IV). Proposition III: In operationalizing this approach to inequality, the Settlement Movement invoked the concepts of “neighbor” and “the neighborly relation” as the appropriate orientation of the settlement resident to people in the surrounding community. “Orientation to other,” a foundational concept in sociology’s analysis of the nature of the social, can be seen as having at least two elements—the qualities the actor assigns or believes to be in the other as an independent entity and the motives the actor has for being in interaction with the other. Naming the other as “neighbor” heightened or defined the relationship in particular ways. “Neighbor,” deriving from the idea of “near-dweller,” is hallowed in Biblical admonitions familiar to all settlement workers to “love thy neighbor as thy self.” “Neighborly” means “having the characteristics of a congenial neighbor”—well intentioned, similar, friendly. To move in next door is to try to bridge the gap between rich and poor by arguing in the flesh the fact of equal footing in the world, asserting similarity rather than difference, saying to the community member “I come in peace, with good intentions.” Settlement Head Resident Robert Woods (South End House) wrote hopefully, that “one of the most remarkable … social facts [is] this instinctive understanding that the man who establishes his home besides yours, by that very act begins to qualify as an ally of yours and begins to have a claim
78 Research handbook on intersectionality upon your sense of comradeship” (Woods 1914 [1923], 151). But in fact, this orientation was not easy to realize—moving in was only a first step to it. The settlement residents faced—with greater or lesser reflective powers—three challenges to becoming neighbors. One was the fact that they had chosen to be where others were constrained to be by lack of resources, the choice itself reflecting the residents’ greater resources. Residents wrestled regularly with the question of how the fact of material inequality hindered the experience of being a neighbor: [T]here was always present the harrowing consciousness of the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our neighbors … for we … had a sense of security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these two securities are the specters which most persistently haunt the poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts more effective through organization and possibly complement them by small efforts of our own. (Addams 1910, 133–4)
The second challenge to the neighborly orientation was the residents’ own mix of motives, the struggle between duty and ambition. Many women college graduates took seriously the duty to fulfill the extraordinary future outlined for them by their colleges—as Wellesley founder Henry Fowle Durant described in a sermon to the student body about 1870: “You mistake altogether the significance of the movement of which you are a part if [for] you this is simply the question of a College education for I believe that God’s hand is in it … calling to womanhood to come up higher, to prepare for great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life, for noblest usefulness” (Kingsley 1924, 239). The effect of such exhortations led Smith graduate Vida Scudder to declare: “Into this world: —a world of paradox, weary with age, yet … bent, as no other age has ever been … on the righting of social wrong … we, the first generation of college women … represent a new factor in the social order” (1890, 3). A variation on this theme was the residents’ search for people in need who might be helped by their presence, an orientation based in values that Addams, like Scudder (1890), traces to “a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity. The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, … express the spirit of Christ” (1893a, 17). But mixed with this is the ambition to use the settlement experience to gain the public legitimacy so long denied to women, a need Addams expressed in her college valedictory address, interpreting the story of Cassandra, whose prophecy of the doom of Troy was not believed, as a problem for all women: to find “what the ancients called auctoritas, right of the speaker to make themselves heard” (Adams 1881, 37). This orientation led residents, especially women, to become participants in an exchange: they would genuinely try to be of service—and they did—and out of that work achieve some measure of auctoritas which they did in unexpected ways as policy experts on the living conditions of the poor, expertise demonstrated in their activist scholarship (see first section). A third challenge was to understand and approach the neighbors across lines of enormous difference as individuals like themselves—embodied, agentic, with interests, emotions, and a capacity for ethical relations. This orientation played off against its counter view that the immigrant neighbors were somehow inferior in biological inheritance or cultural exposure and needed to be assimilated into a superior American culture. Addams argues that the poor neighbors have “come to grief only on the industrial side,” but were ethically more spontaneously kind and generous to others in trouble than the middle-class charity worker who seems to calculate her client’s general worthiness before doling out small measures of aid (Addams 1902, 13–32). Woods also notes the spontaneous hospitality of a working-class
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 79 neighborhood—“one of the most striking facts about the neighborhood is that, though it is not essentially an intimate circle, it is at bottom always a hospitable one, always ready to receive new recruits”—contrasting the working class with “the professional and commercial classes— … the … unneighborly classes … snatched … out of the neighborhood experience at an early age …” (1914 [1923], 151–2). (This positive view was not uniformly shared, especially among the secondary settlements in the American South, e.g. “Nashville Wesley House: “Neighborhoods: The people are most entirely American; many are of the unfortunate, shiftless or immoral class” (Woods and Kennedy 1911, 292).) A fourth, though limited, orientation debated making the settlement a base for sociological research. Woods sees in the settlement experiment the basis for a new, objective methodology of social science, referring to the neighborhoods as “laboratories in social science” (Woods 1893 [1923], 35–6). But many settlement workers were concerned that “settlements as sociological laboratories” might become destructive of the neighborly relationship, treating it as an ethical barrier to value-neutral research. In her introductory comments to Hull-House Maps and Papers, resident Agnes Sinclair Holbrook was firm that: Insistent probing into the lives of the poor … and the personal impertinence of many of the questions asked, would be unendurable and unpardonable were it not for the conviction that the public conscience when roused must demand better surroundings for the most … long-suffering citizens of the commonwealth. Merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of the disease, and apply, what may be its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian. (Holbrook 1895: 13–14)
Addams calls for an activist response as neighbors rather than a value-neutral response as observers: by virtue of its very locality [the settlement] has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of the social injury…. If the settlement, then, is convinced that in industrial affairs lack of organization tends to the helplessness of the isolated worker, and is a menace to the entire community, then, it is bound to pledge itself to industrial organization … And at this point the settlement enters into what is more technically known as the labor movement. (Addams 1895, 183–4)
In 1895 in Chicago, this was a radical declaration of loyalty to one’s neighbors over one’s class. The Neighbors’ Orientation to the Settlements The neighbors seem to have been a good deal less interested in the settlements than the settlements were in them. (Demographic studies show more than 20 million immigrants from Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe coming to the US between 1880 and 1920, most of them not English-speaking.) One record of neighbors’ orientation is from the settlements themselves. The Handbook reports each settlement’s description of the “Neighborhood”— “A mill and factory district. The population is Italian and Slavic” (Bound Brook, New Jersey Neighborhood Settlement House); “Factory district. The people are Bohemians, Hungarians, and Slavs” (East End Neighborhood House in Cleveland, Ohio). But many descriptions note “Americans” (or even “100 percent Americans” presumably meaning “White” or “WASP”) among the population. Addams reports that the neighbors found the Settlement and its
80 Research handbook on intersectionality class-privileged residents “strange”: “I have never tried so earnestly to set forth the gist of the Settlement movement, to make clear its reciprocity as I have to [my neighbors] … I remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was ‘the strangest thing he had met in his experience’” (1893a, 25). Eventually, the neighbors just got used to the presence of the settlement residents. As one said about Woods, “when Mr. Woods kept staying on and we got used to having him go through the streets and seeing him so often, we got to think that he belonged to us” (Woods 1929, 55, in Williams and MacLean 2016, 191). The residents also leave records of disagreements where the neighbors challenged residents’ directives and plans. But overall fewer records survive than one would expect of the neighbors’ reactions to the settlements. The major angle on this lack of neighbor responsiveness comes from scholars who have raised the question of whether the settlements were too assimilationist in their orientation to the immigrants, causing the immigrants’ withdrawal into organizations they were building among their own ethnic groups. This argument is forcefully presented in Rivka Lissak’s penetrating study Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (1989) which uses overlooked records kept by Hull-House on attendance at its activities by number, ethnicity, and gender. Looking at two communities of “new immigrants,” Russian Jews and Italians, she finds patterns of occasional use, followed by a falling away as their own ethnic enclaves developed associations. She attributes this pattern to Hull-House’s not providing sufficient recognition to Jewish culture and “criticiz[ing] the norms of the Italian family, [and giving] shelter to women who ran away from their husbands … Italian peasants regarded this policy as interference in intrafamily relations” (Lissak 1989, 102–3, in Crocker 1991, 255–6). Lissak herself provides begrudging evidence for the settlement’s potential usefulness in her critique of Addams’s account of the Averbuch Affair—an incident in Chicago history where the Chief of Police shot and killed a young Russian Jew and the Jewish community appealed to Addams for help, which she gave. Lissak sees Addams’s account depicting the Jewish community as helpless when they were just using Addams’s better position to present their case. This last example gets to what may have been the thread of the immigrant-settlement relationship. The settlement residents wanted to be of use; the immigrants used them when they could be useful. It was for the immigrants a straight exchange, giving acknowledgment of the settlement’s utility and getting help. The settlement residents were more emotionally and reputationally invested in these exchanges as they fulfilled significant career goals for the residents. This pattern of exchange—and with it the possibility of withdrawal from the exchange when it was not useful—may help explain the relationship of many of the settlements to the African American populations in or bordering on settlement neighborhoods. The relationship between the settlements and African Americans has been given a highly critical book-length treatment in Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Black Neighbors and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement (1993)—a criticism answered by other commentators, most especially Deegan (2002) who stress the extraordinary esteem in which Addams was held by Black leaders—Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Barrier Williams, Booker T. Washington, and Anna Julia Cooper. But the Settlement Movement’s record with Black neighbors was mixed at best. A significant part of that mixture may be due to the exchange relation in which the settlements existed with their White immigrant neighbors who in many instances had absorbed the intense anti-Black attitudes predominant in the US and who objected, by refusing to participate, with Black neighbors in settlement undertakings. Facing this resistance many settlements, both core and secondary, made substantial efforts to serve African American
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 81 populations; often by creating branch settlements offering the same services for African Americans (College Settlement, Philadelphia; South End, Boston; Greenwich House, New York City; Henry St., New York City; Neighborhood House, Elmira, NY). Other settlements attempted to act to promote racial integration in the society, e.g., opposing the imposition of segregation in Chicago schools; establishing settlements designed to bring Black and White together, e.g., Frederick Douglass Center, Chicago; establishing other settlements to serve Black neighborhoods (e.g., Starr Center, Philadelphia; Sumner Settlement, Chicago); and, of course, Black leaders were founding settlements of their own—like the Negro Fellowship League, Chicago—but these were typically dependent on White funding and there were many issues over control. Six basic qualities seem to privilege or disempower neighbors in relation to each other and to settlement residents: (1) language facility, (2) skilled or unskilled employment, (3) appearance that “looks American” (aka “White”), (4) how the ethnic community to which they “belonged” was itself present, and, of course, (5) gender and (6) age. Of all these, the one perhaps most significant was “language facility”—the ability or inability to acquire not simply a knowledge of English but an English spoken “without an accent” (Polacheck 1989) was a major source of status and subordination and exclusion. Proposition IV: A major difference between Intersectionality Theory and Settlement Sociology is their conceptions of power, Intersectionality Theory focusing on power as oppression and Settlement Sociology on power as agency or ability. Power in sociology is frequently conceived in terms of Max Weber’s formulation as the ability to get one’s way despite opposition, regardless of the basis on which the ability rests (paraphrased from Weber 1947, 152, translation by Parsons). Oppression is an exercise of power that is cruel and unfair, exercised by one individual or group toward another individual or group or by a system toward an individual or a group in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, violating rules of fairness. Intersectionality theory sees oppression operating through interlocking stratificational structures that in combination deny certain people the resources to resist. Settlement sociology is in many respects at its weakest in its formulation of power—if power is understood in the Weberian framework; but it shows more substance if power is understood as agency, “the ability to set and executive projects” (Lengermann and Niebrugge 1989, 3) or in a more social framing, “the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter” (Heilbrun 1988, 18); the sharing of power as agency was part of the settlement mission, as Addams conceived it, of “socializing democracy.” Addams’s early (1893) statements on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” and “The Objective Value of a Social Settlements” offer an extraordinary depiction of power as agency, eloquent in their description of the goals of the Settlement Movement and exhaustive in their account of the actual execution of projects for social organization and material improvement. An examination of these projects shows the far-reaching tentacles of intersectionality as much of settlement success rested on the class and race/ethnic position of its leaders and donors. The achievements testify to what good intentions, hard work—and money can do. And in the conduct of these projects there seems to have been a real desire to avoid oppression: settlement records show many moments of opposition from neighbors where the settlement yielded and other moments when settlement and neighborhood united in opposition to some outside force, a force often working through the process of intersectionality—as did settlement resistance, though in subtler ways.
82 Research handbook on intersectionality A brief example from Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House illustrates this complexity of power, as both agency and oppression. (As always, Addams’s analyses are marked by a rich, and often poignant, imagery of the body which evokes the intersection of class, gender, ethnicity, and age in the individual biography.) [S]ome frightened women had bidden me to come quickly to the house of an old German woman, whom two men from the county agent’s office were attempting to remove to the County Infirmary. The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small and battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly that it would have been impossible to remove her without also taking the piece of furniture. She did not weep nor moan nor indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her door stood aghast at the realization of the black dread which always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but which constantly grows more imminent and threatening as old age approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened to make all sorts of promises of support of the old woman and the county officials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy duty, left her to our ministrations. (1910, 155–6)
The reader sees the neighborhood united to save one of its own—the old German woman— from what all the neighbors dreaded as a fate only one step better than death, removal to the poorhouse. The old woman has fallen prey to the workings of intersectionality as age, gender, class leave her vulnerable; yet behind these intersections is the machinery that allows the government of Cook County through its administrative unit charged with overseeing the indigent to move in and seize the old woman’s life—because she is poor, because she, apparently, no longer can work to pay her rent, because she is, seemingly, without family (a deeply gendered relationship). From the perspective of agency, we see that the neighbors can assert some power. Addams does not step aside with the men and explain the situation to them as a negotiator for the neighborhood; she and the women work together to give assurance, affirming not only the women’s right but their duty, their ability “to take their place in discourse essential to action and have their part matter” (Heilbrun 1988, 18). This is low-level participation in terms of the effect of the decision, which touches only this one woman, but as an act of kindness it is complete and effective—the old woman is spared. But that success is affected, in part, by the summoning of Addams, whose power, whose agency, rests in a combination of intersectional factors which allows her to interact with these men—despite her gender. The advantages in summoning Addams are an intersection of her class position, which frees her from fear of old age or poverty; her achieved status as head of another institution, not state, but Hull-House; she is, presumably, known by this time, and seen as someone who uses the combined power of money, official position, ethnicity (native-born White American English-speaker) to help people out. The infirmary men do not want to be involved anyway, may know Addams by reputation, and are relieved that someone who presents as used-to-taking-charge does so. The women’s action here is one of power operating as agency and is based in the social ethic, “the identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy”—an identification based in exposure to “diversified human experience” and its “resultant sympathy” (Addams 1902 [1907], 11). In what is essentially a meditation on oppression, Addams identifies the injustice of the County rules, rules which come down on an individual as a series of intersections occur—age, gender, class.
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 83 This dread of the poorhouse … seemed to me not without some justification … To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she may take them out when she desires occupation, but that her mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce living almost beyond the limit of human endurance. The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of normal living—a symbol of all she was asked to renounce. (1910, 155–6)
What the reader sees is Addams and the neighborhood women activating their own agency to disrupt the processes of oppression they are witnessing. Proposition V: As Settlement workers approached conditions that Intersectionality Theory rightly labels “oppression,” they came over time to recognize the limits of their own powers and the powers of the settlement and to focus on the larger action of building coalitions that would rally public support and lobby for changes in the law. And it was in this work that their activist scholarship saw its fruition. The Settlement Movement’s role in beginning the transformation of US government to a more matriarchal state is partly reflected in an account Addams gives of Hull-House’s role in the smallpox epidemic of the autumn of 1893 that followed the Chicago World’s Fair: One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that there are certain types of wretchedness from which every private philanthropy shrinks and which are cared for only in those wards of the county hospital provided for … in the city’s isolation hospital for smallpox patients … This aspect of governmental responsibility was unforgettably borne in upon me during the smallpox epidemic following the World’s Fair, when one of the residents, Mrs. Kelley, as State Factory Inspector, was much concerned in discovering and destroying clothing which was being finished in houses containing unreported cases of smallpox … the special smallpox inspectors from the Board of Health … had accepted without question and as implicit in public office the obligation to carry on the dangerous and difficult undertakings for which private philanthropy is unfitted, as if the commonalty of compassion represented by the State was more comprehending than that of any individual group. (Addams 1910, 310–11)
In the period focused on in this chapter, 1885–1910, when the settlements moved to lobby for changes at the local, state, and federal level, only four US states allowed women to vote and, as discussed in Proposition II, the belief in male superiority was pervasive. Settlement women lobbying for legislative changes would have been easy to dismiss except for two power resources they brought to the table: first, the fact that they were White college-educated Settlement workers, an intersectional identity that gave them confidence and made male politicians at least pause and listen; and second, that they were armed with a large body of social science evidence that supported their arguments, the fruit of their activist scholarship. Their sociological studies gave them the power resource of knowledge—at a time when, as historian Allen Davis acknowledges, “little reliable knowledge on social problems was available” (1967, 96). The self-reporting of activities in the Handbook shows that lobbying was a major activity among all settlements, and they did it at least at the local level if not the state and federal. We offer here an example of each of the following efforts by which settlements leveraged power for social reform: sociological research, voluntary organization creation, and coalition building.
84 Research handbook on intersectionality Research on Labor Conditions The exploitation of industrial workers in the new capitalist economy was perhaps the chief area of concern in the core settlements of Chicago and the Northeastern cities, producing a voluminous research literature on child labor; the stockyards; sweatshops; women’s work in those sweatshops, in factories, in mines, in department stores, as well as service industries like domestic employment and restaurant work; and, in the heavy, dangerous work expected of working-class men. This last was the focus of Work Accidents and the Law (1910) by Crystal Eastman, a resident of the Greenwich House Settlement in New York City whose research in this case was done under the auspices of Paul Kellogg’s Pittsburgh Survey. Eastman used coroners’ reports and hospital records in Pittsburgh to study 294 cases of non-fatal and 529 fatal work-related accidents of male workers that occurred between 1907 and 1908 at heavy industrial plants like Carnegie Steel, American Tube Company, and American Steel and Wire. She toured these sites, interviewed fellow workers, supervisors, medical personnel, friends, and family. Insisting that “social investigation should not only have evidence that there is an evil but have a rough plan for remedying it” (1910, 788), she argued that blame for these accidents should be allocated equally among the workers who misgauged the risk, the employer who profited from it, and the society that accepted it, and that compensation should be paid to the victim and his dependents. Eastman’s report was a major force in the passage of Workmen’s Compensation legislation at the state level, and, in 1916, the establishment of the federal Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs. Creating Voluntary Agencies for Social Reform Florence Kelley, as a Hull-House resident and later at Henry Street, worked tirelessly on issues of exploitative labor conditions, especially child labor and sweatshops (in-home labor sites for production of goods to be collected and sold by large companies who appropriated the profit of the scandalously underpaid home workers). Kelley published articles in the American Journal of Sociology on this topic and when appointed Illinois Inspector of Factories worked with others to regulate these abuses. A long-time Marxian thinker she then came to the idea of treating the purchasing of goods and services as a major work done by women and women consumers as a new social class who could be mobilized to monitor the conditions under which the goods they purchased were made and to boycott products made under oppressive conditions. The National Consumers’ League (NCL) was chartered in 1899 with Addams and Josephine Lowell as founders; Kelley was appointed its leader, a position she held for 38 years. Through the NCL, whose influence was frequently reported on by the secondary settlements in the Movement (see Handbook, Woods and Kennedy 1911 [1970]), Kelley exposed the horrific conditions in child and sweatshop labor. During its first three decades, the NCL sought regulations to protect in-home workers, promote the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; champion minimum wage laws for women, provide the evidence used in the Brandeis Brief in Muller v. Oregon which both upheld the ten-hour day for women in 1908 and marked the first time social science data became part of a Supreme Court decision; and advocate for the creation of the federal Children’s Bureau (1912) and for federal restrictions on child labor. The Children’s Bureau under Hull-House alumna Julia Lathrop began a series of policy initiatives and reports showing the need for birth registration, infant mortality statistics, data linking poverty and prenatal care, visiting nurses, public sanitation, certified
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 85 milk stations, the education of mothers. The NCL’s work for the improvement of lives of all workers continues to the present time, reporting on their website that they helped lobby for the Consumer Protection Bureau, established at urging of Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2011 and currently being re-staffed by the Biden administration after being sidelined by then-President Trump. Forming Coalitions with African Americans for Justice Work The 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in which a White mob, and later White guerilla tactics, lynched two innocent Black men, burned Black businesses and homes and terrorized Black residents for months, clearly shocking White liberals and progressives, and moved settlement activists to demand some action to prevent further events of this type by developing social justice organizations for African Americans. On September 3, 1908, a meeting was held by three settlement residents, Henry Moskovits (Madison House), William Walling (Hull-House), and Mary White Ovington (Greenwich House). Ovington had called the meeting after reading Walling’s powerful article “Race War in the North” which described the Springfield race riot and called for a body of influential citizens, White and Black, to aid African Americans. Ovington, a prominent New York presence who had founded and administered two settlements (Greenpoint and the Lincoln Center) had devoted her career and scholarship to the cause of African American civil rights moved by speeches by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. She was a friend and colleague of W.E.B. Du Bois, attending his Atlanta University summer conventions, and researched and wrote about employment and housing conditions for African Americans in Manhattan in her best known publication, Half a Man (1911). The group issued a call for a national conference on African American civil rights and persuaded Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, to publish it. Sixty people signed the call, and the meetings among them in 1909 and 1910 led to the permanent organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Both Black and White citizens answered “The Call,” including African Americans W.E.B. Du Bois, Archibald Grimké, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett; 19 respondents were women, 13 of whom were settlement residents, including Addams, Mary E. Dreier, Kelley, Helen Marot, Mary E. McDowell, Leonora O’Reilly, Ovington, Jane Robbins, Anna Garlin Spencer, and Wald (L. Moore 2013, 481). Settlement women were active participants in a variety of other organizations including the Suffrage Movement, women’s club associations, the National Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Immigrant Protection League. Settlement women built a coalition of these players as supporters for the NAACP—Addams was a powerful player in this network (L. Moore 2013). Ovington and Du Bois would work to build the organization and administration of the NAACP for 47 years, until her retirement. The NAACP today has more than 500,000 members and has been ranked third in importance among citizen voluntary associations, and first among Black civil rights groups (L. Moore 2013).
REFERENCES Addams, Jane. 1881. Cassandra. Essays of Class of 1881, Rockford Seminary, 36–9. “News” Steam Press.
86 Research handbook on intersectionality Addams, Jane. 1893a. “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” in Philanthropy and Social Progress, edited by Henry C. Adams, 1–26. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Addams, Jane.1893b. “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” in Philanthropy and Social Progress, edited by Henry C. Adams, 27–56. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Addams, Jane. 1895. “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems of the Social Conditions, edited by Residents of Hull-House, 183–204.New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Addams, Jane. 1902/1907. Democracy and Social Ethics. New York: Macmillan. Addams, Jane. 1910. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan. Berry, Margaret E. 1986. The Settlement Movement 1886–1986: One Hundred Years on Urban Frontiers. Milwaukee, WI: United Neighborhood Centers of America. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. “Definitional Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1913/1998. “The Social Settlement: What It Is and What It Does,” in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper and Other Important Essays, Papers and Letters, edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, 216–23. Lanham, MD.: Rowman, Littlefield Publishers. Crenshaw, Kimerblé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. Crocker, Ruth. 1991. “Review Essay—the Settlements: Social Work, Culture, and Ideology in the Progressive Era,” History of Education Quarterly 31 (2): 253–60. Davis, Allen F. 1967. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press. Deegan, Mary Jo. 2002. Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago. Westport, CT: Praeger. Eastman, Crystal 1910. Work-Accidents and the Law—The Pittsburgh Survey, edited by Paul Kellogg. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Wm. Fell Press. Eastman, Crystal. 1910. “Work-Accidents and Employers’ Liability,” The Survey, September 3. Fernandis, Sarah Collins. 1905. “A Social Settlement in South Washington,” Charities 15: 64–6. Heilbrun, Carolyn. 1988. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton. Holbrook, Agnes. 1895. “Map Notes and Comments,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems of the Social Conditions, edited by Residents of Hull-House, 3–23. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Joslin, Kathryn. 2004. Jane Addams, a Writer’s Life. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Kingsley, Florence Morse. 1924. The Life of Henry Fowler Durant: Founder of Wellesley College. New York: Century Company. Kogut, Alvin. 1972. “The Settlements and Ethnicity: 1890–1914,” Social Work 17 (3): 22–31. Lasch-Quinn, Elizabeth. 1993. Black Neighbors and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 1989. “New Feminist Definitions of Power,” in Proceedings of the First Annual Women’s Policy Research Conference, 1–6. Washington, DC. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge.1998/2007. The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930. Longgrove, IL: Waveland Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2002. “Back to the Future: Settlement Sociology, 1885–1930,” The American Sociologist 33: 5–15. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2007. “Thrice-Told: Narratives of Sociology’s Relation to Social Work,” in Sociology in America, edited by Craig Calhoun, 63–114. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2014. “The Explanatory Power of Ethics: The Sociology of Jane Addams,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Formulating a Field of Study, edited by Vincent Jeffries, 99–123. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Social Settlement Movement and activist scholarship 87 Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2018. “Settlement Sociology,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems, edited by A. Javier Treviño, 185–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lengermann, Patricia M. and Gillian Niebrugge. 2022. “Jane Addams’s Use of Story in Sociological Research: ‘As No One But a Neighbor Can See’,” in Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams, edited by. Patricia M. Shields, Maurice Hamington, and Joseph Soeters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lissak, Rivka. 1989. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McCabe, Lida Rose. 1893. The American Girl at College. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Moore, Dorothea. 1897/1990. “A Day at Hull-House,” in 100 Years at Hull-House, edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis, 42–9. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Moore, Linda S. 2013. “Women and the Emergence of the NAACP,” Journal of Social Work Education 49 (3): 476–89. Ovington, Mary White. 1911. Half a Man. New York: Longmans, Greene and Co. Polacheck, Hilda Satt. 1989. I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, edited by Dena Polacheck Epstein. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Reinders, Robert C. 1982. “Toynbee Hall and the American Settlement Movement,” Social Service Review 56 (1): 39–54. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Scudder, Vida. 1890. The Relation of College Women to Social Need—a Paper presented to the Association of Collegiate Alumna, October 24, fS9o. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu .89099294480&view=1up&format=plaintext&seq=16&skin=20 (accessed April 24, 2022). Simkhovitch, Mary K. 1938. Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, edited with Introduction by Talcott Parsons, translated by A.M. Henderson. New York: The Free Press. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1970. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Fannie Barrier. 1904. “The Frederick Douglass Centre: A Question of Social Betterment and Not of Social Inequality,” Voice of the Negro 1 (12): 601–4. Williams, Fannie Barrier. 1906. “The Frederick Douglass Center [The Institutional Foundation],” The Southern Workman 35: 334–6. Williams, Joyce and Vicky MacLean. 2016. Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Years: Faith, Science, and Reform. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Woods, Robert A. 1893/1923. “Universities as Laboratories in Social Science,” in The Neighborhood in Nation-Building: The Running Comment of Thirty Years at the South End House, pp. 34–44 Cambridge, MA. The Riverside Press. Woods, Robert A. and Albert J. Kennedy, eds. 1911/1970. Handbook of Settlements. New York: Arno Press. Woods, Robert A. and Albert J. Kennedy. 1922/1990. The Settlement Horizons. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
PART II INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
Section IIa
Critical interdisciplinary studies
6. Intersectionality as an ethical commitment Sophie Withaeckx
INTRODUCTION Intersectionality has been tremendously important for the study of violence against women of color. It has been indispensable in making visible the experiences of marginalized communities, while also warning about the pernicious effects of hypervisibility and stereotyping. It has demonstrated the need for understanding how differentiating factors like gender, “race,” class, sexuality, citizenship status and disability collide in cases of violence and how these factors form inequalities and structural barriers. Furthermore, it has inspired scholars to refine their theories and tools when studying violence and has helped them to challenge the boundaries between academy and activism (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 58; 2005; Cullen, Dawson, Price, & Rowlands, 2020; Richie, 1985). Intersectionality has been pivotal in denouncing the erasures affecting women of color, when policy development, activism and representational practices privilege the single-axis framework and neglect how the experiences of marginalized groups take shape at the intersection of multiple systems of discrimination. While adopting an intersectional lens in research on gender-based violence seems the right thing to do for any researcher studying this topic, intersectionality itself has become the topic of heated debates among feminist scholars. Numerous scholars have voiced their concerns about the co-optation, depoliticization and “whitening” of intersectionality in the academy and call for the recognition of intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist thought and women of color’s intellectual work. Others see intersectionality’s open-endedness as an opportunity to flexibly apply it to a variety of social positions and identities, including those that are privileged. With both sides firmly entrenched, it seems difficult to find common ground. In this contribution, I examine how research on violence against women can inform our thinking about intersectionality, and propose to approach intersectionality as an ethical commitment, centralizing the doing and key values that we, as a feminist scholarly community, delineate as important. The issue of violence, and the way it disproportionately affects multiply marginalized communities, presents an ethical challenge to feminist scholars committed to social justice. Indeed, as a theory and critical praxis, intersectionality has historically been developed in narrow conjunction with the study of violence affecting women of color. Therefore, I argue that such studies on violence can inform us about the norms and values that have shaped intersectionality, and that these cannot be brushed aside by researchers committed to social justice. Instead, thinking about intersectionality in terms of values and normative commitments can support us in determining how and why boundaries should be imposed upon interpretations and understandings of intersectionality. In the next section of this chapter I discuss the scholarly debates that have erupted around intersectionality. Intersectionality’s “success” and its traveling to a variety of scholarly contexts have also generated anxieties, mostly about the place accorded to Black women and women of color in intersectionality’s many adaptations, and have elicited calls to restore intersectionality to its “proper” meaning and origins. In the following section I suggest that 90
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 91 an important, but yet underdeveloped ingredient in these debates is an understanding of intersectionality as an ethical commitment. An understanding of intersectionality in terms of ethics has yet not been fully pronounced. Nevertheless, values and commitments have been central in intersectional approaches from the beginning. Approaching intersectionality not merely as a theoretical tool but as a moral attitude may help to articulate what it is that we want intersectionality to do, and what commitments researchers take on when they embark on research projects they call “intersectional.” I end the chapter by discussing some examples of contemporary research on violence against women that demonstrate the urgency of this matter and the enduring importance of committing to social justice as a central and indispensable value of intersectionality.
INTERSECTIONALITY: A MATTER OF CHOOSING SIDES? Intersectionality’s institutionalization and its enthusiast uptake in feminist scholarship and activism has been accompanied with a host of contentious debates – referred to as “intersectionality wars” by Jennifer Nash – discussing issues of ownership, definition, application, and denouncing “improper circulations and devaluations” (Nash, 2018, p. 37). Two positions can be distinguished: one that defends intersectionality’s open-endedness and its applicability to a variety of social groups – no matter how marginalized or privileged they are – and a second position that expresses concerns with the perceived de-politicization of intersectionality and its separation from its roots in Black feminist thought. When Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her landmark publications “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (Crenshaw, 1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (Crenshaw, 1991), her main concerns were the invisibility of women of color, their erasure in feminist and antiracist activism, the marginalization of the specific forms of discrimination that affected them but remained unrecognized. Her explicit aim then was to “demarginalize” Black women, to alert scholarship, policy-making and activism to the importance of fully including Black women, in all their complexity, as a precondition for fulfilled social justice. Crenshaw thereby aligned herself in a long-standing tradition of Black women’s scholarship developing the same aims (Collins, 2000). She did not present intersectionality as a “grand” totalizing theory (Crenshaw, 2011, p. 232) but as a theoretical lens with which to examine how women of color became invisible in single-axis frameworks. This refusal to narrowly delineate intersectionality makes it understood in multiple ways: as a political and methodological tool, a theory, a heuristic device or all at once (Lewis, 2013, p. 883). For numerous scholars, this ”multiplicity” has been experienced as “confusing,” and some set out to resolve the absences, contradictions and incoherencies they spotted by exposing “the assumptions that underpin intersectionality” (Nash, 2008, p. 4), developing it methodologically or theoretically (McCall, 2005). A first position in the debate therefore holds that intersectionality’s “open-endedness” implies that it does not need to be tied to a particular social group or topic but that it can be used to study a variety of social positions and identities. For Kathy Davis (2008), this open-endedness is precisely the reason for intersectionality’s tremendous success in feminist circles: intersectionality responded to the need among feminist scholars to engage with “difference.” At the same time, it succeeded in averting the specter of divisiveness that discussions on “difference” can invoke in feminism by offering a unifying “platform for feminist theory
92 Research handbook on intersectionality as a shared enterprise” in which “any social practice, any individual or group experience, any structural arrangement, and any cultural configuration can become a topic of analysis” (Davis, 2008, p. 72). Intersectionality therefore does not have to be solely about Black women or women of color, and does not necessarily need to “put race and racism on the agenda” (Davis, 2020, p. 121). Indeed, for some scholars, the excessive focus on women of color is itself problematic. For Puar, an exclusive focus on women of color produces those women as Others “who must invariably be shown to be resistant, subversive, or articulating a grievance” (Puar, 2012, p. 52) and Nash notes how intersectionality “has come to equate black women’s lived experiences with marginalization,” thereby neglecting “the heterogeneity of ‘black woman’ as a category” (Nash, 2011, p. 447). They argue that an expanded version of intersectionality, detached from its original application to women of color’s experiences, would make it a more versatile tool, able to offer a broad framework for analysing the multiplicities of all identities and configurations of power (Davis, 2020, p. 119) and inclusive of all types of positionalities, both disadvantaged and privileged. Calls to return to intersectionality’s “true” meaning and origins – an attitude described by Nash as “originalism” (Nash, 2016) – can become perceived as an inappropriate protectionism, stifling the generative force of criticism and preventing the “natural” reworkings of theories through common scholarly discussions and debates. The applicability to a variety of social contexts and groups can be seen as a welcome example of how theory formulated “in the margins” can successfully move to the center (Lewis, 2013, p. 871). However, there are also concerns with how far intersectionality can be stretched, before it loses all of its distinctiveness and, paradoxically, reproduces the same kinds of erasures of women of color’s voices that intersectionality explicitly aimed to denounce (Jibrin & Salem, 2015). The other position in the debate therefore expresses a number of concerns about how the interpretation of intersectionality has stretched in feminist scholarship (Jibrin & Salem, 2015) to the extent that its original aims and content are not recognizable anymore. Firstly, there are concerns that intersectionality has been detached from its roots in women of color’s activist and theoretical work, resulting in the performance of exactly those kinds of erasures that intersectionality aimed to address. Efforts to redefine intersectionality as detachable from its Black feminist origins, and to provide “improved” versions that do not need analyses of racism, are seen as an expression of an unwillingness or even inability, particularly among feminist scholars, to accept the role of racism in shaping their own societies and positionality (Tomlinson, 2013, p. 257). This results in the re-marginalization of women of color, and the deployment of their theories to centralize once again white women’s experiences, under the guise of “universalization” (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 7; Jordan-Zachery, 2013, p. 102). A second concern relates to the epistemological project that is ascribed to intersectionality and which make intersectionality incompatible with some methodological stances. For Alexander-Floyd, intersectionality presented “implicit and explicit epistemological challenges” to dominant ways of doing research (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 14). Black feminist scholarship has traditionally emphasized the importance of experience and the notions of “subjugated knowledge” and “standpoint theory.” Such a stance revalued the knowledge produced by oppressed groups, traditionally denied the status of “real” knowledge in dominant perspectives, but is “less likely than the specialized knowledge produced by dominant groups to deny the connection between ideas and the vested interests of their creators” (Collins, 1990, p. 234). Efforts to apply intersectionality in positivist, quantitative research can then be seen as an attempt to conform “intersectionality to the positivist dictates of traditional disciplines”’ (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 14). Moreover, statements that declare the incompleteness,
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 93 open-endedness and ambiguity of intersectionality can be seen as a dismissal of the alternative epistemologies of women of color, as being “naïve or nonempirical” (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 17) or expressing women of color’s inability to formulate “proper” knowledge (Lewis, 2013, p. 886). Lastly, these scholars point to how intersectionality has been depleted of its critical potential in the neoliberal academy. Intersectionality’s enthusiast reception in the academy should be met with suspicion: just as happened with other initially subversive concepts like “diversity” and “decolonization,” intersectionality “has been commodified and colonized for neoliberal regimes” (Bilge, 2013, p. 407). Intersectionality’s institutionalization in the academy has also implied its reification, turning itself into a disciplinary regime and “as the paradigmatic frame through which women’s lives are understood and theorized” (Puar, 2012, p. 52), blocking other possible approaches to examine identity and difference. Its lingering association with critical thought invests it with moral value, allowing scholars to associate themselves with the “right” kind of theory merely by invoking the term. Such “ornamental intersectionality” (Bilge, 2013, p. 408) has become a substitute “for intersectional analysis itself” (Puar, 2012, p. 53). Intersectionality, once defined as a “synergistic relationship between critical analysis and critical praxis” (Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 49) has been reduced “to an overly contemplative musing” (Bilge, 2013, p. 411), where the production of abstract theoretical reflection about what intersectionality should be like and how it can be improved have replaced the doing of intersectionality. Hence, changing and subverting the social order has slipped from the intersectional agenda, and marginalized groups are once more relegated to the margins and fixed in their position on the peripheries of knowledge production. The debates surrounding intersectionality have not settled yet, and maybe they never will. Both positions in the debate seem firmly entrenched, with one side aiming for definitional closure and an allegiance to intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist thought, while the other side prefers to use intersectionality to inform the study of differences and positionalities in a way that can accommodate a variety of epistemological, methodological, and even political stances. Any scholar claiming to do “intersectional” work seems called upon to “choose sides” and to express allegiance to one final “truth” about intersectionality. These disputes have been compared to a struggle over the “ownership” of intersectionality: Bilge accused “disciplinary feminism” of “laying claims of ownership of intersectionality” (Bilge, 2013, p. 415), while Kathy Davis (2020) accuses feminists who want to reconnect intersectionality with its Black feminist origins of exactly the same. Indeed, neither side seems able to escape the tendency of claiming “ownership” and thereby exercising a form of disciplinary power. While both sides of the debate enumerate arguments and points that merit reflection, my concern with them is that they also divert attention away from the enduring impact of violence and oppression that continue to mark the everyday experiences of marginalized groups. What are researchers to do, when faced with such vigorous debates and critically engaging with the question of whether their research can be “rightfully” qualified as intersectional? In the following section, I suggest that rather than taking sides, what matters in feminist research is to consider the emancipatory aims that have been central to feminism and therefore to privilege what we want our research to do. However, I take as my starting point that any “coherently feminist” project requires “the incorporation of voices of the margins” as a necessary precondition for the general aim to empower all women (Ciurria, 2020, pp. 3–4). Such a stance does require certain guiding principles. In the following section, I argue that intersectionality embodies certain fundamental values that were significantly informed by the study of violence
94 Research handbook on intersectionality against women. Considering intersectionality as an ethical commitment implies that these values are accepted as essential to intersectionality, and have implications for how we do research.
THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE Thinking about the ethics of intersectionality has several advantages: it allows us to refocus the debate on the aims and the doing of intersectionality, rather than to dwell in the theoretical and abstract “musings” that Bilge deplored (Bilge, 2013). Formulating an intersectional ethics implies delineating central values, from which normative commitments flow. This would result in the imposition of certain boundaries, preventing intersectionality from becoming a theory about everything, while simultaneously maintaining a certain open-endedness in terms of methods, perspectives and topics to be studied. This re-centers the discussion from one about “ownership” and finding out “the truth” about intersectionality to one about responsibility and accountability (Rice, Harrison, & Friedman, 2019, p. 416). Reconceptualizing intersectionality as an ethical commitment therefore ties it unambiguously to questions about how “we” as a feminist scholarly community want to do “good” and what this implies for the way we do research. In what follows, I present a short discussion of intersectionality’s engagement with violence to extract the main problems that spurred intersectional research, and how this translated into values and commitments which became central to intersectionality. I first start by describing those problems that historically have caused concern for feminist scholars and activists of color, and whose analysis eventually led to the development of intersectional thought. I continue by outlining the main values – social and epistemic justice – driving intersectional scholarship, and how this commits researchers to an ethics of responsibility and accountability. The Problem of Invisibility The development of intersectionality as a theory, a critical praxis, and a lens to analyse how women of color become erased in policy-making has been intricately intertwined with the history of studying and understanding violence against women of color. Early works that have been credited as predecessors of intersectional theorizing were profoundly informed by experiences of violence. Sojourner Truth’s speech itself is a testimony of violence: the violence of slavery and the colonial system, which could represent Black women as “not-women,” as outside the system of gender and hence as “bestial,” not-fully-human (Lugones, 2010, p. 743). The works of 19th-century Afro-American writers and activists, like Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper, also denounced the epistemic violence, the systematic silencing and erasing of Black women’s voices, “the suppression of black women’s ideas and their denial of a narrative life in the historical and cultural record other than as silences or ellipses” (May, 2014, p. 97). Such violence was reproduced in the incipient Western first-wave feminist movement, whose notion of “woman” solely accommodated the experiences of a particular type of “woman”: white, upper-class, cisgender, depicted as “pure” and fragile, and complicit in the exploitation of those women unlike itself. It became reproduced in the identity-based activist movements and policies that emerged in the 1960s, where intragroup differences were ignored, resulting
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 95 in the elision of those experiences shaped by the simultaneous interaction of multiple systems of discrimination (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). Even though violence against women became one of the central issues in the second-wave feminist movement, the issue of domestic violence against women of color remained for a long time unaddressed in academic research. The feminist movement increasingly succeeded in getting violence against women recognized as a matter of urgency and a topic of societal, political and academic interest, which resulted in a burgeoning theorization of previously ignored issues like rape, sexual violence, sexual harassment, domestic violence and marital rape (Brownmiller, 1975; Dworkin, 1981; MacKinnon, 1979). However, this field became quickly dominated by feminists who were mostly white and middle class, and hence a hegemonic understanding of violence against women started to dominate the field, eclipsing other perspectives produced by minoritized women (Rodriguez Martinez, 2011, p. 148). By explaining violence solely in terms of patriarchal oppression and (biological) gender differences, these hegemonic feminist perspectives constructed violence as an expression of universal male oppression, casting (white) women in the position of victims and ignoring other markers of identification that might bear on experiences with violence. Such accounts emphasized the commonality of experiences, thereby failing to address the experiences of women deviating from the implicit white middle-class norm (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005, p. 41). However, alternative accounts were also around since the 1970s, and could be found in the writings of exactly such “deviating” women: authors like bell hooks (1981), Barbara Smith (Hull et al. 1982), Angela Davis (1981) and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981) pointed to the wider frameworks of racist segregation and oppression, creating multiple layers of violence in which sexism and violence in Black, Chicano and other minority communities should be understood. Subsequent studies on violence against women of color therefore already exhibited the concern with complexity that would become a hallmark of intersectionality. Richie (1985), for example, pointed out the specific barriers she faced when addressing domestic violence in Black communities: domestic violence was understood solely as a corollary of the racist oppression targeting Black men; Black women were exhorted to put up with their men’s violence in order to uphold the harmony of the already threatened Black family; and the notion of the “strong Black woman” was invoked to normalize the idea of Black women as “willing and able to accept beating in support of her man” (Richie, 1985, p. 42). But she also denounced the “simultaneous sexual and racial oppression” faced by Black communities, as well as the raging homophobia within Black communities that erased the contributions of lesbian Black women to the struggle for racial liberation (Richie, 1985, p. 43). Problems of “voice” and invisibility therefore were seen not only to affect minority communities within identity-based movements, but also those members within communities where certain markers of identity (male, heterosexual) became privileged and presented as the only legible experience. Moreover, such analyses pointed out the problem of racist and culturalist representations of women of color in existing scholarship, policy development and activism (Mohanty, 1988). Alternative Epistemologies The invisibilities suffered by women of color victimized by domestic violence provided an insightful lens to see exactly how approaches based on simplified, monolithic notions of identity failed to address the complexity in women of color’s lives. But it was not just that women
96 Research handbook on intersectionality of color’s own voices were needed to provide recognition and analysis of their situation; the inclusion of marginalized voices became one of the main theoretical tenets of intersectionality, and thereby inspired a profound epistemological critique on dominant ways of knowledge production. Intersectionality thereby shared critiques simultaneously formulated from other disciplinary perspectives: notions like “subjugated knowledge” and the need for multiple perspectives were also formulated by (white) feminist, postcolonial and queer theorists, and arose from regions as diverse as the UK, West Africa and the Middle East (Hancock, 2016, p. 31). In these approaches, similar critiques were voiced against dominant ways of doing research and its reliance upon the Cartesian body/mind distinction. On this view, proper knowledge is produced by an assumedly neutral, disembodied researcher – a “God’s eye view” producing “a view from nowhere” pitted against its embodied and particular object of knowledge (Grosfoguel, 2013, p. 75). This “view from nowhere” and its understanding of “objectivity” recommends that researchers disengage from social values and interests (Harding, 2015, p. 1). It has also qualified women and non-Westerners as quintessential objects and not subjects of knowledge, since the embodiment, subjectivity, relationality and irrationality ascribed to them disqualify them from credibility and voice in academic settings (Mbembe, 2016; Mills, 1997; Wynter, 2004). Against such assumptions, intersectionality has denounced the unidimensional view that arises when hegemonic ways of knowledge production remain unchallenged. Studying inequality and power is simply not possible without examining the experiences of those most subjugated and oppressed, since it is only by including their experiences that we can gain a complete understanding of how systems of oppression work. As Romero argues, marginalized groups take the position of the “canary in the coalmine” for the diagnostic function they carry out. They are the first to exhibit difficulties arising from structural problems, and allow us to understand how systems of power and privilege become organized and naturalized (Romero, 2018). The problem of single-axis-frameworks as the basis for feminist and antiracist movement building became more explicitly theorized in the 1970s and 1980s, in the activist and intellectual work of women of color, not only in the US but in a variety of contexts, where other discriminating practices and markers of differentiation – like caste, religion, references to “tradition,” colonial and neocolonial oppression – also become integrated in the analysis (hooks, 1981; Hull, Bell-Scott, & Smith, 1982; Mohanty, 1988; Thiam, 1978). It was Crenshaw’s (1991) article “Mapping the Margins” that explicitly connected an in-depth analysis of violence against women to the notion of intersectionality. In “Mapping the Margins,” Crenshaw analyses violence as a case to demonstrate the insufficiency of approaches that fail to consider how racism and sexism intersect in the lives of women of color affected by violence. Monolithic, single-axis approaches, derived from identity politics, conceptualize one’s identity as a woman or person of color as “an either-or opposition,” thereby relegating the identity of women of color “to a location that resists telling” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). As both antiracist and feminist discourses are shaped to respond to only one or the other of these identity markers (either gender or race), women of color “are marginalized within both” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1244). She also indicated that race and gender are definitely not the only relevant frameworks to consider when explaining violence against women; her main point was “the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1245). In cases describing the plight of women whose immigrant status was dependent upon their abusive husband’s residence status, she emphasized how race and class converge with a host of preexisting vulnerabilities arising from
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 97 culture, class, language proficiency, to the extent that none of these can be seen as primary and separable from other ones (Crenshaw, 2005). These analyses then informed the important reconceptualization of the notion of “identity” itself. Such observations alerted researchers to the importance of considering such complexities when engaging with the study of violence against women. But they also raise questions about researchers’ responsibility in challenging their own assumptions and taking up responsibility in addressing violence.
COMMITTING TO JUSTICE: IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON VIOLENCE Intersectionality’s historical engagement with violence demonstrates how problems of invisibility and erasure of marginalized perspectives led to the challenging of dominant, objectifying epistemologies and of single-axis, reductionist understandings of violence. What intersectionality aimed to do then was make visible such subjugated voices, and re-center their perspectives to denounce systems of oppressions and contribute to emancipatory change and more just societies. What is it then that those researchers commit themselves to when labeling themselves and their research intersectional? Reconceptualizing intersectionality in terms of the ethical commitments and moral imperatives re-centers the discussion from one about “ownership” and finding out “the truth” about intersectionality to one about responsibility and accountability (Rice et al., 2019, p. 416). The concept of commitment is an important one here, as it guides us toward the importance of “doing.” For Ahmed “to make a commitment is to pledge to do something” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 114). It refers to “a state of being bound to a course of action or to another person or persons” (2012, 114). Thinking of intersectionality as a commitment also emphasizes the relationality of intersectionality: it implies a connectivity to others and the validation by others of what we are doing. In what follows, I outline the central values that emerge from intersectional scholarship and discuss how these can be operationalized in research on violence. While I enumerate some core principles and values of intersectionality, it must be clear that it will never be possible to lay out a neat manual prescribing “how to do intersectional research.” Indeed, committing to intersectionality also implies committing to flexibility and open-endedness, and being mindful to not repeat a form of “academic imperialism” by universalizing and imposing on others categories developed in certain locations and by certain communities – whether marginalized or not (Dhawan & Castro Varela, 2016). Every critical and emancipatory theory should be mindful of its politics of location and “be alert to the spatial and temporal coordinates that suffuse all theorizing” (Menon, 2015, 37). Here I illustrate these core values with examples from research on South Asian1 communities in the US and the UK. Despite the burgeoning research on violence against women since the 1970s, these communities remained invisible in research as late as the 1990s, when pioneering researchers like Abraham and Dasgupta in the US and later Gill in the UK developed an interest in them. I draw on their research to illustrate how an intersectional lens can reveal additional and specific vulnerabilities. It also demonstrates how intersectional commitments demand a continuing alertness and adaptability to find those methods and approaches that are most suitable to the particularity of the marginalized communities under study.
98 Research handbook on intersectionality A Commitment to Social Justice What clearly arises from intersectionality’s engagement with the issue of violence against women is the commitment to social justice. With its roots in “social justice research and struggle,” intersectionality can be understood as “an activist project” providing the “analytical tools for framing social justice issues” in order to expose how social exclusion and privileging work in a variety of social positions (Romero, 2018). As Rice et al. formulate it, the defining characteristic of intersectionality lies not in a particular content, methodology or the study of a particular social group but in “its particular purpose: justice” (Rice et al., 2019, p. 415). This commitment for social justice has largely consisted in “making women of color in general, but the intersectionally disadvantaged in particular, a visible and legible part of public discourse with an eye toward getting their policy needs met” (Hancock, 2016, p. 10). As described above, this project for visibility has been applied for a variety of Black women and women of color in Western countries since the 1970s. However, some marginalized groups seemed to grapple with specific conditions compounding such invisibilities and erasures, delaying interventions even more. This has longtime been the case for South Asian immigrant communities in the US. In the 1990s, Abraham noticed that, despite the considerable scholarship on domestic violence in the US, there was a general absence of research on its prevalence among ethnic minorities (Abraham, 2015, p. 93). The long-lasting silence surrounding South Asian communities seemed to arise from specific particularities unique to them. One of these is the myth of the “model minority” attached to South Asian immigrants: they were depicted as “economically successful, hardworking, and family-oriented,” distinguishing them sharply from more negatively perceived minorities like Afro-Americans (Abraham, 2005, p. 430; Sahota, 2016, p. 239).2 Abraham describes how the desire to uphold this image among segments of the Indian community led to the denial of social problems like domestic violence, poverty or substance abuse “as none of these fit into the concept of the model minority” (Abraham, 2005, p. 430). But there were also external factors which colluded in the erasure of South Asian immigrant communities, like researchers’ “unfamiliarity with the culture, the community’s small sized and communication needs” which “discouraged non-South Asian researchers from taking an interest in the group” (Dasgupta, 2000, p. 176). Despite this erasure in policy-making and research, researchers were quick to notice the pivotal importance of community organizations who had been addressing social problems and challenging the model minority myth since the 1980s (Abraham, 2005, p. 430). Motivated both by their exclusion in the mainstream women’s movement and their frustrations with the “model minority myth” (Sahota, 2016, p. 237), activists within these movements became concerned with problems of domestic violence and have considerably contributed to providing “more comprehensive ways of addressing the problem of violence against women” (Abraham, 2000b, p. 6). Their activism has hugely informed theorizing on violence in South Asian communities but was itself also affected by erasures in “organizational or social movement literature” that has neglected their pivotal role (2000b, 6). Committing to social justice then means that researchers should be able to make visible not only the social problems affecting communities, but also the efforts undertaken by the communities themselves to denounce, analyse and address them.
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 99 Epistemic Justice This focus of understanding as the cornerstone of intersectionality’s social justice project also makes intersectionality into an epistemological practice, undergirded by a particular ontological framework (Hancock, 2016, p. 32). Restoring marginalized groups’ voices and bringing them “from the margin to the center” has been one of the main tenets of feminist and women of color theorizing (hooks, 1984). However, as Hancock notes, intersectionality goes a step further than “a margin-center understanding of power” (Hancock, 2016, p. 58). Merely moving certain identities to the center still leaves intact the assumption that one category of identification – whether race or class or gender – should prevail or may feed into additive approaches, where different forms of discrimination are seen as adding up to each other rather than interacting (Hancock, 2016, p. 61). Intersectionality rejects the idea that categories of identity can co-exist as “disaggregated identities” in favor of an understanding of such identities as always interconnected and mutually constructed. This implies, for example, that no category can take ontological primacy (Hancock, 2016, p. 58) and that systems of discrimination need to be addressed collectively and simultaneously. In research among South Asian communities, a concern with epistemic justice is visible from the way researchers emphasize the need to reconceptualize key concepts that are often invoked to explain violence in these groups. One of these is the notion of “culture” that has served ambiguous purposes. The importance of cultural differences has been singled out as an aspect that should be attended to when addressing violence in communities like the South Asian one. Especially the notion of “honor” has been considered important to explain dynamics of silencing among victims, families and wider communities. Honor and shame are considered important cultural precepts in these communities, resulting in patterns of violence that may be significantly different than those in other communities. Honor refers to a value system that attaches women’s moral and sexual behavior to the social and moral status of her family and community, who can become shamed when women breach the codes of honor. This can occur by “a variety of unacceptable behaviors, such as relationships with persons of different faiths, relationships not sanctioned by the kin network, or pre-marital sex” (Gill, 2006, p. 2). So-called “honor-based violence” (HBV) is motivated by a desire to preserve family or community honor and refers to a variety of forms of violence mostly perpetrated by male relatives against females seen as transgressing codes of honor. The moral obligations related to honor make it into “the glue that binds the victim to obligatory silence” since victims are reluctant to speak out about violence so as not to increase the “stain” of dishonor that their testimonies about violence – and their own “dishonorable” behavior – may provoke (Gill, 2004, p. 474). Downplaying the moral importance attached to honor can have lethal consequences: when victims’ stories are not taken seriously by police or social services, or insights into extended family dynamics are missing, their stories become illegible and they may be sent back to their families, sometimes with fatal consequences. But while the role of culture cannot be underestimated, researchers have also become alerted to tendencies to “culturalize” such experiences of violence by stereotypically representing perpetrators as driven by their patriarchal and backwards “culture” and representing women as passive victims needing to be saved by the “modern,” liberal and assumedly non-sexist Western states in which they found themselves (Abu-Lughod, 2011). Against such essentializing and racist representations, researchers have reconceptualized “culture” and
100 Research handbook on intersectionality notions like “honor” by arguing these should more appropriately be situated in a continuum of forms of violence against women because the aim of such violence is not restoring “honor” but upholding patriarchal oppression (Gill, Begikhani, & Hague, 2012, p. 76). Moreover, they point to the concrete political and socio-economic contexts in which such notions become shaped and transformed in immigrant communities. The phenomenon of forced marriages in the UK, for example, should not be understood as an expression of static traditions. It turned out to be motivated more by restrictive immigration policies that instigated parents to force their children into marriages with relatives abroad (Anitha & Gill, 2009). Such analyses of violence reinsert gender into the analysis and emphasize how sexism is intricately interwoven with patterns of racism and exclusions based on citizenship status, religion and class that equally affect these communities. As Ethics of Responsibility and Accountability Understanding intersectionality as a dialogic and interpretive framework has implications for the way researchers do research and situate themselves in relation to the individuals and communities they study. From her examination of Black feminist thought, Collins (2000) distilled key elements of a distinctive Black feminist epistemology which illustrates well the implications for researchers when the boundaries between subject/object become challenged. A first element is the importance of experiential knowledge and wisdom arising from the everyday know-how to survive. These have proven more useful for Black women’s survival than formal education and serve as the “main criterion for credibility” for those who want to make claims (Collins, 2000, p. 257). A second element is the use of dialogue and the assumption of connectedness rather than separation as “an essential component of the knowledge validation process” (Collins, 2000, p. 260). Knowledge claims are “developed through dialogues with other members of a community” and “connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of the knowledge validation process” (Collins, 2000, p. 260). Thirdly and fourthly, Collins outlines an ethics of caring and of personal accountability. Such an ethic takes personal expressiveness, emotions and empathy as central to the knowledge validation process. Emotions are valued since they express that “a speaker believes in the validity of an argument” and empathy in particular is important for anyone to acquire increased understanding of others’ positions (Collins, 2000, pp. 263–264). Personal accountability implies that people can be held accountable for their knowledge claims and take full responsibility for the ideas they express. On this view, a direct connection is made between individual moral character and the knowledge claims one makes (Collins, 2000, p. 265). Incoherencies between these different levels of character, belief, knowledge claims and actions would also undermine one’s credibility; a view which thus opposes the ideal of the disembodied, disengaged researcher of positivist research traditions. Such principles are also recognizable in the subjugated knowledge cultivated by other marginalized groups. In the feminist ethics of care, attentiveness and responsibility have been outlined as central moral values that should guide our social relationship. Attentiveness refers to the importance of recognizing the needs of those around us and lies at the origin of any meaningful relation of care. Responsibility implies the recognition that something we did or did not do has contributed to a need for care, which we must then assume (Tronto, 1993). A postcolonial feminist ethics adds to that “the explicit recognition of the asymmetries of relationships” as shaped in unequal colonial and postcolonial encounters, and a recognition of
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 101 such inequalities through attentive listening and the cultivation of trust and empathy (Mooten, 2014, p. 1). From the research literature on violence against women in South Asian communities, such features are recognizable in researchers’ will to combine different roles when embarking on research because they are not just distant observers but actively team up with community associations and activists to make research into a common and shared endeavor. Abraham describes how throughout her career, she has combined the roles of scholar, public speaker, domestic violence expert and teacher (Abraham, 2015, p. 95). This combination of writing, speaking publicly, teaching, facilitating workshops, testifying in courts and consulting has allowed her to not only contribute to the discourse on domestic violence, but also to invest concretely in the struggle to end violence against women. Such an active stance also requires attention to appropriate research methods. While more positivist and objectifying methods of data collection are not always completely ruled out by intersectional researchers, there is a marked preference for qualitative research methods since they are deemed more appropriate to capture the variety and intensity of experiences. Methods like in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation are more in line with the interpretive and dialogic epistemological framework that intersectionality fosters. Information gathered in this way “is not assumed to be independent of the time, place, and people in that site” but addresses specific situations “instead of generalizing across cases and contexts” (Abraham & Purkayastha, 2012, p. 126). Moreover, a dialogic method implies that the research situation becomes “an arena for dialogue and conversation” (Begikhani, Gill, & Hague, 2012, p. 80). In such a situation, the interviewee is not merely supplying data for the disembodied interviewer to analyse: both parties contribute to the process of constructing meaning, and both can “bring their own feelings, personality, interests, and experiences to the interview situation” (Gill et al., 2012, p. 79). For Abraham and Purkayastha, action-oriented research has proven the most suitable approach for researchers who aim to “challenge traditional restrictions on knowledge construction, and bridge research and activism” (Abraham & Purkayastha, 2012, p. 125). Action-oriented research encompasses a variety of research approaches3 that have in common the will to engage in collaborative community building and aim to bring about social transformation. Abraham’s pioneering research has not only revealed the pivotal role of South Asian Women’s Associations (SAWOs) in the US in addressing marital violence, but also how indispensable it is for researchers to work with such partners when faced with persistent dynamics of silencing (Abraham, 2000b). Another pioneering researcher, Shamita Das Dasgupta, being herself the cofounder of the SAWO Manavi, has developed her research while also being an insider to such movements and can thus proudly describe herself as “a participant/observer of the growing advocacy movement and a chronicler of it within the South Asian community” (Dasgupta, 2000, p. 173). The sensitivity of the topic and the silence surrounding it can make the process of data collection particularly difficult (Abraham, 2000a, p. 223). Building relationships of trust, both with associations supporting victims and victims themselves, is therefore indispensable for researchers, but requires patience, investments in terms of time and emotional commitment, and often more long-standing activist engagement to express the values of responsibility and take-up care implied by intersectional ethics. Abraham concludes that for her “as a sociologist, it is important to talk the talk and walk the walk!” (Abraham, 2015, p. 97). For any researcher committed to intersectionality, this is indeed an exhortation
102 Research handbook on intersectionality that should be taken to heart and expresses precisely the body of values and normative engagements encapsulated by intersectionality.
CONCLUSION: THE ENDURING URGENCY OF INTERSECTIONALITY In this chapter, I have examined how the issue on violence against women has been fundamental for the development of intersectionality. I have traced the heated scholarly debates surrounding intersectionality in which two positions have become pitted against each other: one favoring intersectionality’s application to a variety of social groups, whether marginalized or privileged, regardless of intersectionality’s roots in women of color’s theorizing; the other deploring the perceived de-politicization of intersectionality and prioritizing Black women and women of color as intersectionality’s privileged subjects. Rather than investing in fruitless debates about who “owns” intersectionality, I have proposed to approach intersectionality as an ethical commitment, centralizing the doing and key values that we, as a feminist scholarly community, delineate as important. The issue of violence, and the way it disproportionately affects multiply marginalized communities, continues to present ethical challenges to feminist scholars who are, by definition, committed to social and epistemic justice and the realization of a more just society. These commitments remind us of the responsibilities we as researchers have. Moreover, if we take seriously the essential interpretive and dialogic character of intersectional knowledge production, this means that we cannot just brush aside these values. Instead, thinking about intersectionality in terms of values and normative commitments can support us in determining how and why boundaries should be imposed upon interpretations and understandings of intersectionality. We might indeed concede that intersectionality’s open-endedness can open avenues for a broad application, divorced from its roots in Black and women of color’s feminist thought. But our commitment to justice and the urgency of the social problems affecting marginalized communities today do justify a more restricted understanding of intersectionality. To remind us of this urgency, we might just consult some contemporary intersectional research publications on violence against women as the problems outlined in such publications clearly indicate which problems (still) occur, what the kind of values still associated with intersectionality are and what kinds of normative commitments can be deduced from that.4 From a short review of 25 recent publications, a first thing I noticed is that all display the same sense of urgency that Crenshaw voiced in “Mapping the Margins.” Leung and Williams remark how “[t]hirty years after Crenshaw (1989) first introduced the concept of intersectionality, the world discovered it still had a lot more to learn” (Leung & Williams, 2019, p. 367). Another publication deplores how “despite years of evidence upon which to assess violence against women, we found that dominant frames continue to homogenize women’s experiences and embrace the centrality of law enforcement in protecting survivors, with only superficial consideration of the effects of intersecting forms of marginalization” (Singh & Bullock, 2020, p. 352). Without exception, the studies under consideration describe how laws, service provision and intervention are still homogenizing, modeled upon the experiences of privileged groups and “idealized” victims, while posing as “neutral or even ‘victim-friendly’ policies and procedures” (Durfee, 2021, p. 640). Multiply marginalized groups continue to “face additional issues and pressures that compound their risks of DV [domestic violence]” (Day & Gill, 2020,
Intersectionality as an ethical commitment 103 p. 831). McCauley et al. (2019, p. 1916) have to conclude that “[w]e have not yet achieved justice for sexual violence survivors, particularly for women of color and members of other marginalized communities.” Secondly, the intersectional lens deployed by contemporary researchers reveals new kinds of vulnerabilities: while the marginalization of women of color remains constant (Cantalupo, 2019; Waller, Harris, & Quinn, 2021), intersectionality has allowed researchers to identify other groups exhibiting similar vulnerabilities, like transgender and gender non-conforming groups (TGNC), particularly of color (Lippy, Jumarali, Nnawulezi, Williams, & Burk, 2020), indigenous communities (Fotheringham, Wells, & Goulet, 2021), transnationally married women (Anitha, 2019), undocumented immigrants (Day & Gill, 2020), older people and people with disabilities (Cullen et al., 2020). The increased attention given by researchers to such groups obviously results from a more refined application of the intersectional lens, which gives due regard to those “differences that matter in a given situation” (Rice et al., 2019, p. 416) and from a heightened awareness concerning the vulnerability of sexual minorities and TGNC communities. But it obviously also arises from the specific contemporary socio-political contexts we find ourselves in. Donley and Johnson (2021) aptly point out the pernicious impact of two current pandemics, “white supremacist racism and COVID-19” which “affect Black, indigenous and communities of color more negatively than others in a variety of ways” (Donley & Johnson, 2021, p. 1). Moreover, both sides of the Atlantic have seen a rise in outwardly racist immigration policies and the increasing criminalization and harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants (Day & Gill, 2020, p. 831). Thirdly, it is remarkable how none of the studies report real difficulties in “doing” intersectionality or struggle with the ambiguities that are reported elsewhere as potential weaknesses. All studies remain remarkably close to Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality, refer to her work to explain their understanding of intersectionality, and while some do present some outlines for operationalizing intersectional analysis, most seem able to apply intersectionality in a straightforward way. If anything, intersectionality seems not to have lost its potential to detect and critically interrogate the “one-size-fits-all” approaches that still seem widely applied in policy and practice. The need to return and recycle the basic tenets of intersectionality, the importance of centralizing the experiences of marginalized communities, the self-evidence with which these researchers return to the “basics” of intersectionality, seem therefore not an expression of some misplaced “originalism.” It rather testifies of a world that seems unwilling to “hear” intersectionality’s message, of societies which tend to render intersectionality unrecognizable, unhearable and illogical (May, 2014, p. 105). In terms of values and normative commitments, such studies express a strong concern with the value of social justice and authors often express the hope that their work can provide an occasion for learning and will contribute to change. For example, Durfee expresses “hope of finding better solutions and support services for survivors” (Durfee, 2021, p. 659), Day and Gill hope to contribute to the establishment of “an intersectional approach to safety that offers genuine empowerment to end all forms of oppression and violence against all survivors” (Day & Gill, 2020, p. 847). But many contributions express a sense that our societies and services have failed those most vulnerable to violence. Values like anti-oppression, self-reflection, transformative and restorative justice, accountability and healing are mentioned as guiding these researchers in their efforts (Kulkarni, 2021; Lippy et al., 2020; McCauley et al., 2019). Intersectionality’s appeal lies in its openness and flexibility and can in an ideal world be used as a flexible tool, open for all to use, applicable to a variety of social groups. In theory,
104 Research handbook on intersectionality intersectionality does not have to be about Black women or women of color only. It should be about “the differences that matter.” But given the state of the world today, many social issues, like violence, will inevitably be marked by race and racism, as the “color line” is as relevant as ever. For the Black women and the women of color that were at the center of initial intersectional theorizing, violence and oppression are still intrinsic parts of their everyday lived experiences and have even become exacerbated. Moreover, contemporary intersectional scholarship has identified new kinds of vulnerabilities and groups that continue to fall through the cracks of dominant policy-making and redress measures. This cyclical nature of structural violence reminds us that returning to the origin of intersectionality is not merely a matter of choosing sides in a scholarly debate, but a matter of life and death for individuals and communities that continue to live reinvigorated exclusions and oppression. In such a state of urgency, an ethical understanding of intersectionality requires us to commit ourselves to prioritize marginalized communities in our research, and to take on full responsibility and accountability for our own contributions to a socially and epistemically just world.
NOTES 1. The label South Asian is generally used to refer to “countries found within the ‘Indian subcontinent,’ including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives” (Sahota, 2016, p. 231). 2. A first wave of South Asian immigration occurred in the 1800s, mainly from colonized India. A second wave of South Asian immigration to the US started in the 1960s and consisted initially of highly qualified individuals, who were seen as an asset to the economy. Despite an increasing diversification and heterogeneity in consecutive immigration movements, the model minority myth remained persistently attached to South Asians and a broader group of Asian Americans (Dasgupta 2000). Although it is also accompanied by more negative stereotypical tropes, like that of the “yellow peril,” it remains “the most influential and prevalent stereotype for Asian Americans” (Kawai, 2005, p. 109). 3. Abraham and Purkayastha mention descriptions like “action research, action-oriented research, community-based participatory research, collaborative action research, feminist participatory research, feminist action research, and some forms of public sociology” (Abraham and Purkayastha 2012, 125). 4. For this short review, I drew on recent academic research publications on violence against women from an intersectional perspective, published between January 2019 and May 2021. I used the keywords “intersectionality – violence against women – ethics” in searches on Google Scholar. I excluded articles that did not use or refer to empirical research. The aim was not to provide a representative and exhaustive overview of such studies, but to inquire how intersectionality was understood by these researchers, which topics they addressed and which kinds of values were associated with intersectionality. The final sample was composed of 25 articles.
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7. Disability and rural poverty in the global South Shaun Grech
INTRODUCTION It is estimated that 80 per cent of the over 1 billion disabled people around the globe are in the global South alone, disproportionately living in rural areas and in poverty. Disabled people are far from a minority and numbers continue to rise, especially in the global South, because of poverty and deprivation, inequality, wars, and conflict, forced migration, increases in chronic diseases, and climate change among other reasons (WHO and World Bank 2011). Over the past two decades we have seen the slow yet consistent establishment of linkages between disability and poverty, which in turn serves arguments for the need to include disability in international development. Often framed as a mutually reinforcing cycle, the central tenet is simple. Life in poverty increases the vulnerability to impairment, while disability leads to or intensifies poverty (see e.g., Groce et al. 2011; Palmer 2011). The resulting poverty in most instances is said to be multidimensional (Mitra 2018), that is, it traverses multiple areas, and disabled people are, as a result, among the poorest of the poor. The depiction of the relationship as a cycle emphasizes a view of the connection as a double bind, out of which it is difficult to climb without concerted and targeted attention and intervention. In particular, it served well the motives of those lobbying to find a place for disability in the development agenda and programming. Similar to patterns within the feminist development movement decades ago, discourse among international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even donors began to step up, calling for so-called “disability mainstreaming” as well as “disability targeting”, to ensure that disability is not only included in all dimensions of development, but also that disability-specific needs are addressed through targeted efforts (for example specialized health care and rehabilitation) (Miller and Albert 2005; NORAD 2012) alongside disaggregated disability data to inform policy (Pettinicchio and Maroto 2021). This formed part of a strategy called “twin-tracking” (DFID 2000). More recently, discourse evolved that called for Disability Inclusive Development (DID), defined as a process whereby: all stages of development processes are inclusive of and accessible to persons with disabilities. It requires that all persons be afforded equal access to education, health care services, work and employment, and social protection, among others. (UN 2017, 3)
However, despite these positive changes, the fact is that disability remains relatively marginalized in development policy, research, and practice (Niewohner et al. 2019). Indeed, development studies still struggle to grapple with disability within core content, instead it is often medicalized and/or pathologized and relegated to global health and rehabilitation. Intersectional areas, including those connecting gender, race, and disability, are sparsely addressed within international development, highlighting a tremendous gap in policy as well as practice (Munsaka 2014).
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Disability and rural poverty in the global South 109 More concretely, there remains a dearth of empirical research into the relationship between disability and poverty in the global South (Grech 2015a; Groce et al. 2011). Data remains scarce, including that drawn from censuses or surveys; moreover, data that is collected is often unreliable, because methods have not been standardized and/or because methods themselves may not be contextually adapted and responsive to local circumstances (Mitra et al. 2011b; Pettinicchio and Maroto 2021). Qualitative research is lacking, notably research looking into the dynamics operating within the relationship between disability and poverty. Indeed, while there is a growing body of studies into individual areas such as health, livelihoods, or education among disabled people in the global South, there is far less research addressing how barriers interact, operate, and shift within the context of this disability and poverty relationship, and how they shift it. There is also sparse intersectional research engaging with this relationship, for example, looking into other key thematic areas such as childhood, gender, race and indigeneity, legal status and forced migration. These are complex and critical relationships that deserve research into intersections that complicate and/or shift indigenous disabled people’s or disabled refugees’ lives through space and over time. This is hardly surprising given that theoretical and critical work linger far behind, which means that this relationship lacks epistemological work, including on the complex intersectional dimensions traversing history, power, inequality, and (geo)politics in multidimensional, dynamic, and heterogeneous lives, spaces, and places. Overall, one is frequently left with research that it is siloed, simplistic, and generalizing – too often monodisciplinary and disability-specific, while complex interacting areas are rarely explored with theoretical rigour. In this chapter, I respond to some of these concerns, providing a critical yet admittedly very partial analysis of this relationship, to address two key areas prioritized in this book, that is, issues that arise as disability and poverty intersect epistemologically, and the implications for intersectional methodologies.
FROM HISTORY TO GEOPOLITICS: ON POWER Intersectional analyses are typically preoccupied by and interrogate the structures and systems that create and perpetuate inequality: class, racism, ableism, and/or gender or poverty-based discrimination and oppression; and interrogate how these are interconnected (Winker and Degele 2011). These structures and systems (discursive or material), though, just like poverty, have strong historical foundations. Indeed, much of the poverty experienced in the global South did not happen overnight and the geopolitical asymmetries we witness today are established and propagated by centuries of colonial pillaging, violence, and exploitation, perpetually re-enacted in the current period of coloniality (Grech 2015b; Mignolo 2011). From racist discourse and constructions of the racialized other, to concentration of wealth and land ownership, gendered relationships, dramatic labour exploitation (e.g., sweatshops or mines), abuse, to institutionalized violence and the neoliberal globalizing metanarrative, colonialism provided the material and ontological foundations, including the perimeters of the metropole and the periphery that persist today. This has implications for intersectional research intent on historicizing and framing the disability and poverty relationship and engaging with and probing power dynamics and differentials in specific contexts. Research on disability and poverty in the global South cannot possibly bypass the colonial encounter since colonialism is perhaps the only shared experience
110 Research handbook on intersectionality within the hugely diverse and heterogeneous Southern space. Colonialism had not only material consequences, but also epistemological and ontological. Colonial power defined what is considered “legitimate” knowledge, where this resides and emanates from. It imposed tools and institutions that perpetually framed Other knowledge as illegitimate, or inferior. Much of the literature and discourse on disability and poverty in the global South, including methodological practice and poverty reduction that is considered legitimate and authoritative, emanates from the global North. Academic or knowledge imperialism also fuels and maintains academic dependency in the global South (Ajani 2020). Intersectional research questions, contests and shifts such binaries, including in what constitutes “real” knowledge and where it resides. Intersectionality supports alliances of resistance while promoting alertness to and valuation of complexities and differences. Stinson (2018, 1) articulated this process succinctly: An intersectional analysis can help researchers to build common ground between Indigenous and Western worldviews, by examining how power works on both sides. This facilitates connections across difference, and opportunities for building coalitions of resistance. An intersectional perspective can also help us to link different worldviews without erasing differences between them, because it upholds the complexity and specificity of each.
Understanding how poverty shifts disability requires an informed understanding of how poverty is created, sustained, and perpetuated, by whom and how, and that, in turn, necessitates an in-depth contextualized and historical analysis in intersectional research. Understanding why certain groups of disabled people such as indigenous people confront particularly intense barriers of oppression and disablement requires a detailed historical analysis of indigeneity, colonialism, and geopolitics within specific contexts (Soldatic and Gilroy 2018). It pushes researchers to engage with how such populations came to be Othered, even within their own countries and regions, and how these power differentials are maintained. Colonialism framed the Southern subject and space as Other and positioned them as inferior and sites of intervention, in need of “development”. Colonialism was not only the start of global capitalism as we know it, but also laid the foundations for what would become the industry of international development (Escobar 1995). Disability and development projects, such as those with a poverty reduction objective, stem from international organizations and donors based in the global North. Thus, they set the agenda, process, and conditionalities (Bezzina 2019). An intersectional analysis of disability and poverty, therefore, needs to contend with and probe the power embedded within poverty reduction strategies and measures crafted by a development sector, which many argue (e.g., see for example Langan 2018) is neocolonizing. Even more basically, “development”, amid geopolitical asymmetries, can be a major source of poverty as well as impairment, for example, through exploitative and even perilous labour (e.g., with mining companies), environmental degradation, discriminatory agricultural trade laws, or economic activities causing environmental pollution (Soldatic and Grech, 2022). In brief, an intersectional analysis needs to contend with multiple axes of power within which disability and poverty are situated and unveil multiple interactions including the sites of intervention.
Disability and rural poverty in the global South 111
GROUNDED UNDERSTANDING OF POVERTY Research on disability and poverty, including intersectional research such as that on disability and gender within specific countries, too often takes poverty as a given. In fact, disproportionate levels of poverty in the global South and the impacts on disabled people is what drives much of this research in the first place. However, this research rarely conceptualizes poverty or lays out how it can be understood. More importantly, as theorists and practitioners reference poverty as a source of impairment or hardship for disabled people, poverty is often generalized and simplified; rarely understood within context. The result is that the “condition” of disabled people or disabled indigenous people, for example, is treated in isolation, epistemologically and practically. The point here is very simple. No space of poverty is like any other. Poverty surrounds and co-exists with disability. In context, disability is framed and constructed through a shared poverty, with the implication that we cannot possibly understand disability without first understanding what life in what I termed “spaces of poverty” might mean: (dynamic) spaces that are as material as they are discursive and ontological … critical in understanding how disability is constructed and lived across space and time, but always constitutive of and constituted within/through the poverty space. (Grech 2014, 53–4)
Indeed, many of the barriers which are shared by poor people in rural areas become insurmountable obstacles when faced by specific impairments. As these axes meet and bind, disabled people confront complex difficulties traversing personal, social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological spheres. Basically, we need an in-depth understanding of what life in poverty is like for everyone (irrespective of dis/ability) as the epistemological starting point, because even the meaning of disability changes with these dynamic forces. It is also critical to not address disability in decontextualized isolation, which may lead to problematic assertions and generalizations as well as simplistic and possibly harmful “solutions”. Indeed, it is far too common to see disability research being done by researchers with absolutely no knowledge of livelihoods, the agricultural cycle, cultural and cosmological dimensions, political systems, and what life in poverty in specific areas looks like, and more importantly, how life is lived and survived by everyone. Each space of poverty is different from others. However, it is possible to identify some tentative dimensions, which are perhaps more common in rural areas. Common dimensions need to be understood in an intersectional analysis, including interdisciplinary engagements (e.g., rural development, agricultural economics, global health, etc.) if researchers are to begin comprehending the complex and interacting barriers faced by disabled people. These may include: ● Remoteness and isolation from main thoroughfares and key services such as health care and education. ● Poor infrastructure and erratic and costly transportation. ● Low levels of economic assets and few or no savings. ● Fragmented livelihoods, the bulk of which is in the informal sector: informal labour means that workers are not registered and hence do not pay taxes and contributions, with the implication that they have no rights, entitlements, or benefits such as a pension in the case of an accident at work.
112 Research handbook on intersectionality ● Dependence on agriculture to work and pressure to grow a portion of the food basket to reduce the cost of food overall as a portion of general outlays. ● Malnutrition and/or undernutrition. ● Dependence on natural resources and vulnerability to natural disasters. ● The bulk of household expenses are devoted to covering the food basket and merely surviving. ● Poor sanitation. ● No access to social protection. ● Limited or no health care, especially for those living in more isolated areas, notably specialized health care. ● Social and political exclusion and even discrimination. These aspects, despite their partiality, highlight how the meaning of disability and how it is experienced is constructed and indeed changes within context, and how understanding the spaces of poverty within specific communities may lead to understanding how disability interacts with and is shaped by poverty, as opposed to engaging with disability or intersectional relationships (e.g., disability and ethnicity) in isolation. As an example, it is very difficult to understand how disability impacts poverty for people located in areas vulnerable to natural hazards, without carefully understanding the natural and environmental dimensions, impacts of climate change, and how other poverty dimensions, like poor infrastructure and political exclusion, affect accessibility, including evacuation routes and shelters, and hence survival. In the following subsections, I illustrate a small number of areas where disability impacts and shifts poverty within these spaces of poverty. To be clear, there are many interacting routes of impoverishment (Grech 2015a). Nevertheless, they serve as examples of barriers to understanding of disability and what it means to live in different spaces of poverty. Access to Health Care Studies demonstrate that health care needs of disabled people are higher than for the general population, including specialized health care and rehabilitation, surgery, and medication and assistive devices (Hashemi et al. 2017). Those with serious and more chronic impairments may need even higher amounts of care with greater frequency. Maintaining some or other levels of functioning and/or controlling pain or that secondary impairments do not develop is therefore contingent on timely, accessible, and affordable health care. Disabled people in poverty contexts often confront extraordinary barriers to accessing and sustaining adequate health care and medication (Grech 2015a; Kuper et al. 2018). Indeed, the barriers are so rife, that, as I report in my ethnographic work in Guatemala (Grech 2015a), ill-health and disability are two of the greatest fears of the poor. Barriers and obstacles are many, including distance and the costs of reaching health care facilities, the bulk of which are in major cities, far away from remote rural areas. Medical supplies, equipment, and specialized treatments and medical personnel are often lacking in public health facilities. These may only be available in private health care, totally unaffordable to those living in poverty. Critically, the direct and indirect costs (see below) involved in obtaining health care are often dramatic for the poor. Seeking health care is a major source of impoverishment, especially when poor people have to incur debt through informal loans to be able to access a health care facility, because the poor
Disability and rural poverty in the global South 113 often have few to no savings. In Guatemala (Grech 2015a), I documented patterns where, after the trials and tribulations of reaching a health care facility, disabled people are then told they need to purchase consistent amounts of medication, and to return for repeat medical consultations and examinations. The result is that many simply return home with a prescription for medications and tests they can never afford; they see their health deteriorate, and their poverty accentuated, now even ridden with debt with informal moneylenders. Inability to access and sustain health care, especially for those with chronic conditions, means not only a life lived in extraordinary pain. Following the onset of an impairment, it also means inability to restart livelihoods especially in contexts where livelihoods require physical strength and dexterity (see below; Mitra et al. 2011b). Health care costs are dramatically impoverishing for poor people because, in the absence of social protection, they are invariably paying out-of-pocket. Even modest costs are especially serious when they have few or no savings to tap into, when these expenses far exceed earnings, and where any expense constitutes a major shock to the household economy – what is known in economics as “catastrophic health expenditure” (Hailemichael et al. 2019). Personal, cultural, gendered, and geographic dimensions, among others, also condition access to health care, with the implication that some are more disadvantaged than others. Literature documents the barriers encountered by disabled women (Matin et al. 2021), people with intellectual disabilities (Mkabile and Swartz 2020), those residing in rural areasas well as indigenous people (Grech 2015a). The implications here for intersectional research is the need for a gendered, cultural, ideological, racial, and ethnic analysis of health care barriers, as these are woven in and through the multiple webs of poverty. This means that an adequate understanding of poverty in context is inevitable, alongside critical engagement with the ideological, religious, cultural, familial, community, psychological and multiple interacting factors and processes. In brief, we need a constant updating of a complex analysis of a reality that can hardly be contained and much less generalized, as opposed to addressing health care barriers in an isolated and decontextualized way. Interruptions in Livelihoods A substantial number of studies from both the global North and South highlight how disabled people face very high levels of unemployment as well as well as underemployment (Hanass-Hancock and Mitra 2016; Trani and Loeb 2010), the consequences of which are not only fragmented livelihoods, but also dramatic impacts on poverty in a growing neoliberal context predicated on strong non-disabled individualist productive bodies. As many as 80 to 90 per cent of disabled people in the global South are said to be unemployed (UN n.d.). The barriers in starting or resuming livelihoods for disabled people in poor rural areas are multiple, bound to what life in extreme and chronic poverty often means: ● Livelihoods dependent on strenuous physical labour such as construction and farming with few to no “lighter” alternatives. ● Work that may be perilous (e.g., migratory labour), also on account of lack of health and safety measures and protective equipment, and that may lead to accidents, injury and even impairment. ● Little or no access to start-up capital, for example, through loans, assets, or savings to start a small business.
114 Research handbook on intersectionality ● Oversupply of able-bodied workers, all competing for the limited paid work available in the bid to simply survive. Within this ableist scenario, disabled bodies are continuously pushed further down the long line of available and “adequate” bodies. ● Inaccessibility of workplaces and failure to provide any accommodations (Grut et al. 2011). ● Lack of assistive devices, for example, wheelchairs or crutches. ● Transportation barriers, costs, and long traveling distances. Within such spaces, there is a high possibility of accidents and development of injuries, worsening of existing impairments and development of secondary ones, all of which have not only health, but also economic consequences, and which also act as a serious disincentive to find work. The importance of livelihoods cannot be stressed enough in any intersectional research and analysis, because in the absence of social protection, poor people have little other than their own labour power to sell – to earn a living, to merely feed themselves, or to survive. Studies highlight how disability within such contexts not only interrupts and fragments labour patterns, but also exposes disabled people and their families to a whole trail of abuse and exploitation by potential employers who know that their options are even more limited than those of others (Grech 2015a, 2019). Importantly, interruptions in labour patterns in the absence of social protection mean reduced economic capability to purchase health care, medication, as well as food and other basic necessities, and therefore impact consumption for the whole family, especially when the disabled person is the main income earner of the household. This calls for a focus beyond the disabled individual to incorporate the family (see below). Furthermore, the barriers to livelihoods are conditioned and even accentuated based on gender, race or caste, impacting also access to pro-poor policies and programmes (Kabia et al. 2018). The implications here are once again to conduct intersectional analyses and research capable of engaging multiple strands of discrimination woven through poverty dynamics including stigma, patriarchy, racism, as well as the ideological, class and political forces that create and maintain disparities and oppression. The Costs of Disability The costs of disability are extensive, multiple, interacting and both direct as well as indirect. The onset of an impairment introduces a whole new set of costs for disabled people and their families living in poverty, costs that are catastrophic because they must be covered by the poor themselves, with no assistance whatsoever. They shake whole households to the core because minor stresses and shocks constitute a potential disaster; that is, poor families are increasingly vulnerable. Costs are multiple and include (not exclusively) health care and rehabilitation for those who can and do seek them. In the absence of social protection, free or subsidized health care and medication, these need to be sought and purchased privately, meaning they are totally price prohibitive, and cannot be sustained. Other costs include medication (even if partially); purchasing of assistive devices, maintenance, and repair (because parts are often prohibitively expensively and only found in major cities or the capital city); and transportation. The latter is a major cost because negotiating rough terrains in rural areas together with inaccessible means of transportation (e.g., crowded minibuses) means that disabled people may frequently need to hire a private vehicle simply to reach basic services such as health care, pharmacies, and repair shops.
Disability and rural poverty in the global South 115 Disabled people also face indirect costs such as lost labour power, including that of family members (Mitra et al. 2017) as well as opportunity costs, that is, the value of lost earnings had such labour to be put to its next best use. Overall, a contextualized intersectional analysis adds critical awareness of such costs and how they impact poverty in multiple ways, or more specifically, the complex and interacting avenues of impoverishment. But this needs an acute understanding of the personal, circumstantial, social, economic, political, geographic, infrastructural, and other aspects that establish the conditions for these costs to be incurred. For example, poor people have few if any reserves of financial assets, including savings, meaning that any added expense, such as health care, severely drains these assets and can push families into profound debt, including debt traps. These result from the fact that poor people can only resort to informal moneylenders for emergency loans that come at exorbitant interest rates (in parts, like “payday loans” the poor in the global North incur). Within contexts of chronic scarcity, reduced consumption including of food, health care, and medication means basic needs compete against each other, forcing poor people to prioritize, for example, reducing medication intake or stopping altogether, to be able to eat and feed the children (Grech 2015a). Similarly, education and other needs now become secondary ones, with the implication that these are given up, thus impacting the children of disabled people.
THE HETEROGENEOUS DISABILITY EXPERIENCE IN POVERTY Substantial literature from disability studies as well as other fields highlight how the disabled population is profoundly heterogeneous, including how disabled people experience their disability, not least based on different social meanings, as well as barriers (Dowse et al. 2016; Grech 2015a). Indeed, disability and its interactions with poverty, and hence this relationship itself, are ultimately dependent on a range of social, contextual, cultural, locational, personal, and familial aspects, among others. This means that any engagement with and understanding of this assumed cycle or relationship in intersectional research, needs to account for these intersecting dimensions, including the “cultural specificities of personhood and to reconsider the unstable boundaries of the category of the human” (Ginsburg and Rapp 2020, S4). Moreover, these dimensions change across space and time. When one considers heterogeneity, the most obvious dimensions include the type of impairment, gender, race and ethnicity, and age, among others. Multiple literature across a range of contexts documents how disabled women confront a double bind, oppression based on gender as well as disability; studies highlight how disabled women face higher levels of violence, including sexual violence and rape (Rohwerder 2018; Shah and Bradbury-Jones 2020). Indigenous disabled people as well as those from racial and ethnic minorities confront a complex set of barriers, including racism and profound exclusion and even ill-treatment – most with strong historical foundations and baggage, including in colonialism (Soldatic et al. 2018). Examples abound as to how disability and poverty are experienced differently by a range of disabled people. For example, those with working family members confront different experiences and also hardships from those who have no supporting members to provide care, food, and other basic needs (Grech 2015a). Even people with the same impairment do not experience poverty in the same way, when, for example, they live in more precarious areas. Those in more remote locations, and those with certain types of impairments (e.g., with more serious, chronic impairments) also live disability and poverty differently. Disabled refugees and asylum seekers, for example, confront a distinct
116 Research handbook on intersectionality set of barriers requiring an intersectional analysis that also incorporates space and time as well as legal status, and how rights travel across borders (Pisani and Grech 2015). Disabled people with impairments requiring large and consistent amounts of health care and medication will also deal with more severe poverty. This translates into pressure on family members for support, thus impacting labour, care, and other patterns, including dire constraints on time. Remoteness, physical isolation, climate, quality of land, land ownership, access to assets (including productive inputs), infrastructure, governance structures and multiple, interacting factors and processes mean that an analysis of this disability and poverty relationship needs to not only account for complexity and heterogeneity, but importantly to adopt an approach that is theoretically informed and nuanced to engage with all these areas. Alertness to such heterogeneity has serious implications for intersectional research and methodologies. Experiences and outcomes are shaped by a range of factors and processes, including, for example, ideological or religious beliefs about the provenance of disability as well as the perceived role and responsibilities of women within particular communities, all of which are often rooted and backed by years of tradition. The result is therefore the need to critically understand and support local efforts that challenge and also “subvert, dominant forms of representation” (Swartz 2018, 281). Given the range of disability experiences, it is important to explore those specifically in under-researched communities. The implication here for intersectional research and methodologies is therefore acute engagement with the various and hybrid historical, contextual, and cultural dimensions, and how these frames not only disability (e.g., the belief that disability is the result of sin in a previous life among certain cultures), but also gender, sexual orientation, class, and caste relationships, among others. Even more basically, oppression and the means that oppress are found in social and cultural constructions, themselves with strong historical lineages, but which may not necessarily be fixed or unchanging. Similarly, there needs to be openness to the fact that not all disabled people are neglected or even oppressed in the global South, pushing us to constantly renegotiate how disability is understood and responded to on the ground. In this regard, challenging fixities of thought, generalizations, and myths fits within open and decolonizing intersectional approaches. The attention to the heterogeneity of disability also has impacts on policies and programmes claiming to adopt an intersectional and inclusive approach. In practice, alertness, and responsiveness to the heterogeneity of the disability experience, means that one cannot adopt one size fit all approaches to poverty and its reduction, requiring instead informed, nuanced policies and action. The heterogeneity and interplay of complexities highlights how policies, including rights, declarations, and law cannot be assumed to be enough, or that indeed all people can in fact claim their rights. Social policies, too, including those designed to protect and ensure that basic needs are attended to, also often bypass disabled people, which means that they are too often ignored in poverty reduction measures, or these are designed in ableist exclusionary ways. For example, measures aimed at facilitating access to the labour market or basic needs through initiatives such as food for work (e.g., on public infrastructural projects) do not consider the needs of persons with physical disabilities for whom such work may be impossible, too strenuous, or even dangerous. Similarly, targeted social protection requiring repeated registration at government offices in cities may not account for those with mobility impairments and/or with scarce economic resources and who may not even be able to pay for transport. Literature also highlights how government departments may be unresponsive and even antagonistic towards disabled people asking for benefits and/or services they may be
Disability and rural poverty in the global South 117 entitled to by law, patterns borne also of stigma and lack of education on disability, especially at regional and local government levels (see Grech 2015a).
THE POVERTY THAT IS SHARED: SPOTLIGHT ON FAMILIES Any understanding or analysis of the disability and poverty intersections requires the adoption of a family approach. The importance of family cannot be stressed enough in contexts of poverty because in the absence of social protection, poor people only have other poor people to depend on and to merely survive, because resources as well as strategies for survival are often pooled. From the provision of caregiving (notably by women), to changes in labouring patterns to cover the costs of disability and to compensate for the lost labour of the disabled person, to changes in consumption (including food) on account of increased costs and dwindling assets, one cannot but speak of what elsewhere I have called the “disabled family” (Grech 2019). The family effectively becomes the only source of social protection. Women, for example, are often pushed to reduce or withdraw their labour input to provide care, impacting their own opportunities for self-development and care, thus tightening the trap of poverty. Others must work harder or are pushed prematurely into the labouring market, including children and adolescents (Grech 2015a). Working harder means additional stress and exhaustion alongside exploitative and potentially hazardous work, exposing family members to illness, accidents, and disability. Disability also impacts educational and socializing opportunities, especially when family members, notably women and girls, must be pulled out of school to provide care for the disabled family member and/or to free other members, for example, siblings or mothers, to start working. Education is interrupted, often for good, opening an additional trail of abuse and impoverishment including through lower levels of human capital within the family. Family members may have to forsake their own health care to prioritize care for the disabled person, opening new possibilities of ill-health and impairment for the family unit. Once again, an intersectional approach leads to an in-depth understanding of poverty as a shared collective experience, illuminating well-being and survival as conditions and outcomes contingent on networks. Intersectional approaches focus on “the relational nature of well-being”, and one would also add suffering, especially in contexts where “relationships between people is a dominant social structure” (Mahali et al. 2018, 384). Disability intensifies poverty for whole families, who are frequently poorer than other households (Mitra et al. 2011a; Palmer et al. 2010). Family units survive as a collective but are unprepared when new costs are involved. Because they have few or no assets, poor families are vulnerable and fragile in the face of disability stresses and shocks. Disability, for these families, is therefore reframed as a major impact on the system, casting many disabled people and their families (including extended members) among the “ultra-poor”, a poverty most likely intergenerational. A Long-haul View: The Need for Longitudinal Research Understanding disability and poverty in an intersectional analysis requires a family analysis that crosscuts psychological, emotional, personal, physical, and social dimensions as well as economic ones. It also calls for interventions that address the voices, needs, and demands of the whole family as opposed to focusing only on disabled people or sub-populations such as disabled children. Overall, as Pinilla-Roncacio et al. (2020, 2) conclude, “people with disabili-
118 Research handbook on intersectionality ties and their families have fewer tools to move out of poverty and may require more supporting strategies (e.g., social protection programmes covering for the extra costs of disability) to reach at least a minimum acceptable level of wellbeing”. At the most basic level, any support given to families will likely translate into support for the disabled family member. Importantly, poverty experienced by disability families is likely intergenerational (Pinilla-Roncancio 2015); it will impact children and other members over years and years, which implies not only the need for longitudinal research, but also well-planned strategic responses with a clear vision of addressing poverty for generations to come. Longitudinal research is critical for understanding the impacts of disability over time and for different people, social groups and cultures. It is extremely important because neither poverty nor disability are static; they are constantly changing and dynamic. For example, in times of drought when food is in short supply and expensive, poverty is dramatically accentuated, consumption is reduced, and the experience of disability is worsened, for example, by having fewer financial resources to purchase medication or access health care. Similarly, maintaining a basic level of food consumption may mean reduced access to education and health care by family members who may prioritize these for the disabled person. This has serious consequences not only for their own health, but also on missed opportunities such as livelihoods which require travel, physical strength, or additional training and education. On Resilience and Resistance Finally, and to round off this section, while disabled people and their families are impacted within spaces of poverty, they are far from weak or powerless. Specifically, while the focus on barriers is extremely important, an intersectional engagement with the disability and poverty cycle needs to account for agency, resilience, and resistance, issues too often raised by disability theorists to counteract ableist and disabling narratives (Runswick-Cole and Goodley 2013). Poor people, including disabled people, ultimately survive on their own, using their own resources and resourcefulness within poverty spaces that are rough to navigate, physically, economically, infrastructurally. Disabled families too, despite the hardships, are instead: … constantly engaged in a dialectic of weakness and agency, conscious and unconscious. People are always developing systems tailored to their own context, needs, resources, and their own poverty. (Grech 2015a, 185)
Indeed, while the focus on vulnerability is important, Yeo (2020, 676) contests an exclusive focus on weakness and fragility, when these obscure “systemic oppression and distract[s] from the rights and achievements of disabled people”. The point here is very simple and has critical implications for intersectional approaches. The poor continue to exist and to ensure the survival of their own disabled people thanks to their own resourcefulness, their strategies to adapt and change, and indeed stories of strength emanating from these agentic bodies are many. These are strengths that need to be understood, carefully, documented sensitively, and then built upon and to ensure that any discourses or interventions do not interfere or weaken these in any way.
Disability and rural poverty in the global South 119
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS This chapter has briefly and partially attempted to explore the intersectional space between disability and poverty, to highlight concerns and implications for social researchers. The disability and poverty relationship requires serious interdisciplinary theorizing backed by empirical longitudinal research and needs to employ theory from a range of disciplines and fields including critical disability studies, global health, rural development, anthropology, and decolonial theory, among others. We are at no point yet where it is possible to even think about simplifying and/or trying to contain this relationship or how we understand oppression and inequality. On the contrary, we need all the theorizing we can muster, we need questioning and probing, and we need openness to how this relationship traverses time, and how it changes across people, spaces and places in a poverty that is complex and dynamic. We also need to question and probe simplified cyclical representations of disability and poverty, to reframe and reposition the relationship as “a fluid dynamic association, a relationship that is open, hybrid and hybridising and that is changing” (Grech 2015a, 250), that requires a consistently changing and responsive analysis of theory and data. I argue that attempts at understanding this relationship, including intersectional approaches, methodologies, and interventions, cannot but adopt a family and/or community approach as opposed to addressing disability in isolation. Disability in rural areas in the global South is experienced as a family, and strengthening families not only protects them, but also indirectly impacts the disabled family member. This necessitates active efforts at listening to and prioritizing the needs and demands of these persons. Overall, a critical and decolonizing approach to this relationship is essential to global disability studies (Grech 2015b; Nguyen 2018). Such an undertaking also includes a serious questioning and challenging of power relationships, including who dominates discourse, the power of the development sector and agenda, and who produces so-called “knowledge” and where. Most importantly, the voices of disabled people living in poverty in the global Southneed to be heard and represented – in a word, prioritized – and the research process needs to be owned and designed by disabled people.
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122 Research handbook on intersectionality Winker, Gabriela, and Nina Degele. 2011. “Intersectionality as Multi-level Analysis: Dealing with Social Inequality,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18 (1): 51–66. Yeo, Rebecca. 2020. “The Regressive Power of Labels of Vulnerability Affecting Disabled Asylum Seekers in the UK,” Disability & Society 35 (4): 676–81.
8. Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research in feminist food studies Barbara Parker
INTRODUCTION Intersectional feminist food studies seek to advance social justice through research, activism, and pedagogy (Lloro 2021; Parker et al. 2019; Swan 2020; Williams-Forson and Wilkerson 2011). Like other interdisciplinary areas of scholarship that take up intersectionality, Black food scholars have led the way in centering the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social class in their analyses of food practices, food systems and inequality structured through White supremacy and imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism amongst other systems of power (Harper 2010, 2012; Nettles-Barcelón et al. 2015; Reese 2019; Williams-Forson 2006; Williams-Forson and Wilkerson 2011). Indigenous scholars, activists, and allies also urge us to look more closely at settler colonialism as another interlocking system of power that constitutes Indigenous and settler identities in relation to food, food systems, and food movements (Pictou et al. 2021). High levels of food insecurity in First Nations’ communities and among Indigenous Peoples1 living in urban settings and violence against Indigenous women are the effects of the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and have led to a resurgence of Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) focused on land, food, health, well-being, responsibilities, and justice, with feminist food scholar-activists attending to structural inequalities through intersectional research and activism (Pictou et al. 2021; RAIR 2022; Ray et al. 2019; Robin et al. 2021).2 With growing attention to settler colonialism, decolonization, and Indigenous-settler relations in IFS research (Kepkiewicz 2017; Phillipps et al. 2022; Ray et al. 2019; Robin et al. 2021), there is a need to consider how intersectionality is approached methodologically, or the methods employed in intersectional research praxis. The absence of attention on how to do intersectional research is not unique to feminist food studies, with McCall (2005) suggesting that the absence of an intersectional methodology may be the result of “the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories of analysis” (1773). This is also complicated by anti-colonial theory that cautions against homogenizing anti-oppression research and activism because settler colonialism is different from other forms of oppression in that it demands the erasure and elimination of Indigenous Peoples through ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands (Tuck and Yang 2012). Although tensions arise when working across differences (Roth 2021), alliances are necessary in our anti-racism and decolonization activism and research (Arvin et al. 2013; Lawrence and Dua 2005). Tuck and Yang (2012) propose that we begin from an “ethics of incommensurability” saying: there are portions of these projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied … [and] we make these notations to highlight opportunities for what can only ever be strategic and
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124 Research handbook on intersectionality contingent collaborations, and to indicate the reasons that lasting solidarities may be elusive, even undesirable. (28)
In recognizing these struggles for solidarity, I suggest that it is generative to think about how we do intersectional research within a settler colonial framework. Following Levac et al. (2018), I propose that possibilities for anti-colonial intersectional research must link Indigenous ways of knowing with feminist intersectional research as the epistemologies underlying these methodological approaches have shared principles that can be productive in research practices. Specifically, Indigenous research epistemologies and methodologies position all knowledge as relationships and therefore, subjective, with multiple ways of knowing to represent diverse knowledges (Absolon 2022; Wilson 2008; Wilson et al. 2019) while feminist intersectional epistemologies position knowledge(s) as socially situated, dependent on the positionality or standpoint of individuals and the groups to which they belong structured along the lines of gender, race, social class, among other intersections of identity, which are also relational and interconnected (Collins 1990; Collins and Bilge 2016). In terms of methodologies and methods, both Indigenous and feminist intersectional research is closely attuned to power in research relationships and within the research context. According to Wilson (2008), Kovach (2009), and Smith (1999), relational accountability between researchers and communities or participants underpins knowledge construction while for feminist intersectional approaches, researchers attend to the interconnections within research relationships (e.g., researcher as expert) and seek epistemological and ontological accountability, which Doucet and Mauthner (2012, 123) conceptualize as “knowing responsibly.” In both Indigenous ways of knowing and feminist intersectional research, researchers pay close attention to the temporality and socio-historical contexts of our inquiries and use reflexivity to understand different standpoints or subjectivities of participant positionalities (Collins and Bilge 2016; Rice et al. 2019; Rotz et al. 2022). Moreover, Indigenous and feminist intersectional approaches to research share the goals of seeking equity and social justice (Hankivsky et al. 2014; Levac et al. 2018). Community-based research provides one methodological framework to put these shared research approaches and principles into action (Hayward et al. 2021; Parker et al. 2018; Phillipps et al. 2022). Like feminist intersectional research that is driven by social justice through participatory action research (PAR) (Bailey et al. 2019), community-based research is also undertaken collaboratively based on needs identified by the community (Etmanski et al. 2014). I suggest that by taking up these parallel ways of knowing, which model Mi’kmaw Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall’s research principle of Two-Eyed Seeing (TES) (Bartlett et al. 2012; Martin 2012; Roher et al. 2021), in a respectful way whereby researchers endeavor to learn with humility (Hayward et al. 2021; Regan 2010; Wilson et al. 2019) and pay close attention to power within the research itself (Levac et al. 2018), we are better positioned to undertake anti-colonial intersectional research and build alliances across Indigenous-settler relations. Before I explore further, I briefly explain what an intersectional approach entails, followed by a description of how settler colonialism functions as a structure and system of power and oppression shaping Indigenous and settler identities, and make connections to intersectionality as “a method, a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool” to study interlocking axes of oppressions (Carbado et al. 2013, 312).
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INTERSECTIONALITY Intersectionality has been widely taken up as an analytical tool through interdisciplinary scholarship to think through complex social problems (Collins and Bilge 2016).3 Intersectionality foregrounds power to underscore the relationality of social identities (individual and collective) and discourses as these are constituted through interlocking systems and structures of oppression with very real material consequences (Carbado et al. 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016). For example, in Indigenous communities and for urban Indigenous Peoples, an intersectional approach helps to see how glaring social and health inequities are compounded by gender, sexuality, income, age, where one lives, and one’s access to land, among other intersections as these are experienced relationally with Indigeneity (Pictou et al. 2021; Munro et al. 2014). Exploring these relational interconnections opens up possibilities for understanding the complexity of these social inequalities. As Carbado et al. (2013, 305) state: No particular application of intersectionality can, in a definitive sense, grasp the range of intersectional powers and problems that plague society. This work-in-progress understanding of intersectionality suggests that we should endeavour, on an ongoing basis, to move intersectionality to unexplored places.
As I will describe, we can employ intersectionality analytically, heuristically, or as a method (2013, 312) alongside Indigenous ways of knowing and methods using TES to examine settler colonialism through an anti-colonial intersectional approach in community-based research. This expanded intersectional approach opens up possibilities for deepening our understanding of how gender, sexuality amongst other categories of social difference intersect with Indigeneity through systems of power, which structure Indigenous-settler experiences of land, food, and the settler state.
THINKING THROUGH SETTLER COLONIALISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY IN OUR RESEARCH PRAXIS Settler colonialism is a persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/ settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous Peoples that are there. (Arvin et al. 2013, 12)
Settler colonialism operates as a system of power and domination structuring experiences of Indigeneity, oppression, and violence as these occur through the settler state and its institutions. Settler colonialism differs from other forms of colonialism because “settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). Settler colonial expansion required capital, with Arvin et al. (2013, 12) explaining that “extracting value from the land also requires systems of slavery and other forms of labour exploitation,” which produced wealth for landowners in the US and similarly, for colonialists on the land known now as Canada (Cooper 2006).4 In the settler colonial state: Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5)
126 Research handbook on intersectionality These authors point out that “settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways” (21) with “citizenship rights historically denied to women, Indigenous peoples and those without property” (Strong-Boag 2002, 41–2, in Abu-Laban and Nath 2020). Settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism amongst other domains of power interlock to shape Indigenous, settler, and immigrant experiences of citizenship, land, and food (Kim et al. 2021; Pictou et al. 2021). Specifically, through heterosexuality and heteropaternalism, gender and sexuality were sanctioned and managed by the colonial state through regulations on kinship and structures of government (Arvin et al. 2013, 14) which “in Canada, the Indian Act of 1876 regulated the marriage of Indigenous Peoples to confer lines of descent, property, and landholding to men even though most societies were matrilineal” (15). The Indian Act also ensured that Indigenous women would lose their legal status if they married a non-status man, as would their children (Green 2017).5 Indigenous women experienced multi-level structural violence within their communities when they lost their power in governance structures imposed by the colonial state. Their subjugation continued through residential schools (Green 2017). Today, their ability to practice IFS, such as harvesting Indigenous foods and medicines, is impacted through continued settler expansion, industrialization, and economic development that decimates and pollutes the land and waters contaminating Indigenous foods and water (MMIWG 2019; Pictou et al. 2021, 94). As Collins and Bilge (2016) explain, an intersectional approach requires scrutiny of how power operates relationally in specific socio-historical and political contexts and “across domains of structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal power” to produce compounded inequalities (27). By attending to analyses across micro, meso, and macro levels of power we unravel relationalities between land, food, gender, and Indigeneity. Settler colonial violence occurs at the interpersonal, community, and institutional levels including in our research and pedagogical approaches (Arvin et al. 2013; Dhamoon 2015; Wolf 2006). Settler colonialism also functions through knowledge systems and in the institutions which legitimize knowledge (Smith 1999), For example, Western systems of knowledge6 are dominant over Indigenous storytelling or Traditional Knowledges (TK) in similar ways to feminist knowledge(s), which are constructed through reflexive, subjective, and qualitative accounts (Pictou et al. 2021; Skinner et al. 2018). Hegemonic knowledges are enforced through epistemic violence embedded in patriarchy and settler colonialism and ignore or minimize divergent ways of knowing or knowledge systems, particularly in relation to land (Haywood et al. 2021; Smith 1999). Settler food scholars have a responsibility to learn Indigenous epistemologies of the land as these constitute knowledge about food production, ecology and the environment, food access, food consumption, and identity knowing that they can never really know because settlers are positioned differently ontologically to land.7 That is, in Western ontologies of nation, land is capital or “a commodity whether privately owned or collectively [and] commonly shared, that man can [and] must master nature in [and] as the nation” (Dhamoon 2015, 23). In contrast, Indigenous ontologies and axiologies position land “as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations” which are “non-exploitative and based on material survival, constitutive meanings of identity, and relationships between humans and between humans and the environment” (Coulthard 2014, 78–80, in Dhamoon 2015, 24). Thus, knowing who we are, where we come from—our own ontological and epistemological relationships to land, and our material socialization to the land and the ecology around us—our positionalities and the specific social
Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research 127 context we are working in shapes how as intersectional feminists we can understand our responsibilities for food justice, environmental justice, and social justice in our research. Within a settler colonial framework, the epistemological and ontological relationship to land is at the heart of our differences and it is necessary to recognize the ongoing structural violence in relation to land that is required to maintain this system of domination. Specifically, policies, laws, and the courts authorize and sanction settler occupation of land while denying Indigenous claims to sovereignty and self-determination (Kepkiewicz 2017; Wolf 2006). Altamirano-Jimenez and Kermoal (2016), RAIR (2022) and Pictou et al. (2021) explain that through resurgence and resistance, Indigenous women are leading the IFS movement that centers land and Indigenous ways of knowing, aimed at both social and environmental justice. Arvin et al. (2013, 9) argue that “attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative” and “opens us to the possibility of new forms of activism based on critically thought-out alliances.” As discussed, Levac et al. (2018, 4) propose linking frameworks in intersectional research to bridge Indigenous and Western approaches to knowledge creation as they are complementary and “allow us to gain new ways of thinking about and approaching existing problems.” Much like Dhamoon (2015) and Arvin et al. (2013), Levac et al. (2018) explain that “it is not enough to include colonialism, as one axis of oppression, … [because] colonialism conditions the whole matrix of intersecting systems of power in colonized spaces, such as North America” (9). These authors propose seven principles for intersectional, decolonial research including (1) relationality, (2) reciprocity, (3) reflexivity, (4) respect, (5) reverence, (6) responsivity, and (7) responsibility (10). Importantly, researchers must also recognize that like Western knowledge systems, there are multiple Indigenous ways of knowing and our research should reflect the “specific context and conceptual landscape in which you work” (v). Therefore, an anti-colonial intersectional research practice must pay attention to the temporality and historical context of our research inquiry and participants, and Indigenous ways of knowing must be made explicit (Levac et al. 2018). Two-Eyed Seeing (TES) as a guiding principle (Bartlett et al. 2012) is one approach that can facilitate these connections, which I describe below.
FEMINIST INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH SYNERGIES WITH INDIGENOUS METHODOLOGIES AND WAYS OF KNOWING USING TWO-EYED SEEING There is a rich scholarship in feminist research that has focused on the relationships between the knower and the known and the practices of accountability to power in researcher-participant and researcher-to-researcher relationships (Hesse-Biber and Brooks 2012). Critical reflexivity provides us with a method for learning about who we are in relation to systems of power (Hesse-Biber and Piatelli 2012; Rice et al. 2019). Similarly, Indigenous scholarship posits research is relationships with Indigenous ways of knowing positioning knowledge itself as relational (Kovach 2009; Smith 1999; Wilson 2008). Relationality in research requires that we value multiple worldviews or standpoints in intersectional approaches (Collins and Bilge 2016; Wilson et al. 2019). Moreover, we must endeavor to conduct research “in a good way” (Hart 2004), or through practices of “knowing responsibly” with our attention on epistemological accountability within our research relationships (Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 123).
128 Research handbook on intersectionality Doucet and Mauthner (2012, 136) remind us that our research responsibilities extend to the “persons and communities who will read, use and build on our knowledge” which may also include non-human subjects.8 Specifically, in “knowing responsibly” there is an ethical and moral imperative to think about the relational ontologies in our research relationships, which might include plants or other non-human participants (Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 123). Within Indigenous ways of knowing, being on the land or in relationship with land is good research practice (Absolon 2022; Wilson et al. 2019).9 As discussed earlier, within an anti-colonial framework, it is necessary for researchers to think about the positionality of land in relation to Indigenous-settler relationships—asking ourselves and centering our research, questions about land as it sits relationally and intersectionally with our participants. An Indigenous guiding principle of research that seeks to value both Indigenous and Western worldviews use the metaphor of “Two-Eyed Seeing” (TES) or “Etuaptmumk, the Mi’kmaq word for ‘the gift of multiple perspectives’” (Roher et al. 2021, n.p.; Bartlett et al. 2012). TES refers to seeing the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing with one eye, while the other eye sees the strengths of Western ways of knowing with the goal of producing knowledge that benefits everyone (Martin 2012). TES “encourages researchers to consciously weave back and forth between Indigenous and western ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, and can be implemented through action-based approaches which encourage flexibility on the part of the researcher and meaningful involvement of Indigenous people and their knowledge systems” (Wright 2019, in Ray 2021, 98). Roher et al. (2021) suggest that TES is like intersectionality in that they both offer flexibility as a research approach.10 As Martin (2021, 38) explains: Two-eyed seeing holds that there are diverse understandings of the world and that by acknowledging and respecting a diversity of perspectives (without perpetuating the dominance of one over another) we can build an understanding of health that lends itself to dealing with some of the most pressing health issues facing Indigenous peoples and communities. (38)
TES is understood as a useful underlying principle of research as it is relational, participatory and it can be meaningfully employed to co-construct diverse knowledges together (Roher et al. 2021). TES is also a decolonizing approach in that it “promotes reflexivity, challenges institutional norms and do[es] not reassert unequal power relations” (Ray 2021, 97). Moreover, “when applied in the context of diverse knowledges, Two-Eyed Seeing entails an ongoing reflection on self, openness to new perspectives, and readiness for adjustment” (n.p.). One way in which researchers can practice relational accountability is to use reflexivity (Kovach 2009; Smith 1999; Wilson 2008). Intersectional approaches to research also encourage the use of reflexivity to practice epistemological accountability and disrupt power in research relationships (Pictou et al. 2021). It is through reflexive practices, whether writing in a research journal or through some other intentional means of interrogating power both within research relationships and in our researcher-participant or community relationships that we can bring together Indigenous ways of knowing and intersectionality. This can be done on an individual level or with our co-researchers, community members and participants. Employing TES as a guiding principle and drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and relational accountability (Wilson 2008) alongside intersectional research practices that are reflexive and responsible (Doucet and Mauthner 2012) we become better positioned to do anti-colonial intersectional research. Specifically, committing to being in relation with one another as researchers and community or participants, as well as in relationship to the land, we
Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research 129 share commitments to the principles outlined above by Levac at al. (2018). That is, through reciprocity, respect, reverence, responsivity, and responsibility towards and within our research relationships, which include relational accountability with the land (Abolson 2022; Wilson 2008). These considerations of our ethical and moral responsibilities as researchers usefully provide a path for thinking about synergies between feminist epistemologies and Indigenous ways of knowing. Community-based research provides a research framework for anti-colonial intersectional research. Central to community-based research are the key principles of ethical responsibility and reciprocity (Jull et al. 2017). As I will describe below, researchers attend to power by minimizing the expertise of the researcher and the institutions represented, and instead, center participants’ knowledge in the research process and research outcomes (Etmanski et al. 2014; Hayward et al. 2021). Community-based research brings together Indigenous ways of knowing and intersectional research producing space for an anti-colonial intersectional framework. Such an approach requires that Indigenous research partners and participants guide or participate in aspects of the research process, including analysis and reporting. Moreover, data should remain firmly in the hands of Indigenous communities and participants through ethical agreements such as OCAP–Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession, developed by the First Nations Governance Centre (Hayward et al. 2021). What this looks like will vary depending on the community in which the research is being undertaken (Hayward et al. 2021). However, methodologically, researchers can use the guiding principle of TES and center relationality, respect, reciprocity, and reflexivity within our research frameworks to attend to relational and epistemic accountability (Haywood et al. 2021; Wilson 2008). In what follows, I provide reflections and examples of anti-colonial intersectional research practices that stem from my experience doing community-based research. I make connections to the seven principles Levac et al. (2018) outline for anti-colonial intersectional research. I begin by situating myself in this work as a practice of reflexivity, relationality, reciprocity, and respect to acknowledge that I write from multiple intersecting standpoints and acknowledge my own positionality in this work. This is followed by a discussion of residential schools, food, and colonial trauma to provide context for why an anti-colonial intersectional approach to research is needed with IFS activism and scholarship. In bringing together intersectionality and settler colonialism in an anti-colonial intersectional research practice, I suggest that we must find ways to recognize the centrality of land to Indigenous-settler relations, and have reverence for the ontological and spiritual relationships Indigenous communities, participants, and co-researchers have for non-human relationships to land, water, and animals in our research practices.
SITUATING MYSELF In the settler colonial state of Canada, where there is growing recognition of the impact of residential schools (TRC 2015a, 2015b) and ongoing violence of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls (MMIWG 2019), settler scholars have a responsibility for theorizing settler colonialism and our ethical responsibilities in relation to Indigenous Peoples and the land in our research and teaching (Carlson 2017; Regan 2010). As a White woman settler11 who owns land and has been socialized through persistent settler colonial systems, my privileged vantage point has obscured truths about the history of Canada, Indigenous
130 Research handbook on intersectionality Peoples, and residential schools which has required that I re-learn the history of the land my family settled four generations ago. For example, growing up and now working in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which is on the territory of the Anishinaabe and Metis peoples, and the Fort William First Nation in the Superior Robinson Treaty area signed in 1850, I was unaware that St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School operated in my community from 1870 to 1966, and like other residential schools, served the purpose of “separating Indigenous children from their families … weakening family ties and cultural linkages, and indoctrinating children into a new culture—the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society” (TRC 2015c, v). The impacts and trauma of residential schools on Indigenous Peoples, which I discuss more fully in the next section, have been intergenerational, and several students at the regional university where I teach are children and grandchildren of Survivors. As an anti-racist, feminist scholar activist, it is being in relationships with my students that has pushed me to undertake reflexive learning about settler colonialism in relation to my own history as a settler and think more deeply about land, systems of power and my ethical and epistemic responsibilities. Specifically, as a settler feminist food scholar-activist, it is necessary to center intersectionality alongside colonialism and settler colonialism in my research and teaching because of the centrality of land to food systems, food production and consumption (Young 2011).12 As a settler ally, I can never claim to know all the many ways in which Indigenous Peoples embody the land, their health and food systems, however I understand that these relationships are physical, emotional and spiritual (Ray et al. 2019, 55) and “achieved through relationships to other people, to the land and creation, and to our ancestors in the spiritual realm” (Dennis and Robin 2020, 4).
RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS, FOOD, AND COLONIAL TRAUMA In late May 2021, 215 unmarked Indigenous children’s graves were found at the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School on the land of the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓ pemc, or Interior-Salish Secwepemc (Shuswap) First Nations’ peoples of British Columbia (Dickson and Watson 2021). As the largest residential school in a system of over 160 schools spread across the country, the Kamloops Indian Residential School operated between 1890 and 1978. Since this news, over 1,300 burial sites have been located and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has documented 4,118 children’s deaths at residential schools between 1831 and 1996 (Ka’nhehsí:io Deer 2021; National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation 2022). For the children who were forced to attend, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015a), residential schools were “a systematic, government sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples” (153).13 The trauma woven onto the land through residential school gravesites manifests itself in numerous ways that are undeniably connected to food. Food in these schools was completely inadequate and severely rationed with corporeal punishment for any child who sought ways to feed themselves, their siblings, or friends (Dennis and Robin 2020; TRC 2015a). Colonial state policies sanctioned research on children through nutrition experiments in many residential schools, withholding foods and essential nutrition to study the effects of malnutrition on these young bodies (Burnett et al. 2016; Ray et al. 2019). This genocide corresponds with the words of Doris Young, a Survivor, who shared, “I was always hungry” (TRC 2015a, 72).
Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research 131 Children were forced to work in the institutional kitchens, on the farms and in the gardens of these schools and through assimilation and abuse, lost or displaced traditional food knowledges and skills such as hunting and harvesting, practiced by their families and in their communities (Dennis and Robin 2020; Pictou et al. 2021). For example, one residential school Survivor explained, she was not taught “how to be an Inuk woman, how to clean seal skins, and that kind of thing” (TRC 2015a, 182). Colonial heteropatriarchal beliefs about gender, femininity and masculinity, and food produced hegemonic gendered food experiences. Thus, girls were trained in domestic science and worked in the kitchens and gardens, while the boys labored on the farms and learned animal husbandry (Acoose 2016). Although the children were intimately involved with the production of food, they were rarely able to eat the fruits of their labor and instead were forced to eat “mush” or porridge, “vitamin enriched biscuits,” potatoes and canned foods, often served rancid or full of bugs (TRC 2015a, 76). Meat and fresh vegetables were reserved for the priests, nuns, staff, and government officials who might visit, with one Survivor noting “how well they ate compared to the food that was given to us students” (76). Food has long been used as a colonial tool of oppression and assimilation through the destruction of Indigenous food systems and by controlling food access through laws, policies, and programs including the Indian Act, the reserve system, hunting and fishing laws, family allowance, the 60s scoop and today through food subsidies programs (Burnett et al. 2016). As described by Robin et al. (2021) and Phillipps et al. (2022), hunting, harvesting, and family food practices continue to be constrained by settler colonial legislation, policies and programs that impact Indigenous communities and women’s ability to practice food sovereignty. Structural violence14 continues to disrupt Indigenous food systems and maintains the conditions of food insecurity through ongoing settler colonialism, which has severe social, economic, spiritual, and health consequences on Indigenous Peoples’ health and well-being (Phillipps et al. 2022; Ray et al. 2019; Robin et al. 2021). An intersectional approach to understanding how power intersects through settler colonialism as a system of power interlocking with other systems of oppression including heteropatriarchy and neoliberal capitalism can elucidate the inequalities experienced in specific contexts, such as Northern communities or urban environments, as I will describe. Kim et al. (2021) remind food scholars that “in order in analyze inequities in the Canadian food system, we must first acknowledge the ongoing processes of colonialism in Canada, in which settler control of land and subsequent migrations are directly involved in the ongoing violence against Indigenous lands, Peoples and food systems” (76). The ongoing interlocking gendered, racialized, and socio-economic forms of oppression through heteropatriarchy (e.g., gender structures and norms), neoliberal capitalism (globalized agriculture and resource extraction), and settler colonialism affect First Nations’ self-determination to food systems and the ability of individuals to practice their responsibilities for land and food (Burnett et al. 2016; Neufeld 2020; Phillipps et al. 2022). The impact of residential schools on Indigenous communities and individuals cannot be overstated (Marshal et al. 2014) and when it comes to food practices and IFS, this history must be centered in anti-colonial research with Indigenous communities (Dennis and Robin 2020).
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IFS, HEALTH, AND DOING COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH IFS broadly describes the resurgent relationships between Indigenous Peoples to the land, their food, and their food systems and provides a conceptual framework for health and healing (Dennis and Robin 2020; Martens et al. 2016; Ray et al. 2019).15 Ray et al. (2019) explain that viewing IFS in this way: acknowledges that relationships with land have been negatively impacted by colonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism and [IFS] thus seeks to decolonize these relations so that Indigenous people can be self-determining in their relationships to their food and food systems. (58)
IFS has existed since time immemorial, in the relationships, respect, reciprocity, and responsibilities that Indigenous Peoples have with the land (Morrison 2011, 2020), with Indigenous activists, scholars and their allies pointing to the health and healing benefits of IFS, which center on the land itself, as resistance to the trauma and health inequities produced through the violence of settler colonialism (Dennis and Robin 2020; Morrison 2020; Ray et al. 2019; Robidoux and Mason 2017). Research connecting Indigenous foods with health and identity through IFS land-based activities and scholarship expands our understanding of the deep and meaningful relationships Indigenous groups have with land and food and the need for self-determination in managing food, land, and health (Ray et al. 2019). As I discussed earlier in the chapter, there is a need to develop our understanding of the specific intersectional and anti-colonial research practices (methods, methodologies) to undertake research in a “good way” with Indigenous communities and peoples, particularly as a settler ally. What follows are reflections and examples of how I have engaged both intersectionality and Indigenous ways of knowing in research. First, in one community-based action research (CBAR) project, we took an explicit anti-colonial and intersectional research approach in decolonizing the research design. We applied TES as a guiding principle in the project thinking through intersectionality as a heuristic device to understand how power was operating through gender, Indigeneity, and settler identities in the context of the research. More specifically, we chose to employ an Intersectionality Policy Based Analysis (IPBA) (Hankvisky et al. 2014) to examine urban Indigenous women’s experiences of access to Indigenous foods (game, fish) and land in the context of provincial Natural Resources Management and Public Health policies regulating hunting and food respectively (Phillipps et al. 2022). As a framework for intersectional analysis, the IPBA: allows for understanding the fluidity and fluctuations of identities shaped by socio-historical conditions and social structures such as settler-colonialism, racism, and sexism to get at the deeper and more contextual meanings of Indigenous women’s individual and group experiences, needs, and strategic resistance to the existing policy while proposing policy solutions. (Phillipps et al. 2022, 3)
Specifically, the IPBA required attention on the social and historical context in which the participants lived and worked, and the assumptions built into the policies and an interrogation of power in how policies affected stakeholders.16 Stakeholders included Indigenous women who were seeking to access Indigenous foods in urban environments, non-Indigenous employees in Indigenous-serving organizations and policy makers, public health inspectors, and natural resource officers who go out on the land to monitor hunting and fishing. Using in-depth inter-
Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research 133 views, we explored the policies from the perspectives of those who experience the effects of the policies to those who manage and monitor the policies by undertaking in-depth interviews with these three stakeholder groups. Close attention was paid to the specific contexts of each community situated within the wider context of Indigenous-settler relations and settler colonial histories shaping the policies under consideration. We centered the stories and experiences shared by Indigenous women about their experiences in accessing Indigenous foods and lands to practice IFS within our policy analysis (Phillipps et al. 2022). Although there is not the space here to share detailed findings, briefly it is important to note that through the IPBA it was evident that the policies are tools of settler colonialism that reinforce unequal Indigenous-settler relations and structural violence, including a lack of access to Indigenous foods and ongoing food insecurity for Indigenous women and communities (Phillipps et al. 2022). Indigenous women participants were deeply distressed that they were unable to feed their families traditional cultural foods, which they saw not only as healthier, but as their inherent responsibility for caretaking the land. This was compounded by food insecurity for some and feeling unsafe in their communities because of the very real threats of violence and ongoing racism they experienced as Indigenous women (Phillipps et al. 2022). As this intersectional and anti-colonial research suggests, our concerns for environmental, food, and social justice must center the struggles and racism Indigenous women and communities face in enacting self-determination over food choices, and sovereignty over lands in relation to other interlocking axes of oppression such as White supremacy, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism. In addition to using the IPBA in our research framework and analysis, we paid attention to power within the research team using reflexivity to center the standpoints of our Indigenous women participants and the diverse knowledges they shared. Specifically, our Indigenous women participants were invited to became involved in the research process as co-researchers, assisting in the direction of the analysis and reporting because of their lived expertise. They were given copies of their interview transcripts and the preliminary analysis to review as well as drafts of journal articles prior to publication. Furthermore, relational accountability was practiced in regular meetings among co-researchers,17 where we clearly discussed that Indigenous women’s experiences and voices needed to be centered in the analysis and reporting. Through our intentional research practice, we were able to disrupt the power relations embedded in the relationships between our Indigenous participants and the settler co-researchers yet I am aware that power operating through racial differences is systemic and structural. At the individual level however, we were all able to deepen our relationships that have continued beyond the life of this project. Building alliances and solidarity through our research and learning is often discomforting (Kepkiewicz 2015). For me as a settler-scholar, I experienced discomfort in another community-based research project where as a co-researcher, I was invited to attend a culture camp in a remote northern community in Ontario that was focused on IFS and manoomin.18 Beyond the normal anxieties of travel, this trip entailed driving five plus hours into the bush on an old logging road and out of cell service range.19 Once at the camp, we were then able to put canoes in the lake and learn from Elders how to harvest manoomin with a traditional manoomin stick with our health team community partners from the Waasegiizhig Nanaandawe’iyewigamig Aboriginal Health Access Centre from Kenora, and high school youth from the community (Ray et al. 2019). This experience on the land and water was unforgettable. First, the beauty of the lake and the experience of witnessing the manoomin
134 Research handbook on intersectionality plants growing in the lake was breathtakingly beautiful, peaceful, and calm. Canoeing is a very mindful activity, and this was enhanced by learning how to harvest manoomin with other Indigenous and settler participants, as a practice of IFS. Physically, however, it was also uncomfortable because it rained most of the time we were there, and I was cold. I also felt uneasy at times because I was unfamiliar with the cultural food practices spiritually connected to land and water. I did not know what to expect in each moment that we were there. Although I was outside my comfort zone, everyone participating was kind and generous in explaining the process and detailing changes to the area, the land and water, that they have witnessed over time through their annual visits to this ceremonial harvesting place. My experience of gathering data in this setting was truly unforgettable. Again, I approached this research and learning using intersectionality as a heuristic device to organize my understanding of Indigenous-settler relationships within the context of the settler colonial state and its histories of settlement and displacement. In this research, I practiced humility, reverence, respect, and an openness to learn new perspectives on IFS including the meanings of land, food, and water. My role was that of a learner and participant and the Elders and Knowledge Keepers were there to guide our gathering of knowledge, which stayed with the community. As my work has evolved, I have come to believe that in anti-colonial intersectional community-based research, the most important aspect of the research are relationships and practicing relational accountability with epistemic accountability as the goal. Through reciprocity and respect, centering Indigenous ways of knowing in the research process with Indigenous partners, the research focus changed as we consciously disrupt power relations in the knowledge gathering process (Absolon 2022; Levac et al. 2018). For example, attention is placed on the ceremonies of research, which include gifting Elders with tobacco and Knowledge Keepers with other gifts such as food, blankets, or scarves, in addition to paying honorariums for their time and sharing of knowledge(s). As with any relationship, building trust takes considerable time and often goes beyond the expectations or timelines that are explicitly and implicitly communicated through Western research norms (funding agencies, ethics boards, graduate school timelines). Imposed timelines are challenging to overcome when relationships and relational accountability are central to the research (Etmanski et al. 2014; Smith 1999). Community-based research emphasizes the co-creation of knowledge with Indigenous communities whereby research partners and participants lead the research process in determining research goals, aims, and questions (Etmanski et al. 2014; Hayward et al. 2021). Like other frameworks of PAR, community-based research is participatory, and the goal is social justice. Smith (1999) explains: In all community approaches, process – that is, methodology and method – is highly important. In many projects the process is far more important than the outcome. Processes are expected to be respectful, to enable people to heal and educate. They are expected to lead one small step further towards self-determination. (127–8)
Smith’s words resonate with my experiences of doing community-based research within an anti-colonial and intersectional research framework. I understand that the process of conducting research facilitates my learning not only in terms of research outcomes, but also in terms of the process and building research relationships that are reciprocal and respectful.
Anti-colonial praxis in community-based research 135
CONCLUSION There are many synergies between intersectional research approaches and Indigenous ways of knowing that can guide our research practice, particularly when we incorporate TES. First, in a settler colonial framework, our research must be grounded in the specific socio-historical and political contexts to understand how axes of oppression and power are operating specifically in relation to the social identities we are studying. Levac et al. (2018) provide principles for anti-colonial intersectional research which include relationality, reciprocity, reflexivity, respect, reverence, responsivity, and responsibility that can act as guideposts for our research practice (10). As discussed and illustrated in my reflections and examples I provided, the principles outlined by Levac et al. (2018) can guide our research practices, particularly when undertaking community-based research. As researchers we can commit to centering relationships and relationality in the research process through reflexive processes that are respectful, reciprocal, responsive, and reverent. Rice et al. (2019, 415) state, “reflexivity disrupts power relations embedded in acts of naming and narrating others from the top down and allows space for research to be understood as a dynamic process that transforms researchers and participants” saying further that “such reflexivity can facilitate cross-movement building.” For settlers, this might mean recognizing when we are complicit in maintaining settler colonialism even when we wish to work in solidarity and as an ally with Indigenous Peoples (Lawrence and Dua 2005). Although tensions can arise in reflexive research practices when individuals do not attend to the power dynamics embedded in positionalities, it is perhaps “the best method researchers have for building inclusive theoretical perspectives and transformative movements from divided, asymmetrical interests” (Rice et al. 2019, 416). Finally, an anti-colonial intersectional approach to research must begin by recognizing land as another axis of oppression that interlocks with gender, race, sexuality among other intersections of identity. This is particularly important given the centrality of land, and the lack of self-determination over land and food to understanding the violence and harms caused by settler colonialism in Indigenous communities. Although not without tensions, acknowledging land as an essential relationship and relational to other social identities is important for thinking about how we overcome the “incommensurability” of settler colonialism (Arvin et al. 2013, 16). An anti-colonial intersectional approach to research which centers land in its analyses may help to facilitate deeper alliances and improve Indigenous-settler relations with shared goals for social, environmental, and food justice.
NOTES 1. My use of “Indigenous Peoples” in no way asserts a pan Indigenous perspective as I recognize that there are many Nations on Turtle Island and beyond. 2. Feminist Indigenous scholars, such as Pictou (RAIR 2022) and Dennis and Robin (2020, 9) see tensions and contradictions with the word “sovereignty” because of its imperialist connotations of land. 3. As earlier chapters have discussed, Black women’s intersecting experiences of race and gender were articulated through the writings of Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper long before Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality. Zitkala-Sa wrote an essay in 1924, “Regardless of Sex or Age” observing Indigenous women’s intersectional experiences (Nason 2010, 52, in Clark 2016, 49).
136 Research handbook on intersectionality 4. For example, agricultural labor exploitation continues in Canada through the federal government’s SWAP program, or Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, which enables corporate and family farm employers to hire temporary foreign workers (TFW), often coming from Mexico and the Caribbean. See Weiler (2018). 5. This has enormous implications on Indigenous women’s access to housing, health, social and economic benefits. 6. Western knowledge systems include natural and social science models grounded in positivism (quantitative) as well as interpretive approaches (qualitative) that are uncritical in their conceptions of power. 7. Elizabeth Carlson (2017) talks about this more holistically in terms of knowing. 8. Their work examines Evelyn Fox Keller’s work (1983, 1985) on Barbara McClintock, who as a geneticist had research relationships with plants, specifically, the corn that she studied calling them her “friends,” disrupting the conventions of research in her field, reorienting ideas about ethical and epistemological accountability (Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 126–128). Moreover, their work builds on the scholarship of Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code (1995) and their work on knowing, ethics and epistemology as these are shaped by relationality and accountability. 9. I have had the privilege of learning on the land from my father, who grew up on a homestead in Northern Ontario, but also have learned so much about Indigenous understandings of land from the book, Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) by Robin Wall Kimmerer and my Indigenous friends and colleagues. 10. See also Collins and Bilge (2016, 73–4). 11. My use of “settler” is to signal my privilege to land and in this work as it denotes a relationality in signifying my relationship to colonialism (Flowers 2015, 33–4). 12. As Young (2011) states, “those who are beneficiaries of racialized structures with unjust outcomes … can properly be called to a special moral and political responsibility to recognize our privilege, to acknowledge its continuities with historical injustice, and to act on an obligation to work on transforming the institutions that offer this privilege” (187). 13. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 2007, followed the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history: the Indian Residential Schools Agreement. The Commission produced key reports documenting the experiences of over 6,500 Survivors and witnesses in 2015 with 94 Calls to Action, with recommendations 71–76 urging Canadians to recognize the Missing Children and burial sites at residential schools and commemorate and honor the memories of the children who attended these institutions (TRC 2015d). 14. I use Farmer’s (2005) concept of structural violence here as it is the state that produces and reproduces the social conditions that lead to discrimination and racism. 15. Settler colonialism produces tensions between the food sovereignty movement in Canada and IFS as any agriculture or food production in so-called Canada is happening on stolen land. See Kepkiewicz (2017). 16. See Phillipps et al. (2022) for a detailed discussion of the questions explored in our IPBA analysis. 17. Although all six Indigenous women participants were invited to participate, only three took up an active role in the research process itself. 18. Manoomin is the Anishinaabe word for wild rice. 19. I am an avid camper with experience canoeing and I was familiar with northern Ontario having grown up here, so I had some idea about what bush roads and a bush camp entailed.
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Section IIb
Critical sexuality studies
9. Researching sexuality and state Jyoti Puri
On rare occasions the state, once described by Michel Foucault as the cold monster, brings sheer joy. Every once in a while, the courts make us collectively believe in the possibility of justice and the righting of wrongs. On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India decriminalized homosexuality in no uncertain terms, and in soaring language affirmed the fundamental rights and dignities of LGBT persons. Images of joyous celebrations marking this momentous ruling filled my computer screen as I followed the news from a distance. This moment had been long in the making. Although the first writ petition against the antisodomy law was filed in 1992, efforts to decriminalize same-sex sexual activity began gathering momentum after 2001. At the time an HIV/AIDS organization, Naz Foundation (India) Trust, filed a petition in Delhi High Court asking that the law no longer apply to same-sex adult consensual sexual activity in private. While this legal challenge was not well known initially, I chanced on the information in 2002 and began formally researching the emerging campaign for legal reform. Additional fieldwork over the years provided insight into the winding legal process, which resulted in the upholding of the antisodomy law in 2013. But the momentum against the criminalization of same-sex sexual activity led to a fresh writ filed in the Supreme Court by a group of concerned citizens, resulting in the 2018 historic ruling. The first round of fieldwork that I conducted in 2003 was concentrated on understanding how the impetus toward decriminalization emerged, why the focus on legal (as opposed to social) reform, and what were the possibilities and limitations of a legal campaign. Issuing from an intersectional methods perspective, my understanding was primarily framed around sexuality and the state, especially law and its enforcement. This perspective meant seeing the state not as a monolith, but as an assemblage of institutions, agencies, archives, practices, and discourses. Following this, it became important to do fieldwork among the Delhi police to understand how the antisodomy law is implemented and gather data from the National Crime Records Bureau about the volume of police complaints filed under this section; it became necessary to conduct research at other state agencies, for example, the Judicial Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is charged with responding to writ petitions, and obtain archival data on the legal cases registered under the section. Taking an intersectional methods lens also entailed beginning with sexuality’s tight links to issues of class and gender, since the antisodomy law does not have a uniform impact on subjects across differences in class, gender identity, and gender expression. For example, many of the activists that I spoke to early on registered their concerns that the Naz Foundation writ had included the caveat of privacy to the legalization of same-sex sexual activity. This would potentially expose LGBT and other sexually and gender-diverse groups who did not have access to private spaces, a matter of class privilege, to being criminalized even if homosexuality were to be decriminalized. An intersectional methods perspective too fostered alertness to the relevance of additional social factors. In this case, subsequent rounds of fieldwork revealed the relevance of religion and racialization to the antisodomy law. Furthermore, given the Indian context, it was clear from the outset that the intersectional lens needed to be complemented with a transnational 143
144 Research handbook on intersectionality approach, for it was necessary to place the antisodomy law within histories of the colonial and postcolonial state to understand how the law first came to be and how it had been used over the course of some 150 years. Taking such an approach would also link the emergence of the legal campaign to other such initiatives in other parts of the world, for example, the historic Lawrence and Garner v. Texas ruling in 2003 that invalidated sodomy laws, thereby setting the stage for gains at the federal level, including marriage equality. This chapter showcases and highlights the indispensability of an intersectional and transnational methods perspective to field research. At one level, it delves into how to assure attention to the intersections and transnational connections that shaped the institutionalization of the antisodomy law in India as well as the struggle to overturn it. This involves investigating the transnational context of the antisodomy law’s introduction, its racialized and gendered colonial origins, and the intersections of gender, class, race, and religion that shape the implementation of the law. This stance shapes the data that needs to be gathered from the archive as well as from the field; indeed, as is explored below in more detail, an intersectional and transnational methods perspective shapes decisions on what counts as data and the significance of what seems to merely be a sidenote or prelude to the gathering of data. At another level, this chapter explores the intersectional and transnational aspects of research itself. It alerts us that matters of gender, sexuality, class, and nation are ever-present in fieldwork, not just in the substance of what we are trying to research, but also in the process of research and data gathering. This chapter models an intersectional and transnational methods perspective by taking the position that the antisodomy law must be understood in relation to colonial histories as well as the contemporary context. Weaving together intersectional and transnational approaches, it highlights the relevance of ciswomen, heterosexuality, racialized religious differences, and gender-variant groups, namely Hijras, to the governance of the antisodomy law. The third section of the chapter reflects on the research process itself, before ending with some points for further consideration.
SECTION 377: COLONIALISM, RACE, GENDER, AND BODIES An intersectional and transnational methods perspective begins with paying attention to the colonial racialized and gendered histories of the antisodomy law. Section 377 was introduced in India in 1860 by the British colonial state and was part of 511 codes that became the Indian Penal Code developed by the colonial state to standardize legal systems in the colony. The language of the law was deliberately vague, requiring judicial interpretation of what constitutes carnal intercourse against the order of nature, and it remained unchanged when India became a sovereign state in 1947. Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.
Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section. At the same time, it is important to note that Section 377 was uniquely a product of the colonial encounter since neither England nor precolonial India had a parallel to it. Therefore, accounting for the introduction of the penal code has meant bringing the spaces of colony and
Researching sexuality and state 145 metropole into the same analytical field, leading to two kinds of speculations on how it came to be. David Skuy (1998) has suggested that the penal code that India received actually reflected the needs of England, given its messy, bloody, and inchoate legal system at the time. This is to say, the desire for legal reform was displaced on to the colonies in a way that could not be undertaken in the metropole. However, another angle of critique suggests that the Indian Penal Code was the colonial state’s effort to harness lawlessness among European communities in the colony (Kolsky 2005). My point here is not to settle these differences, but to underscore the transnational colonial conditions that allowed for the imposition of the Indian Penal Code and more specifically the introduction of the antisodomy provision. What is indisputable, though, from this engagement with colonial history is that these laws were part of the broader racialized and gendered project of colonial reform that had been evolving in the prior decades. For example, widow immolation, known as Sati, was outlawed just a few years prior to when the first draft of the penal code was submitted in 1837. Its prohibition was justified by the colonial state as a matter of improving Indian civilization and transitioning it toward modernity. The point is not that Sati was a supportable practice, but that the British colonial state took a custom associated with a select group of upper-caste Hindus and rendered it into a reflection of Indian culture and civilization. The additional point is that the state justified colonial occupation by advancing discourses of improvement and progress that were typically related to issues of body, race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, if abolishing Sati was an alibi for justifying colonial rule, then so was the introduction of the antisodomy law. It was rooted in the colonial beliefs that the natives were prone to sexual deviance and sexual licentiousness. The irony, of course, is that a law that has come to be seen as so problematic in the West, now understood as a sign of anti-modernity, was first introduced in India and other colonies by the British under the pretext of modernization and curbing racially based proclivities toward sexual deviance. Lawmaking, though, is not just a matter of imposing social order and governance but also about the making of subjectivities, altering social relationships and popular consciousness (Haldar 2007; Merry 2000). This is especially the case in colonial contexts, where law is designed to ensure racialized forms of subjugation rather than notions of citizenship (Sundar 2011). Thus, even though case law indicates that the antisodomy provision was infrequently used during the colonial period as well as in postcolonial India, it introduced, institutionalized, and amplified homophobic beliefs that still exist. Alongside its troubling symbolism, the law has been used to harass and inflect violence on gender and sexually diverse groups in India. Its existence became increasingly relevant as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India that led to the targeting of marginalized communities, including gay men, Hijras, sex workers, and others. Section 377 became an impediment for sexuality and gender rights activists who were not only challenging the state’s targeting of these marginalized groups but also seeking rights and protections for them. It was too symbolic of the warping of the Indian sexual-social fabric that began with the British colonial state and endured in the postcolonial nation, thereby accounting for why the 2018 Supreme Court judgment was welcomed as the overdue reversal of a 158-year alien history. When I began researching this history as well as the efforts to overturn this law, a few writers had already paved the way by discussing the law and the body of cases related to it (Bhaskaran 2001, 2004; A. Gupta 2002). Their insights were particularly useful in apprehending the intersections between sexuality, gender, and class, as well as the inconsistencies between the letter of the law and how it was used in the courts. For example, even though
146 Research handbook on intersectionality the number of cases is relatively small across the long arc, Section 377 has been wielded as a threat by police and ordinary and marginalized people to harass, threaten, and harm people thought to be gender or sexually diverse, a point confirmed by two key reports (Fernandez and N.B. 2003; PUCL-K 2003). What became clear, then, is that gaining a fuller understanding of the antisodomy law required broadening the scope of research to include key state institutions implicated in upholding and implementing the law. Alongside analysing case law related to Section 377, I extended the research to Delhi police, police crime reports, the unit charged with responding to legal challenges on behalf of the government of India, the National AIDS Control Organization, among others. At the same time, I also met with individual activists and organizational representatives who had a stake in the outcome of the legal campaign. Stretching across five of the major cities, these individuals and groups also included those who were opposed to the decriminalization of homosexuality. Below, I focus primarily on my interactions with Delhi police, while also gesturing to encounters with other state officials and individual activists.
RESEARCH CHRONICLES: CISWOMEN, CHILDREN, AND HETEROSEXUALITY On a summer late morning, I find myself in the office of a senior police official, N.N. Khanna, at the Police Headquarters in Delhi. I was directed to him by the Delhi Police Commissioner after our abortive meeting during his open office hours. Upon being ushered in alongside a few other people seeking the ear of the commissioner, I was given only a few minutes. Dismissing my inquiry about the police response to the Naz writ, he took offense as I shared the allegations of police violence against LGBT persons in Delhi and discounted any merit to them. Then relenting as I pressed for the police response to the Naz petition, he sent me on to Khanna as the official charged with responding to writs involving the Delhi police. Although Khanna was not aware of the Naz writ, he too sought to discount my interest in the antisodomy law by noting that “This is a peripheral aspect. Because of the total volume of crime, very little attention is paid to Section 377 by the police.” Remarkably, he instructed me that should I wish to make any meaningful impact, I ought to turn attention to crime against women. He continued, “The social attitudes to women’s issues and gay criminal activity cannot be compared. You should be studying Section 375 (rape law), not 377. There is more social impact of 375. If you want to make a contribution, you should study crime against women.” This was by no means an anomaly, for on other occasions too state officials had exhorted me to focus on crime against women, especially heterosexual crime. In the case of a senior-ranking policewoman, a Joint Commissioner of Police who oversaw the Crime against Women police cell, there was puzzlement: why would I want to focus on Section 377? It could be argued that moments such as these belong in the margins of fieldnotes and are merely preludes to obtaining data. But an intersectional and transnational methods perspective suggests otherwise, for such field-based happenstances are indications of dominant ideologies and discourses that shape the governance of sexuality and its intersections with other social factors. Such moments can be as important to the research as are conventionally defined data—that is, number of criminal complaints, case law and such. Indeed, understanding and analysing these encounters alongside numbers, interviews, and other research modes expands and enriches the very conception of data. Juxtaposed with background research and previous
Researching sexuality and state 147 round of interviews conducted, these field encounters shed light on the tight intersections between the antisodomy law and heterosexual violence against women. From an intersectional methods perspective, I paid attention to how these links have been encoded in the Indian Penal Code, where Section 377 follows Sections 375 and 376, which criminalize and punish rape. The three sections are part of the penal code’s Chapter 16, covering other violent offenses relating to the body, including kidnapping and assault. Furthermore, Sections 375 and 376 were constructed around rape, which meant that forms of heterosexual assault exceeding narrow definitions of rape (as forced penile-vaginal penetration) were sometimes prosecuted under Section 377. This is to say, the provision of carnal intercourse against the order of nature was used to fill the gap created by rape laws. To assure an intersectional methods stance, I gathered and analysed case law related to Section 377 case law from 1860 onwards. The law was most typically used to prosecute sexual assault on boys, since they were not included as victims under the rape laws. In fact, the vast majority of cases under this section have to do with sexual assault on boys and girls, typically young children, by adult men. Alok Gupta (2002, 2011) notes that more than 60 percent of the cases prosecuted involved child sexual abuse and that Section 377 trended toward increased use in the 1990s to prosecute sexual assaults on girls. As I delved further into the archival record, including not only case law, but also sampling police crime reports related to the antisodomy law, I found an even higher percentage related to violence against children. From the 66 Delhi police crime reports, it turns out that as many as 59 entailed crimes against children, while the remaining were complaints of assaults on young adult men. This legal landscape changed after the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act was passed in 2012, recognizing boys as well as girls as victims of sexual violence. Similarly, the enactment of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 introduced important changes to the rape laws, expanding their scope and the implementation processes. As Sunita V.S. Bandewar, Amita Pitre, and Lakshmi Lingam (2018) note, this Act introduced long overdue changes in combatting sexual assault, including making it easier for survivors to report the violence, providing them care, issuing guidelines for maintaining their dignity and autonomy, safeguarding their rights, among others. At the same time, the links between the antisodomy law and heterosexuality do not explain why officials repeatedly dismissed my inquiries related to the antisodomy law, while seeking to redirect them to the issue of sexual violence against women (and girls). Their responses speak to the different legal as well as social logics that underlie the juxtapositions of histories of Sections 375, 376, and 377 interwoven in the Indian Penal Code and in case law. While the rape laws pivot around the question of consent—whether a woman could or did consent to the sexual activity—consent is seen as irrelevant to Section 377. Regardless of whether adults consent to same-sex sexual activity, it is criminalized. Where rape laws are meant to protect girls and women, the antisodomy law is meant to punish and prohibit. While rape as heterosexual violence is presumed to be “natural,” same-sex sexual activity is not. Thus, by seeking to deflect attention from the antisodomy law, Khanna and other officials were reflecting deep-seated legal and social discourses about the wrongfulness of same-sex sexual practices, regardless of consent. Officials’ attempts to turn the spotlight on to crime against women was an extension of the ways that heterosexual violence has been discursively rendered into a problem of global, transnational as well as national proportions. Since the colonial period, the “woman question” has been used as the line to draw differences between colonizers and the colonized, which is to say,
148 Research handbook on intersectionality matters of women’s social reform was central to rationalizing colonial rule and occupation. In the postcolonial era, women’s issues, especially heterosexual violence against women, are now underwritten by transnational organizations, including the United Nations and others, as measures of cultures and modernity. As Inderpal Grewal (1999) remarks, the need to protect and endow women with rights was supported by international and national development agencies and backed by streams of aid and funding. Placing the burden on states in the Global South, such as India, for addressing the problem of violence against women, this discourse of women’s rights are human rights reshaped older colonial hierarchies. Western nations encouraged and incentivized states like India to adopt the discourse of violence against women, even though feminist critics have repeatedly noted that it has expanded the reach of governance in women’s lives without necessarily bringing relief from violence. Nonetheless, the discourse of crime against women was repeatedly used by state officials as a counterpoint to same-sex sexualities and to subvert the possibilities of decriminalizing homosexuality. At another moment of fieldwork, as I was gathering archival data related to Section 377, I visited the National Crime Records Bureau. I was told by the first bureaucrat that archival data on police crime reports related to Section 377 did not exist, but she offered me information and a stack of reports on crime against women. When I pressed the issue, she sent me on to a senior official, who echoed her. I heard the same refrain from each official at this organization that is charged with gathering, processing, and tabulating data on a variety of crimes. These responses speak volumes about the ways that crime against women, especially heterosexual crime, has been rendered into a social problem, while issues related to the dignity and rights of LGBT persons in India were being denied or discounted. Indeed, it was over the long haul of the legal campaign to decriminalize homosexuality, including the impact of other social forces such as HIV/AIDS-related activism, neoliberal policies, and expanded internet access, that changed national conversations about sexual orientation. LGBT rights are increasingly embraced as signs and symbols of a nation aspiring toward modernity (Rao 2015).
RACIALIZING RELIGION One afternoon, I accompanied a Naz Foundation outreach worker to a police station in Delhi while he conducted an informational session for police constables. The aim of this program was to create awareness and provide information related to HIV/AIDS. In the second part of the session, I led a discussion among the 25 constables about Section 377, seeking to understand what they knew about it and how they implement it. As they offered examples of the kinds of behaviors that fall under the antisodomy law’s purview, I was caught off guard when one of the constables said, “It happens more among Muslims.” At a subsequent group discussion, this time with middle-rung police officers who were gathered for a gender sensitization program, I heard similar sentiments. Several police officers asserted that most crimes related to the antisodomy law are committed by Muslims. Even though I shared evidence from my research that this was neither the case nor could it be statistically possible in a country that is dominated by Hindus, they remained unconvinced as a group. The intersectional and transnational methods perspective that led me conduct research among the police also compelled me to analyse the ongoing histories and implications of police associations of Muslims with sexual crime and deviance. In India, Muslims are the largest religious minority, and they are beleaguered with harmful stereotypes, especially
Researching sexuality and state 149 related to myths of hypersexuality. For example, the falsehood of a “Muslim growth rate” pervades the Indian context, especially among majoritarian Hindus. It is premised on the idea that Muslims are expanding at a much faster rate than other religious groups, posing a potential threat to India as a Hindu nation. Popular discourses in social media, for example, have repeatedly advanced claims that Muslims constitute 30 percent of the population even though a recent study confirms otherwise.1 This study systematically shows that although India’s population grew significantly between 1951 and 2011, Hindus still make-up almost 80 percent of the population and Muslims account for less than 15 percent.2 Contrary to myths about the “over-sexed Muslim and his over-fertile Muslim wife/wives,” this study reveals that Muslims have experienced the sharpest decline in fertility rates in recent decades.3 The myth of Muslim overpopulation is not limited to India, but has transnational resonance wherever there is sizeable Muslim presence as immigrants or minoritized groups.4 In the Indian context, though, these representations of sexual and reproductive excess are also compounded by pejorative forms of queering. Paola Bacchetta (1999) notes that Hindu nationalists assign queer gender and sexuality to Indian Muslims, who are cast as hyper-masculine and hypersexual, sexually violent as well as sexually deviant. However, these projections of “queer” sexuality are not limited to the Hindu right wing, but also resonate among ordinary people and among police. An intersectional and transnational methods perspective induces attention to the colonial histories of such police biases against Muslim communities in India. The first strand of colonial impact has to do with the institution of policing, forged by the Indian Police Act of 1861 and the Indian Evidence Act of 1872. Intended to strengthen colonial control over native society, policing in India, David Arnold (1990) suggests, was derived from another part of the British empire, namely Ireland. He further notes that institutional hierarchy was distinctively racial as relatively few European officers occupied the highest positions out of an entrenched distrust of Indians, and a low opinion of their abilities and character. At the same time, recruitment policies disaggregated people into convenient stereotypes of “martial races,” giving preference to some groups over others and recruiting from the “low castes” only when others were unavailable for recruitment.5 Most importantly, the role of the police was to impose and maintain law and order and the constabulary was accountable to the colonial authorities. The institution was not designed to protect and serve native communities. The second related strand, which amplifies police hostility against Muslim and other minoritized communities, such as Dalits, Sikhs, and others, has to do with what is described as communalism in the Indian context. Rooted in British colonial administrative politics, and coming into usage by the 1920s, the term communalism continues to be widely used in India to represent sectarian differences, as well as mutual prejudices and hostilities, and symbolizes loyalty to one’s community over nation and an impediment to patriotism. It is predominantly applied to religious differences, and it is believed to be the primary challenge facing Indian nationalism—loyalty to faith over nation, intercommunal strife, competition for resources, politicization of religion, dissidence in Kashmir, and (Muslim) terrorism. Since most of Delhi police is constituted by the ethnically and religiously distinct Hindus from northern India, prejudicial associations of (homo)sexual crimes with Muslims by police could be seen as communalist. But a grounding in these legacies and the entrenched nature of the anti-Muslim biases revealed through the fieldwork highlight the need to rethink dominant frameworks, such as communalism. The deep-seated nature of these biases and prejudices led to a reconsideration of the extent to which communalism is a useful analytical tool in the Indian context
150 Research handbook on intersectionality and whether the concept of racialization is better suited to understanding these entrenched anti-Muslim prejudices. Gyanendra Pandey (2006) observes that the term communalism persists, despite its declining relevance in the Indian context, not only because it serves as a shared language for discussion but also because of intellectual inertia. It is less and less useful to explaining religious tension and strife, for typically Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Dalits are the ones who are grievously hurt through instigations of majoritarian Hindu groups with the implicit and explicit collusion of state institutions and agents. When violence broke out in Northeast Delhi in March 2020, the worst such violence in decades, it was described as religious riots among Hindus and Muslims. But the reality of it is that among the 53 dead and the hundreds wounded most casualties were borne by Muslims.6 In the past decades, what has occurred are not so many riots or mutual conflict and hostility as much as genocides, pogroms, forcible conversions to Hinduism, torching and looting of the property of minority religious communities (alongside inter-caste, inter-ethnic violence, and gender-based violence). The term communalism is also inadequate to understanding the institutionalization of socio-economic inequalities and discriminations that are captured, for example, by the Sachar (2006) committee report, “Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India.”7 In its survey of 13 states in India, the report documents widespread and disproportionate gaps faced by Muslim communities across educational attainment, income, bank credit, and high-level government jobs. It too identifies widespread perceptions among Muslim communities of prejudice and discrimination toward them. Increasingly, in lieu of communalism, what is required is an understanding of the ways that Indian Muslims are racialized in this majoritarian Hindu context. Even though Hindus and Muslims are not phenotypically different, majoritarian Hindu discourses give a racial character to Islam, cultural practices associated with Muslims, and the presence of Muslims in India. For example, Muslims are cast as alien outsiders and are seen as innately physically and psychically different from Hindus. These racist stereotypes also drive a Hindu politics of Muslim extermination, not only in the form of periodic genocides but also in the routinized targeting and killing of Muslims (Bharucha 2003). As a result, an intersectional and transnational methods perspective prompted me to innovate an analysis of racialization to understand the perilous implications of police associations of Muslims with sexual crime and deviance.
POLITICS OF GENDER-VARIANT BODIES At other moment during the meeting with Delhi police constables, attention turned to Hijras. As the discussions related to Section 377 progressed in each of the groups, I shared that my field research among Hijras had resulted in reports of widespread police harassment and violence against them due to their gender non-conformity and sexual practices. Outraged by these accounts, constables vehemently accused them of being criminals, thieves, and sex workers and therefore requiring pre-emptive policing (read: police violence). And, the constables charged, using the English language word, even in a discussion largely in the language of Hindi, “Hijras are antipolice.” Delhi constables’ outpourings come in response to the mention of the grievous police violence reported by Hijras. They are clearly offended by such allegations and react by highlighting the ways that Hijras transgress law and all manner of social norms. Unwilling to accept any criticism implied by Hijras, they go so far as to say that Hijras
Researching sexuality and state 151 are anti-police, thereby foregrounding the puzzle of how to understand its meanings, ironies, and links to criminality and sexual transgressions. An intersectional and transnational methods perspective, which led to research among the police is equally indispensable to an analysis of these police responses, for such a perspective highlights the relevance of nation, state, and law to matters of gender and sexuality. To say that Hijras are antipolice is to imply that they are opposed to the police, against the police, or antagonistic to them. As a prefix, “anti” derives from Greek and is frequently associated with speaking against, contradicting, rivaling, or really, being on opposite side of figures of authority. Thus, the constables quite specifically suggest that to be anti-police is synonymous with being anti-law and anti-state, a point further confirmed by the accusations that Hijras are thieves, sex workers, and such. Insofar as the why and wherefore of the state is to manage and regulate on behalf of the collective, anti-police also takes on the connotations of being anti-social and anti-national. To an extent, the constables’ responses reflect the deep-seated popularly held beliefs, especially among the urban middle classes, that Hijras are utterly without shame, but they also trail colonial and postcolonial histories of law and law enforcement that render Hijras as adversaries. Once again, engaging the colonial archive is a central part of an intersectional and transnational perspective, and of particular note is the Criminal Tribes’ Act (CTA), 1871, requiring all groups assumed to be “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences” to register with the local authorities.8 Discursively producing the very social categories intended for regulation, the law sought to suppress “hereditary criminals” believed to transmit crime from one generation to another, much like how caste-based professions were thought to be passed down (Radhakrishna 2001). So-called Eunuchs were given a prominent place in the Act, requiring that all names, residences, and properties of those who might be even reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children (in order to expand their community), or violating the antisodomy law introduced in 1861, be registered with the Superintendent of Police. The CTA’s apparatus of surveillance and regulation was chiefly enforced by police— through extensively monitoring Hijras, their homes and activities, but also controlling their movements by determining whether they could leave a village or change residence. The Act was primarily the outcome of strongly held colonial prejudices against itinerant groups and their arguable proclivities to licentiousness that seemed to the colonial authorities especially pronounced in the case of Hijras (Narrain 2004). As Meena Radhakrishna (2001) argues, itinerant groups were viewed as difficult to control, believed to be perennially disloyal and missing respectable codes of conduct and norms of morality. As street entertainers and performers at public events, weddings, births, and such, Hijras appeared all the more suspect, accounting for why the Act criminalized activities that were their sources of livelihood. Perhaps the most egregious violation per the colonial moral order was that Hijras were feminine presenting, frequently dressed in feminine clothing, which was also explicitly outlawed. Indeed, one of the first cases populating the annals of the colonial antisodomy law involves a Hijra, Khairati, who appeals her conviction for a “crime,” since the allegation of crime was not supported by any evidence, witness, or indication of harm to anyone (Arondekar 2009). Since the threshold for CTA’s enforcement was as low as “if the local government has reason to believe,” it was open to indiscriminate use, leading to more abuses in the 1920s when the Act granted police added powers to inspect residences, summon people to the police station, report daily to the police, and more.
152 Research handbook on intersectionality Even though Hijras were denotified as a criminal group in postcolonial India, they are still seen as having an “innate” propensity to crime and are regulated accordingly. In the contemporary setting, they are subject to the cluster of colonial codes that became the legal backbone of the postcolonial nation, especially the edicts against same-sex sexual practices (Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) and voluntary or involuntary castration (Sections 320 and 322 of the Indian Penal Code), and the more banal but more frequently used laws aimed at curbing vagrancy and public nuisance (Puri 2016). The anti-prostitution legislation, Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, was also amended in 1986 to be gender neutral, thereby further targeting Hijras and other non-conforming gender subjects. Since, aside from being opportunistic, the police take their cue from these laws and dominant social moralities, Hijras are among the communities most vulnerable to them. The handful of reports and scholarly accounts detail intense police abuse and violence toward Hijras; the report, Human Rights Violations against the Transgender Community, by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties describes the routine and egregious police physical and sexual violence to which Hijras are subjected on and off the streets, which is also confirmed by another damning report, Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police.9 When police wield allegations of subaltern communities being anti-police, they are in fact pointing to the deeply subjective and affective aspects of law and law enforcement. In this institutional view, embattled communities pose an intrinsic threat and are imminently out of order. Such perceptions are equaled and exceeded with law enforcement practices aimed at neutralizing the threat—whether by use of excessive force, subduing, arresting, sexual harassment, among others. Even as histories of law and law enforcement construct these communities as essentially non-compliant, constabularies expect that they will unquestioningly submit to them in ways that are consonant with militarized environments. Compliance is often not enough to shield the vulnerable, but it appears to be a prerequisite for organizing relations between communities seen as outside the pale of the law, state, and society and those who embody them. The perceived failure of Hijras to unquestioningly succumb justifies extra-judicial policing that is, in fact, normalized.
REFLECTING ON RESEARCH: INTERSECTIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES An intersectional and transnational perspective provides an invaluable window to the transnational histories of the antisodomy law that intersect with cisgender women, heterosexuality, racialized religious communities, and gender-variant groups like Hijras. At the same time, it also calls attention beyond the content of research to the research process itself. One aspect that stands out has to do with the patronizing stances of several state agents that I encountered throughout the fieldwork, whereby officials such as Khanna sought to inform me as experts on matters related to policing, law, and governance. Such responses are to be expected, for as Max Weber (1978) has noted, they are engendered by bureaucracies and their hierarchical and status-driven structures. But they are also heightened by heterosexual and gendered hierarchies—the maleness of the respondents and the embodied presence of the researcher. In this case, my status as a relatively young cisgender, presumably heterosexual woman, with a caste Hindu name routinely impacted the nature of my interactions in the field and the kinds of data that I was able to obtain.
Researching sexuality and state 153 These identity markers helped get me an audience with state officials and other senior figures during the fieldwork, even as they shaped their responses to me. For example, while I was at the Judicial Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, another government official lectured me at length, prompted by my initial and brief inquiry about the role of this division in responding to the Naz writ against Section 377. Self-assuredly relaxing back in his chair with hands crossed at the back of his head, he launched into a long explanation meandering between public order, the Geeta, a pre-eminent upper-caste Hindu epic, and the place of sex in Hindu philosophy. Presenting (his) ideas about morality and law and order, he eventually took a stand against same-sex sexual activity on the premise that it was against the order of nature. In another example, this one involving a senior cisgender male (and presumably heterosexual) activist, I experienced an especially difficult moment during fieldwork. As a one-time medical doctor who gave up his practice to become a grassroots activist, this person started to reprimand me, launching into a tirade that lasted over an hour. His grouse was that I had given a public talk on the Naz writ without consulting his group about their efforts to decriminalize homosexuality. While this was not exactly true, I was at the receiving end of his complaints at being sidelined in the struggle against Section 377, his concerns about the focus on legal reform, and his criticisms at LGBT persons for not engaging in public forms of activism. Notwithstanding the problems of ordinary LGBT people outing themselves at the time, this and other examples illustrate the ways that my gender status was directly relevant to the research process. Equally notable about most of these interactions is that the state officials or others, such as the activist noted above, did not meet with me alone. At the meeting with the activist, there were two other people, including a woman, who was silent throughout the meeting. At the Judicial Division meeting, another official with the designation of Director stayed as a mute witness to our meeting. He was invited to join the meeting before it started. In fact, throughout the research process, no male-presenting state official met with me without the presence of a third person. This, I believe, was as much about the need to maintain heterosexual decorum that is seen as culturally proper. It is also, as I see it, about having witnesses to delicate or difficult conversations involving sexuality, especially same-sex sexual activity. An intersectional and transnational methods perspective too foregrounds the relevance of caste, religious, and class status to the process of research. These markers, reflected in my name and subtle aspects of self-presentation, opened the door to these meetings, helping me secure interviews, requests for data, etc. Undoubtedly, police constables, state officials, and others interpreted these markers, coloring what they could say and how they said it. It enabled police constables and others to speak openly and pejoratively about Hijras and Muslims, even as they shared with me the challenges of policing in Delhi. Also relevant to the field research were my transnational credentials—the fact that I was a faculty member at a university in Boston. It gave legitimacy to my inquiries and, indeed, more than one official mentioned that they would not have agreed to see me had I not been affiliated with a US university. This affiliation lent weight to my quest validated as the pursuit of research. While there are now many more established and emerging scholars doing fieldwork on sexuality as well as state institutions, it was still uncommon at the time. As a result, officials were more curious but also more likely to take it upon themselves to inform and educate me in ways that are directly related to my gender, caste, religious status, and transnational affiliations to higher education. At the same time, an intersectional and transnational methods stance brought moments of friction and opportunity to be an engaged researcher—to say something, to do something.
154 Research handbook on intersectionality Even as police constables were eager to share their views with me, being present in the field meant contending with racist and discriminatory views. During one trip to another police station to gather FIRs on Section 377, a constable followed me into the Records Room, dusty and cramped with a couple of tables, several chairs, and metal shelves stacked with files, ledgers, where I looked through the ledgers with FIRs, across from another constable at an adjoining table. Curious about my presence, he inquired about my purpose and upon hearing of my interest in police crime reports related to Section 377, he volunteered that it’s a crime mostly committed by Muslims. Once again, pointing to the evidence, I insisted that data does not support this claim, citing the overwhelming representation of Hindu names in these crime reports. While I was not able to convince the constable or his colleague, who periodically joined the conversation what became clear were the deep-seated anti-Muslim prejudices among the mostly Hindu police in Delhi and their colonial antecedents. After several such encounters, I returned to report my provisional findings to a senior police official. I sought to share with him my concerns about the extent of the biases and prejudices against Muslims that were rife among a mostly Hindu Delhi police force. This senior official, a member of another minoritized group, the Sikhs, had previously given me access to data about police complaints related to Section 377. But he vigorously dismissed my concerns, saying that these biased police constables were just a “a few bad apples.” When I pressed him on the deep-seated nature of these hostilities and the need for anti-bias training among the Delhi police, our meeting was quickly terminated. My efforts to “do something,” to let the research shed light on to the dangerous biases toward those who need the most protection from those who are sworn to protect, fell on deaf ears. Each time there are reports of Delhi police’s collusions with Hindu right-wing groups, the most recent case being Northeast Delhi in which police tacitly and actively supported the violence against Muslims, the significance of field research is once again underscored. The irony is that Delhi police constables live at the edges of poverty, working long hours under arduous conditions. In many ways, they are subalterns too. They perform 12-hour beats daily, are required to be available 24 hours a day and have no fixed days off. They return to their families no more than three days a week. In fact, during my repeated visits to Delhi police stations, I glimpsed the meager conditions of dorm-style rooms where the constables spend much of their off-duty time. As I heard their accounts of the difficulties of the working and living conditions, Delhi police constables shared with me the problems that they routinely face and the ways that they must navigate a politically corrupt system. But my attempts to mitigate their hostile perceptions of Hijras, much like in the case of Muslim communities, were for the most part futile. Police constables were inflexible in their perceptions of Hijras as inherent criminals and as always on the wrong side of law and the nation. Nonetheless, fieldwork can sometime present unexpected openings among unsuccessful attempts to changes hearts and minds. One such moment came when in the discussion on Section 377, one constable turned to his colleagues and, interpreting my presence as a teaching moment, went on to defend the right to be gay. His interjection contrasted sharply with a string of homophobic responses—it’s against Indian culture, it would diminish the country’s population—about why the antisodomy law should not be overturned. The extent to which this constable’s intervention was persuasive to his peers in the room is unclear, but what it illustrates is the unpredictability of research and its possibilities. Ultimately, though, while there seemed to be some leeway in the possibility of decriminalizing homosexuality, constables remained intractable on their anti-Muslim and anti-Hijra biases.
Researching sexuality and state 155
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS “The field” is a complex terrain and fieldwork is a complicated process. Doing research can be exciting, anxiety-provoking, exhilarating, and can even invoke “bad feelings” (Moussawi 2021; Moussawi and Puri 2022). If part of the challenge is how to constitute “the field,” then the other uncertainty is how to go about researching it. Intersectional and transnational perspectives are invaluable in both respects, for they provide important guidelines in framing the field and alerting researchers to the insights that emerge in the process of conducting the research. As this chapter shows, taking such a perspective to researching the antisodomy law in the Indian context begins with investigating colonial and postcolonial archives. Thus, this chapter underscores the colonial origins of the antisodomy law and its racialized and gendered aspects, but also the colonial introduction of policing and policies such as the Criminal Tribes Act, the combined legacies of which endure until now. It investigates the body of case law related to Section 377, identifying the links between the criminalization of same-sex sexuality with cis-heterosexuality, as well as the application of the law to prosecute crimes against boys. In the chapter, fieldwork is an equally important part of the implementation of intersectional and transnational methods. Such a stance entails “dehomogenizing” the state and pursuing research among its various institutions and agencies—police, legal records, Judicial Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, among others. It means remaining alert to sexuality’s intersections with social differences of gender, gender expression, class, and racialized religion. Instances from research among the police, but also other field-based encounters, foreground homophobic attempts to dismiss the importance of undoing the antisodomy law by highlighting violence against women or by linking the law to racialized Muslim communities and to Hijras. An intersectional and transnational perspective further illustrates the need to go beyond conventional understandings of data and to analyse the seemingly insignificant encounters that occur before, after, and alongside the formal interview or access to quantitative data. Thus, this chapter is developed around more formal moments in fieldwork, including the group discussions with police constables and police officials, but also around informal meetings and conversations. Although such informal moments are more likely to be relegated to the margins of a researcher’s fieldnotes—the interaction with Khanna, the police constable who followed me to the records room—they provide invaluable insights into dominant ideologies and discourses in ways that expand and enrich the scope of data collection, insights, and findings. Emphasized too in this chapter are the ways that intersectional and transnational perspectives are indispensable for locating the researcher in the field. These reflections raise important ethical and activist questions of what is to be done in the face of homophobic, transphobic, and racialized discourses that surface during the process of research. While I share the ways in which I intervened, largely unsuccessfully, it seems to me that intersectional and transnational approaches compel us to do what we can. They too draw attention to unexpected openings that emerge during the research process as well as the work that still needs to be done in ensuring social justice to those who are still denied.
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NOTES 1. 2. 3.
4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
https://w ww. indiatoday. in/f act- check/s tory/f act- check- viral- post- muslim- population- india -1733926-2020-10-22, consulted on October 5, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/key-findings-about-the-religious-composition -of-india/, consulted on October 5, 2021. The Hindu Right has fanned fears about an explosive fertility rate among Muslims, pejoratively called the Muslim Growth Rate, and especially so after the release of reports from the 2001 census. On this, see Ashish Bose (2005), “Beyond Hindu-Muslim Growth Rates”; Charu Gupta (2004) “Censuses, Communalism, Gender, and Identity.” As Mehar Singh Gill (2007) observes, despite the fact that fertility rates among Muslims have decreased over a period of time, data and reports have been twisted by leaders of the Hindu Right to make specters of explosive Muslim growth rates. Also see Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery (2005), “Saffron Demography, Common Wisdom, Aspirations and Uneven Governmentalities.” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/muslim-overpopulation-myth/545318/, consulted on October 5, 2021. Martial races was a category invented by the British to create groups who seemed well suited for warring and policing. These groups were characterized as physically strong, fearless, and loyal to British interests and were recruited for the military, police, etc. The groups varied regionally. The clubbing together of various ethnic and caste groups as “Brahmans” or as “low castes” by British administrators was a related strategy of reducing and enumerating the tremendous cultural, religious, class, and caste-based differences in the sub-continent. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/07/812193930/delhi-riots-aftermath-how-do-you-explain-such -violence, consulted on October 16, 2021. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/iit/Minority%20Report.pdf, consulted on October 16, 2021. The full text of this Act is available at: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=forums&s rcid =MDk3NzM5NDU0NDkyNjkxNzcwNjIBMDI2OTYzMTU4NjkwNTQ1MzkzNjYBNXBXSHp BRUlpTzRKATAuMQEBdjI, consulted on October 16, 2021. Human Rights Watch (2009). “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse, and Impunity in the Indian Police.” http://www.hrw.org/reports/2009/08/04/broken-system, consulted on February 10, 2017.
REFERENCES Arnold, David. 1990. “Bureaucratic Recruitment and Subordination in Colonial India: The Madras Constabulary 1859–1947.” In Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 1–33. New York: Oxford University Press. Arondekar, Anjali. 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bacchetta, Paola. 1999. “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers,” Social Text 17 (4): 141–67. Bandewar, Sunita V.S, Amita Pitre, and Lakshmi Lingam. 2018. “Five Years Post Nirbhaya: Critical Insights into the Status of Response to Sexual Assault,” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 3 (3): 215–21. https://doi.org/10.20529/IJME.2018.025. Bharucha, Rustom. 2003. “Muslims and Others: Anecdotes, Fragments, and Uncertainties of Evidence,” Economic and Political Weekly 4 (October): 4238–50. Bhaskaran, Suparna. 2001. “‘The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’, in Ruth Vanita.” In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita, 15–29. New York and London: Routledge. Bhaskaran, Suparna. 2004. Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Transnational Projects. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bose, Ashish. 2005. “Beyond Hindu-Muslim Growth Rates: Understanding Socio-Economic Reality,” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (5): 370–4.
Researching sexuality and state 157 Fernandez, Bina, and Gomathy N.B. 2003. “The Nature of Violence Faced by Lesbian Women in India.” Research Centre on Violence Against Women, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Gill, Mehar Singh. 2007. “Politics of Population Census Data in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 42 (3): 241–9. Grewal, Inderpal. 1999. “‘Women’s Rights as Human Rights’: Feminist Practices, Global Feminism, and Human Rights Regimes in Transnationality,” Citizenship Studies 3 (3): 337–54. https://doi.org/10 .1080/13621029908420719. Gupta, Alok. 2002. “Trends in the Application of Section 377. ” In Humjinsi: A Resource Book on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights in India, edited and compiled by Bina Fernandez, 66–74. Mumbai: Indian Centre for Human Rights and Law. Gupta, Alok. 2011. “The Presumption of Sodomy.” In Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives, edited by Lawby Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, 115–61. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Gupta, Charu. 2004. “Censuses, Communalism, Gender, and Identity,” Economic and Political Weekly 39 (39): 4302–4. Haldar, Piyel Law. 2007. Orientalism and Postcolonialism: The Jurisdiction of the Lotus-Eaters. Oxford and New York: Routledge-Cavendish. Jeffrey, Roger, and and Patricia Jeffrey. 2005. “Saffron Demography: Common Wisdom, Aspirations, and Uneven Governmentalities,” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (5): 447–53. Kolsky, Elizabeth. 2005. “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law and History Review 23 (3): 631–83. Merry, Sally Engle. 2000. Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moussawi, Ghassan. 2021. “Bad Feelings on Trauma, Nonlinear Time, and Accidental Encounters in ‘the Field’,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 10 (1): 78–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr .2021.10.1.78. Moussawi, Ghassan, and Jyoti Puri. 2022. “"Bad Feelings: Reflections on Research, Disciplines, and Critical Methodologiees.” In Silences, Neglected Feelings, and Blind-Spots in Research Practice, edited by Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Narrain, Arvind. 2004. Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law, and Social Change. Bangalore: Books for Change. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2006. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. New York: Oxford University Press. PUCL-K. 2003. “Human Rights Violations against the Transgender Community.” Bangalore, Karnataka. Puri, Jyoti. 2016. Sexual States: Governance and the Decriminalization of Sodomy in India’s Present. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Radhakrishna, Meena. 2001. Dishonored by History: Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Rao, Rahul. 2015. “Echoes of Imperialism in LGBT Activism.” In Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies, edited by Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sèbe, and Gabrielle Maas, 355–72. London: I.B. Tauris. https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/19606/. Sachar, Rajindar, Salyid Hamid, T,K. Oommen, M.A. Basith, Rakesh Basant, Akhtar Majeed, and Abusaleh Shariff. 2006. “Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India,” Development Economics Working Papers 22136, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research. Skuy, David. 1998. “Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 32 (3): 513–57. Sundar, Nandini. 2011. “The Rule of Law and the Rule of Property: Law-Struggles and the Neo-liberal State in India.” In The State in India after Liberalization, edited by Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 175–93. London: Routledge. /2017/11/muslim-overpopulation-myth/545318/, consulted on October 5, 2021. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Vols 1 and 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
10. Space, place, and urban future Marcus Anthony Hunter and Terrell J.A. Winder
INTRODUCTION Black queer geographies matter. Intersectionality is at the core of living and existing in this world as fully realized persons in a social landscape that would ask us to cast aside aspects of the self or hide them from view (Collins 2002, 2019; Collins and Bilge 2020; Crenshaw 1991). While these affirmative statements may ring true, even apparent, they tend not to guide many in practice and scholarship. Black queer geographies are often ignored, subsumed in a vacuum of details on or about Black people writ-large, or LGBTQ people writ-large (Cohen 1999, 2004; Cohen and Hunter 2007; Lorde 2012). In turn, our relative ignorance generates presentism on the development and articulation of racialized and queer urban geographies. Such maps of urban life are believed to be relatively new, lacking a true historical genealogy. Yet, where did Langston Hughes or Lorraine Hansberry go to be gay and Black and unwind? Where are the sites of leisure and pleasure? Where are they nestled inside a predominantly heterosexual Black experience or inculcated within a scene dominated by White gay cis-men? Or both? Or neither? Hidden and erased as they often are, Black queer geographies reveal the limits, possibilities, and continuities of space and time, especially in urban America (Bailey 2013; Greene 2014; Johnson 2011; McCune 2014; Moore 2011; Roane 2020). The Great Migration, or the Great Escape (K.L. Brown 2018), reflects a period whereby staggering numbers of Black Americans urbanized, shifting the populations of urban America coast to coast. From Jewel’s Catch One in Los Angeles to Langston’s in Brooklyn, Black queer sites of pleasure and leisure are few and far between, underlying the ephemerality of urban American Black and queer geographies (see, e.g., Bell and Binnie 2004; Doan 2007). Taken together, the historical omission and contemporary erasure of urban Black queer life make the conjunction of urban life and intersectionality an even more pressing endeavor. More than simply arguing for the accurate and comprehensive inclusion of urban Black queer lives, we utilize this critical juncture in Bayard Rustin’s life to bring into sharp relief the intersectional geography it reveals—the probable and possible futures unrealized and underdeveloped. We must recover the otherwise erased Black queer urban geographies. To this end, this chapter offers what we term intersectional recovery—an intentional form and pathway for pragmatic and meaningful recovery, recasting, and reclamation of the overlooked and understudied biographies and geographies of Black queer figures. To do so, this chapter uses Bayard Rustin’s socio-political biography and the historical context of Black life in Los Angeles as a template to perform and demonstrate the returns to intersectional recovery. In so doing, we offer a replicable pathway to investigate and apprehend the convergence of urban geography and intersectionality to produce a more inclusive urban and identity-based analysis nested within the dynamic dialogue afoot in the broader field. Thus, this chapter utilizes Rustin and Los Angeles to amplify historical figures whose 158
Space, place, and urban future 159 lives and contributions to the social sciences have been flattened through intentional neglect of intersectional methods. We begin by briefly re-engaging the landscape of Black queer scholarship to date. We follow this engagement using the case of Bayard Rustin to underscore both how an intersectional focus would have radically shifted Rustin’s self-perceptions while also noting how a lack of this focus has come to impact our perceptions of present Black queer geographies. By recasting and reclaiming Black queer figures, we can better apprehend the relational field between intersectional perspectives and the urban condition more broadly. To be sure, the focus on one Black gay man’s socio-political biography is but a small reflection of the broad spectrum comprising the experiences and perspectives of the larger Black LGBTQ+ community. The following analysis and discussion joins with several recent explorations and demonstrations of the power of reclaiming and building social theories based upon quotidian experiences at the nexus of urban geography and intersectionality (Hartman 2019; Hunter and Robinson 2018; Hunter et al. 2016; McKittrick 2006, 2011; Roane 2020; Robinson and Hunter 2019).
THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHOCOLATE RAINBOWS What is the intersectional potential for Black queer liberation when social actors express their entire selves? What is the intersectional urban potential for embracing Black queer spaces, places, and bodies? As we have outlined elsewhere (see, e.g., Hunter and Winder 2019), invisibility—historical, geographic, or otherwise—has devastating consequences on the lives of Black queer peoples. Populations that have gone unrecognized tend to be erased from history both in theory and practice; their lived realities are rendered absent from the pages of histories of the city, their roles in society undervalued, and their hopes unheard to the masses. Yet, Black queer urban geographies make patterns of race, class, sexuality, and political economy even more visible. As Black queer urban people move about the city, whether for work or leisure, the pathways they take reveal elements of safety and inequality otherwise unable to be discerned with singular analyses that do not take intersectional approaches. In recent decades, dynamic literature has emerged in various disciplines and mediums to illustrate the indelible marks Black queer people have had on our society and understanding of social equality. For example, scholars that have examined Black gay identity have highlighted how race, place, class, sexuality, religion, and social spaces shape and inform the proclaimed identities of Black gay men (e.g., Crichlow 2003; Ferguson 2004; Hawkeswood 1996; Hunter 2010; Johnson 2011; McKittrick 2006, 2011; Moore 2011; Walcott 2015; Winder 2015). While many works consider that either race or sexuality must dominate as a primary identifier, both Hawkeswood (1996) and Hunter (2010), for example, emphasize the dynamic variations in Black gay men’s understanding of their sexualities and that, for many cases, Black gay men find race and sexuality as inseparably linked. These analyses underscore the analytic potential for intersectional methods that attend to the contours of the multiple jeopardies (King 1988) imbuing social categories and their consequences on the human condition. Employing oral histories of Black gay men, Johnson’s (2011) seminal text revealed the historical and contemporary lives of Black Southern gay men in the United States. Through these narrative histories, Sweet Tea is a corrective to the familiar narratives of gay life in the United States, which often fail to account for the experiences of queer people in the South and Black
160 Research handbook on intersectionality gay life. Immortalizing these men’s memories and contemporary realities, Johnson’s work illuminates how dynamic social conditions and processes like stigmatization, discrimination, and marginalization shape the formation of racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Focusing on the intersection of urban and Black queer life in Detroit, Bailey (2013), for instance, highlights the complex chosen families and social support networks that make up the house/ballroom scene which is now prominently featured in media like FX’s Pose and HBOMAX’s Legendary. Building on the legacy of 1980s early ballroom documentaries like Paris Is Burning, Bailey’s autoethnographic account of the ballroom scene vividly depicts how Black queer people fashion new communities and support networks in the face of continued discrimination from both Black communities and White communities. Their erasures and often fraught historical experiences illustrate the impact of simultaneously being erased from the national consciousness. For example, the role of Black queer activists such as Marsha P. Johnson in movements like Stonewall are finally being recognized and the historical record revised (see, e.g., Calafell 2019; Feinberg 1997; France 2017; Hunter amd Robinson 2018; Jackson 2021). Shows such as Pose, loosely based on the documentary Paris Is Burning (Livingston 1990), highlight the crossover appeal of Black queer culture to mainstream and illustrate the potential for lived recognition. These erasures and subsequent recasts highlight both invisibility and visibility’s constant promise and perils. Illustrating how Afro-Caribbean and African Canadian same-sex attracted men prioritize “safety and pleasure” (Crichlow 2003, 4) in their social interactions, Crichlow demonstrates the fragility of the inclusion of Black queer communities. Indeed, secular spaces can become centers for exploring the relationship between religious teachings, both affirming and stigmatizing, and the formation of racial and sexual identities (Winder 2015). Furthermore, Black gay men are frequently criticized by members of the Black community and other non-Black persons who combine race-based and sexuality-based stigmas to denigrate their social identities as Black gay men. This phenomenon, which Berger terms “intersectional stigma” (2004), shapes how stigmatized individuals can craft identities when their identities are under attack. Even further, Moore’s (2011) assessment broadens the focus from gay men to explore the overlaps among communities of Black lesbians. It contrasts emergent when considering how Black gay women navigate family and child-rearing in urban America. In this work, Moore (2011) persuasively shows how Black lesbians are often structurally obscured from local queer neighborhoods and often create intimate social networks for socializing in personal homes. Scholarship—and more recently, mainstream media—has extensively documented young men’s social sanctioning and fears navigating racial and sexual stigma (see, e.g., Young 2018). Scholarship in performance studies has been indispensable for understanding how Black gay people respond to social stigma through specific practices and behaviors. Jeffery McCune’s (2014) qualitative participant observation highlights the social and cultural avoidance practices men who sleep with men, perhaps unbeknownst to others, employed to manage their stigma by identifying as discreet rather than queer or gay. Furthermore, research at the intersection of religion, race, and sexuality collectively have found that Black LGBT persons often maintain their connections with religious communities and spirituality even in the face of direct attacks on their sexualities by prioritizing racial connections (Moore 2011) discrediting the speaker but not the text (Pitt 2010), and reinterpreting religious messaging to justify their sexualities (Winder 2015). Much of this literature on religious-based stigma coalesces around the high levels of Christian religiosity among Black
Space, place, and urban future 161 Americans. Consistently, these studies have found that religious-based stigma and discrimination persists even as the number of LGBTQ-affirming and accepting churches are increasing across the United States. Taken collectively, these works underscore the overall import and thrust of the scholarship in this area—the mechanisms constraining and facilitating identity and community building are rendered especially visible when the conditions of urban queer of color perspectives are centered (Baldwin 1989; Ferguson 2004; Muñoz 1999). The findings of these studies help to carve out the importance of understanding how social stigmas for people with multiple marginalized identities make visible the collision of intersectionality and urban formation. The imports of this critical work reframe our understandings of how the intersections of racial, sexual, and gendered identities have placed marginalized urban communities in uniquely stigmatized social positions. Each of these works is a testament to the importance of understanding the interlocking aspects of identities that constrain and influence Black queer communities as they respond to social stigmas. These scholars envision their contemporary ethnographic works as correctives to the long legacy of research neglect on the lives of Black queer men often obscured by a focus on Black heterosexuals and White queers. On the one hand, invisibility has catalysed the development of unique Black queer rural and urban cultures, knowledge, and survival practices across the globe. On the other hand, however, this invisibility has been its own kind of socio-political message whereby Black queer lives do not matter and are vulnerable to state-sanctioned harms and disposability. As a result, Black queer lives are overlooked and forgotten in the annals of history or left behind, significantly as gay rights movements gain mainstream acceptance and socio-political success. Once visibility is obtained, it can mean a social reckoning for forgotten and under-resourced communities, revealing futures unrealized because of the precarity, isolation, and wayward outcomes invisible geographies can produce (Hartman 2019; Wynter 2003). However, it can also mean the distortion and mainstreaming of Black queer cultural elements like vogue, house-ballroom culture, slang, and more. Within the context of the rich, vast scholarship, the aim of this chapter is formed. In what follows, we call for and provide a workable demonstration of another form of correction, intersectional recovery, to the historical record by going beyond those who can be readily interviewed and observed. We aim to show how the impacts of stigma, lack of social research, and ignoring of intersectionality came to bear on one life in the hopes that we can reimagine a queer utopia yet to arrive.
WHERE BAYARD’S RAINBOW BURST In this section, we take up the story of Bayard Rustin to illustrate how an intentionally intersectional analysis can help us not only recover the historical ways that intersectional identities were erased but also to envision what an intersectional queer methodology offers for the contemporary moment in the face of shifting public acceptance of queer persons and more considerable demographic change in the United States. We offer this recasting of Bayard Rustin’s experience on a visit to Los Angeles that fundamentally shifted his worldview and self-perception as a guide for the intersectional reclamation of queer activists, figures, and scholars of color whose impacts have been less understood due to intentional obscuring of their queer identities.
162 Research handbook on intersectionality Table 10.1
Black population, Los Angeles County, b. 1950 Negro Women
Negro Men
Colored Women/Mena
1890
a
a
6 421
1900
1 451
1 390
a
1910
4 869
4 555
a
1920
9 870
8 868
a
1930
24 598
21 827
a
1940
39 959
35 250
a
Note: Source:
a Please note ‘Colored’ category includes all non-Whites. ESRI, NHGIS, and US Census.
Beginning in the 1850s, Black migrants began arriving in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Rather than arriving as free people, many arrived alongside their enslavers, journeying as a part of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Indeed, the story of Bridget “Biddy” Mason is critical here. The legal property of Robert Mays Smith, a White Mormon, Mason arrived in Los Angeles and her family in 1850 (Beasley 1919; Demaratus 2002). Although California was a Free State, it did not intervene in the legal slave ownership rights of arrived White Southerners like Smith. This laissez-faire approach to slavery came to a head once Smith determined to leave California and take Mason and her family to Utah, where fellow Mormons had begun establishing a persisting community around the Great Salt Lake. When Mason refused, Smith filed a petition at the California court, requesting that his slaves be legally compelled to comply with his demand to leave. The court denied his claim, and Smith’s slaves, including Mason, were immediately freed and allowed to stay in Los Angeles (Reiter 1978, 213). This history is the foundation for the Black geography of Los Angeles over the 19th and 20th centuries. Within one hundred years of the legal enforcement of Mason’s freedom, she, her family, and a host of Black migrants emerged as entrepreneurs, professionals, property, and business owners, establishing several vibrant and persisting Black communities across the Los Angeles area. So much so that by the time a weary and well-traveled social justice warrior, Bayard Rustin, arrived, Altadena and South Pasadena were among the established Black communities and residential areas in the Los Angeles area. South Pasadena, in particular, has historically maintained a persisting Black population adjacent to middle-class and upper-middle-class White people (Table 10.1, Figures 10.1 and 10.2) (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). Rustin’s arrival in Los Angeles was a part of a series of meetings, conferences, and planning sessions he had been engaged in for more than a decade. Born in 1912, Rustin was reared in a Quaker household anchored in a philosophy of non-violent protest. Rustin was raised primarily by his grandmother, Julia, a lifelong member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—joining the organization shortly after its founding in 1909 by Black leaders including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Moorfield Storey, and Mary White Ovington, among others. Despite his peaceable upbringing, Rustin had been a bit of a rabble-rouser early in his life having been expelled from Wilberforce in 1936 (D’Emilio 2003). A lifetime member of Omega Psi Phi, one of the Black Greek “Divine Nine,” he was a renaissance man known for his leadership and singing abilities and fondness for Blues and Spirituals. Beginning in 1947, Rustin organized the first Freedom Rides as a test to Morgan
Space, place, and urban future 163
Source:
ESRI, NHGIS, and US Census; map created using GIS.
Figure 10.1
Los Angeles area Black population, c. 1950
v. Commonwealth of Virginia. Throughout 1948, Rustin trained in India on non-violent practices, integrating those teachings into his approach, strategies, and civil rights and social justice organizing. For five years, 1947–52, Rustin led and organized advocacy for Ghanaian and Nigerian Independence, meeting with international peace and African leaders (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). In 1951, he also established the Committee to Support South African Resistance, advocating non-violent measures to resist and end the Apartheid Regime. Primed to become the leading race man among race men, Rustin was well on his way into the upper echelon of the national and global racial and Civil Rights movement vanguard. However, all of the upward momenta would come to a crashing halt after a late evening in Pasadena on Wednesday, January 21, 1953 (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). Earlier that evening, Rustin’s speech on world peace before the American Association of University Women at the Pasadena Athletic Club had been well received. After attending to the inspired crowd that lingered, Rustin declined a ride back to his hotel room, choosing to walk back along the edge of the Black neighborhood and the neighboring White neighborhood.
164 Research handbook on intersectionality On a mild yet windy evening seeking sexual pleasure and release, Rustin walked the streets of Pasadena cruising, as gay men did in the area, for potential partners (see, e.g., J. Anderson 1997; Carbado and Weise 2003; D’Emilio 2003; Haskins 1997; Podair 2009). Rustin biographer John D’Emilio (2003) noted that although he was not closeted, many were aware. Rustin made no public remarks about his sexuality. Instead, like many Black and professional men and women then and now, Rustin compartmentalized his sexuality taking up with sexual partners in his off-hours and never presenting a partner publicly for fear of it affecting the momentum of his career and leadership aspirations. Without any known or readily available club, speakeasy, or bar to meet indoors, especially for an out-of-towner, Rustin strolled along the streets slow enough to get noticed and notice and purposeful enough to not be stopped by suspicious police officers. D’Emilio (2003, 191) writes of the critical events that followed: Just before 3:00 A.M., a car with two young white men cruised by slowly, and Rustin waved. After the driver pulled over, Rustin approached the car. “He asked us if we wanted a good time,” one of them said later. “We asked him what he meant, he replied that he couldn’t offer us much, but he could blow us.” The two still had the box of unused condoms they were carrying that evening from their unsuccessful search for female companionship, and they accepted Rustin’s offer. Rustin was in the back seat performing oral sex when two county police officers approached the car. The police promptly arrested the three of them on charges of lewd vagrancy, and Rustin’s world began to unravel.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian social justice organization Rustin helped lead for many years, was immediately contacted about the situation. Declining to offer meaningful help, the FOR instead chose to publicly release and widely distribute a damning statement that “Bayard Rustin was convicted on a ‘morals charge’ (homosexual) and sentenced to 60 days in the Los Angeles County Jail on January 23, 1953 … [H]is service as an FOR staff member terminated” (D’Emilio 2003, 192). With the West Coast papers’ coverage of the ordeal of a “nationally known Negro lecturer” (D’Emilio 2003, 192) being arrested, Rustin’s fate was sealed. By the time Ruth Brown’s “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and (Willie Mae) Big Momma Thornton’s “Hound Dog” climbed the 1951 R&B charts, Rustin was a pariah listening to the tunes from a jail cell over his 60-day sentence. Following the completion of his sentence, he was unemployed and forced to take up odd jobs. The incident also creates a Black and religious leadership power-grab, whereby heterosexual cis-gender men supplant Rustin, never again allowed to occupy the head of the vanguard he once held. Over the subsequent five years, new figures rose to the top of the ranks of the global racial justice and Civil Rights movements, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rustin would eventually find his way back within the fold, but never again as the leading figure. Instead, he would have to accept being a sidekick and quiet influencer of sorts within the Civil Rights movement, never again the frontman. To be sure, the constrained geography of Black queer leisure and collection alongside Rustin’s sexual desires were the source of his reputational downfall. His straight counterparts could quickly and effectively find such outlets for their sexual desires. To lead, he would have either had to deny himself pleasure or hide it behind a mask of a seemingly heterosexual relationship. Rustin’s story comes before the communal spaces for Black queer gatherings emerge on the Los Angeles landscape. The lack of social spaces for Black queer people and the rampant vagrant laws in California of the 1950s and 1960s created the conditions necessary for spaces
Space, place, and urban future 165 like Jewel’s Catch One. “The Catch,” as it was affectionately called, was one of the oldest Black-and-queer-owned discos in the United States having opened in 1973 and established just two decades after Rustin’s original arrest (A. Brown 2018). Places like “The Catch,” and others that came after across the country, were hard-fought spaces that have held the memories of Black queer lives and continue to be sources of joy for those living at the intersection of racial and sexual stigma.
Source:
ESRI, NHGIS, and US Census; map created using GIS.
Figure 10.2
Los Angeles area Black population, c. 1960
These spaces did not exist for Bayard Rustin and other Black queer people of the generation. And their absence, as Rustin’s case demonstrates, upends individual and collective outcomes on liberation, racial justice, and social movements. Had Rustin been afforded a safe and meaningful geography of sexual pleasure and leisure that did not bring the added risk of harmful intervention by the police, might we have a visible Black gay leader at the front stage of Civil Rights and global racial justice movements? What potential future would have been unlocked had he not been jailed and ostracized? Until recently, there were rarely any spaces where they could live out the full expressions of their intersecting identities without being marginalized, and even where they did exist, they were constantly under the vigilant eye of the state. Although Black queer spaces were beginning to emerge in the 1970s, Rustin still faced the same major issues affecting these
166 Research handbook on intersectionality Black queer spaces. An observation that Jewel Catch One’s owner, Jewel Thais-Williams, also experienced. In her discussion of the historical constraints on Black queer life in Los Angeles, Williams explains that “There was a restriction on same-sex dancing, women couldn’t tend bar unless they owned it. The police were arresting people for anything remotely homosexual” (as quoted in Chicago Tribune May 2, 2018). The Pasadena, California, of Rustin’s past with a thriving Black community has shifted drastically in racial composition. By the 1980s and 1990s, Black Americans made up nearly 20 percent of the population in Pasadena; the most recent Census reports fewer Black/ African-Americans in the area than in 1920. These drastic demographic shifts due to migration (both voluntary and forced) illustrate how contemporary perceptions of neighborhoods and geographies can erase their pasts, making it difficult to understand how and why Black figures move through space. Today, Pasadena has become increasingly understood as “White space” (E. Anderson 2015) in the public imaginary, making it difficult for us even to understand why a Black queer man might be cruising for fun in 1950s Pasadena. By illuminating the larger structural contexts of Pasadena and Rustin’s fated visit, we aim to uncover how intersectional recovery functions as a method to correct the record and underscores the potentially deleterious effects that a lack of intersectional recognition can have on both individuals and communities.
CONCLUSION I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer. (Bayard Rustin)
In 2020, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti posthumously pardoned the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin for his 1953 conviction for lewd public acts. The significance of this moment cannot be overstated, yet it also highlights the historical and continued tensions of visibility and invisibility that we have outlined in this chapter. Sadly, Rustin died before he was fully exonerated and acknowledged by the state and the country. His inability to recover from the shame and stigma associated with his arrest led him to cast his sexuality into a sort of darkness. As Carbado and Weise note in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Rustin decided that to continue living in the world, he must sublimate his sexuality, saying: “I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer” (as quoted in Carbado and Weise 2003, xx). Recovering the life of Black queer figures like Bayard Rustin allows us to reimagine what the liberation of intersectionality can provide for those subjected to multiple forms of oppression. It allows us to re-envision what the Civil Rights Movement could be if it considered the multiply marginalized person and genuinely reckoned with the complexity of the human condition. Intersectionality offers a chance to uncover the nuance and intricacies of Black queer life in a time when they were mostly erased from view even as they worked to ameliorate the lives of their Black neighbors. Intersectional recovery offers a practice and a potential pathway for researchers to recast the narratives of significant figures through an extensive understanding of the moments and experiences that have come to shape our contemporary understandings of their historical impacts. Rather than reach forward, we can reach back and
Space, place, and urban future 167 attend to those figures whose lives and experiences, while overlooked, bring the collision of intersectional identity and the urban condition into sharp relief. While Black queer people still face the challenges of stigma and discrimination, there have also been considerable gains in the social acceptability of Black queer identities. From the famous Black queer artists, activists, and actors to the everyday Black queer teenager, we see the importance and centrality of understanding the interconnectedness of race and sexuality for the liberation of Black queer people. We are also witnessing, whether through the #BlackLivesMatter movement and global trans-activism, the new realities and new futures unlocked when Black queer leadership is affirmed and at the forefront. As the first Black, queer president of the Human Rights Campaign, Alphonso David noted in a 2021 interview for Elle magazine, “I cannot be free as a Black man if I’m not free as a gay man. I cannot be free as a gay man if I’m not free as a Black man.” Perhaps in this assertion is the realization of the visibility Rustin believed was too dangerous to survive. Intersectional recovery is an inclusive method that affirms that Black queer geographies, histories, and lifeworlds matter, especially in building theories and explanations of the causes and effects of political and economic development and change.
REFERENCES Anderson, Elijah. 2015. “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (1): 10–21. Anderson, Jervis. 1997. Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen. New York: HarperCollins. Bailey, Marlon M. 2013. Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Baldwin, James. 1989. Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Beasley, Delilah. 1919. “The Negro Trailblazers of California,” Los Angeles: Times Mirror. Bell, David, and Binnie, John. 2004. “Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance,” Urban Studies 41 (9): 1807–20. Berger, Michelle T. 2004. Workable Sisterhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, August. 2018. “The Story of L.A. Club Jewel’s Catch One and Its Pioneering Owner Finds Its Way to Netflix,” Los Angeles Times May 2. Accessed August 27, 2021. https://www.latimes.com/ entertainment/music/la-et-ms-jewels-catch-one-documentary-20180502-story.html Brown, Karida L. 2018. Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Calafell, Bernadette Marie. 2019. “Narrative Authority, Theory in the Flesh, and the Fight over the Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6 (2): 26–39. Carbado, Devon, and Weise, Don. 2003. Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press Start. Cohen, Cathy. 1999. Boundaries of Blackness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Cathy. 2004. “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” DuBois Review 1 (1): 27–45. Cohen, Cathy J., and Hunter, Marcus Anthony. 2007. “Race, Sex and Space: The Reproduction and Policing of Race and Segregation in Sexual and Intimate Spaces,” Paper presented VI IASSCS Conference: Dis/organized Pleasures: Changing Bodies, Rights and Cultures, Lima, Peru, June 20. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2002. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill, 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Bilge, Sirma. 2020. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Reveview 43 (6): 1241–99.
168 Research handbook on intersectionality Crichlow, Wesley. 2003. Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. D’Emilio, John. 2003. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Demaratus, DeEtta. 2002. The Force of the Feather: The Search for a Lost Story of Slavery and Freedom. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Doan, Petra L. 2007. “Queers in the American City: Transgendered Perceptions of Urban Space,” Gender, Place and Culture 14 (1): 57-74. Feinberg, Leslie. 1997. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. France, David. 2017. The Life and Death of Marsha P. Johnson. Public Square Films. Greene, Theodore. 2014. “Gay Neighborhoods and the Rights of the Vicarious Citizen,” City & Community 13 (2): 99–118. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Haskins, James. 1997. Bayard Rustin: Behind the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Hyperion. Hawkeswood, William G. 1996. One of the Children. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hunter, Marcus Anthony. 2010. “All the gays Are White and All the Blacks Are Straight: Black Gay Men, Identity, and Community,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 7 (2): 81–92. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Robinson, Zandria F. 2018. Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Winder, Terrell A. 2019. “Visibility is Survival: The Chocolate Maps of Black Gay Life in Urban Ethnography,” Urban Ethnography (Research in Urban Sociology) 16: 131–42. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, Pattillo, Mary, Robinson, Zandria F., and Taylor, Keeanga Y. 2016. “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (7–8): 31–56. Jackson, Jenn M. 2021. “Black Feminisms, Queer, Feminisms, Trans Feminisms: Meditating on Pauli Murray, Shirley Chisholm, and Marsha P. Johnson against the Erasure of History.” In The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, edited by Janell Hobson, 284–94. London: Routledge. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2011. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. King, Deborah K. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1): 42–72. Livingston, Jenny. 1990. Paris Is Burning. Off-White Productions. Lorde, Audre, 2012. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press. McCune, Jeffrey Q. 2014. Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, Katherine. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (8): 947–63. Moore, Mignon. 2011. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Vol. 2. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pitt, Richard N. 2010. “‘Killing the Messenger’: Religious Black Gay Men’s Neutralization of Anti‐ gay Religious Messages,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49 (1): 56–72. Podair, Jerome E. 2009. Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Reiter, Joan S. 1978. The Old West: The Women. Fairfax, VA: Time-Life Books. Roane, J.T. 2020. “Queering Growth in Mid-20th Century Philadelphia,” The Review of Black Political Economy 47 (2): 194–211.
Space, place, and urban future 169 Robinson, Zandria F., and Marcus Anthony Hunter. 2019. “Measuring, Interrupted: Queer Possibilities for Social Scientific Methods.” In Imaging Queer Methods, edited by Amin Ghazini and Matt Brim, 163–229. New York: New York University Press. Walcott, Rinaldo. 2015. Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging. Vancouver: UBC Press. Winder, Terrell J.A. 2015. “Shouting It out”: Religion and the Development of Black Gay Identities,” Qualitative Sociology 38 (4): 75–394. Wynter, Slyvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. Young Jr., Alford. A. 2018. Are Black Men Doomed? Malden, MA: Polity Press.
11. Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
INTRODUCTION The visibility of immigrants, a perceived immigration crisis, and the challenges of an idea of the dangers and pleasures – to borrow from a critical approach to gender and to a certain extent, sexuality research (Vance 1992) – all frame how gender, sexuality, and migration are approached by governments and Nation-States. These ideological approaches to how immigration is gendered and sexualized permeate academic and research circles and endeavors, co-constructing a web of scholarly work with the potential to change how these three aspects – gender, sexuality, and (im)migration – influence one another, and how they relate to other elements such as race and ethnicity, class, and a notion of citizenry. Citizenry necessitates of an immigrant other in order to fulfill its promise; the border where they meet is no longer a fence or wall, but a set of imbricate forms of exclusion and bordering that challenge previous ways of engaging with immigration. In the US American imaginary, as well as in the real material conditions and needs of immigrants, this is a border that contains, on either side (but also within the belly of the beast), an excess of surplus populations – in other words, the border as a space (everywhere) regenerates more people, more bodies, for even more labor. The fear of immigrants is combined with various forms of White supremacy in the US and other countries – even when the language used references xenophobia, not anti-Blackness, or even when the strategies are an interwoven form of expulsion or exclusion by ironically “saving” workers (Doezema 2001; Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018). Because Asian, Latin American, and African bodies are often constructed as those racialized others that cater to fantasies of the erotic yet embody fears of counter conquest (since those are also reproductive bodies), the challenge in a neoliberal era is to absolve the surveilling entities by rescuing (Agustín 2007) while also eliminating them from the territory. This chapter seeks to bring together recent literatures on migration, sexuality, and gender in order to account for an intersectional lens in sociology in particular, while bringing in, at times, some other disciplines. My goal is to show how sociology, and to a certain extent the social sciences, can produce work that is more intentionally intersectional – whether they bring forth the foundations of the field, or not. The focus on sociology is not merely for reasons of space limitations; given the disciplinary investment in the framework of intersectionality (Collins 1990; see also Romero 2018) and the subsequent advancements in thinking through sexuality in intersectionality (Collins 2004; see also Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018), sociology is poised to offer a critical canvas from which to theorize power and structural connections. Moreover, as a discipline, sociology has increased an analysis of the interrelation of migration and race (Vidal-Ortiz, Robinson, and Khan 2018), and of gender and sexuality, adding to the reasons for narrowing the focus on sociology. 170
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 171 Sociologists and other scholars have tended to an understanding of what migration does to the family unit, to remittances, to the social service provision in host countries, and to the value of the experience for those leaving hostile conditions that produce what Cantú called a well-founded fear of prosecution (Cantú 2005), as commonly referred to in legal (and academic) terms. Yet, it has only been as recent as the last three decades where scholars have made explicit the economic linkages of migration and production to the specific gendered and bodily reproduction that we are now witnessing, as well as to sexuality. Lionel Cantú, Jr., for example, explored in The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (2009) how these two categories – sexuality and migration – are not mere variables but articulated in and through each other in processes of migration and notions of sexuality that were seldom explored before the 1990s; in doing so, he followed the work of sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994), who remedied in many ways the study of women in migration as variables (debates in the earlier decades – mainly the 1970s and 1980s – fostered the idea that studying women in migration would take the focus away from structural analysis and processes that more evidently centered the State, class, and capital labor exploitation). Moving the discussion from women to gender as structure, she studied migrant women coming from Mexico and moving to the San Francisco/Bay Area. While for Hondagneu-Sotero gender was a stand-alone formation, for Cantú, it was a combined gender and sexuality dimension that intercepted migration. Sexuality – at least in this chapter – is not limited to same-sex sexualities; it encompasses sexuality across sexual orientations and gender identity; it also focuses on reproduction and the inherent threat implicit in the bodies of those border crossers. Moreover, this chapter operates on an approach that considers intersectionality at its core, and that makes evident connections between sexuality and other axes of power such as race and class. For instance, Cantú outlined the dynamics in a popular highway – interstate 5 freeway – in Southern California, a site where families of immigrants constantly cross that highway at night, in order to arrive and either settle in the area, or go through in order to conclude their travels by arriving onto other states. Support groups had been formed as early as the 1990s for truck drivers who have accidentally hit highway crossers. Cantú (2009, 118) argues that this image – a yellow sign that depicts “a fleeing family (father leading, mother, and child, legs flailing behind)” is an image that connotes not just the risks many immigrants take, but also the way we imagine them. Cantú also insists that while this image may not alert motorists of a sexual component, it is there, if we only look: a sign symbolic at multiple levels, it shows a nuclear heterosexual family, but one that is also a threat to the racial social order by its reproductive potential. Likewise, I want to take a close look at articles that focus on gender, sexuality, and migration, seeking to extend their potential intersectional reading.
CHAPTER AIMS The methodological approach for this contribution is quite specific. I am concentrating on an interpretative approach of how the themes of gender, sexuality, and migration flow in two recent special issues that aimed to foreground them (one in a sexualities venue, another in ethnic and race studies). The two special issues in question (Sexualities special issue focused on “Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement” and Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue focused on “The Sexual Politics of Border Control”) are ideal sites of analysis that showcase
172 Research handbook on intersectionality the uses and limitations of the place of intersectionality on the topics, particularly the research methods. As you will see, most research relies on single-site qualitative interviews, with the exception of a legal case study at multiple sites, and a multiple site project (also with qualitative interviews, but including ethnographic work as well). The research at times directly brings up race, class, and gender, while at others, it seems to depend on the focus on sexuality and migration in lieu of an intersectional framework. I have only foregrounded two venues where the crossroads of gender, sexuality, and migration authored by sociologists have circulated the most – there have of course been other efforts and special issues.1 As well, it is important to note that almost all of the articles are published by sociologists in collaboration with non-sociologists; as a result, this chapter may offer tools to better engage with intersectional methods in disciplines beyond sociology – even the social sciences. One of the central propositions of this chapter is to better connect the focus of gender and sexuality (which is at times reduced to LGBTQI communities, or cis gender women’s issues) with the focus on migration (immigration and, by extension, displacement and refugee and asylum status). Often, we see that those special issues foreground one over the other. That is a first methodological challenge I pose to the readings. However, it is also important to note that the structure of academic journals themselves actually preclude intersectional work, in that the journals are topical, and very much work in isolation by design, minimizing the chance to produce cooperative work across the fields this chapter focuses on. In what follows, I hope to show how intersectional work in gender, sexuality, and migration can be more intentional in research conceptualization and design, by engaging, at times incisively, some of the works that have connected gender or/and sexuality to migration. Unlike other scholars in this book that might discuss their own research as part of their exploration of what data to collect in order to produce an intersectional analysis, I pose questions to explore what it would take to consider similar projects to those outlined while also valuing the extent of the work I’m discussing for its intersectional potential. While all of the sources I am discussing depend on an ethnographic lens and qualitative interviews, and I would agree that qualitative and intersectional run parallel paths, the question of whether only qualitative methods are the only forms of data collection that fit well, or are best suited for, intersectional work, goes beyond the scope of the limited focus of this chapter. As well, thinking about how qualitative data collection forms offer permeability to wander toward race, class, and gender analytics in projects that do not center any of those analytical dimensions, it is a base, and not a demand, to how I approach my reading of the authors’ engagement with gender, sexuality, and migration. To be clear, none of the articles in the two special issues I review intentionally propose or invest on an intersectional methodology. I am instead bringing forth the missed opportunities to further the otherwise exceptional work on gender, sexuality, and migration, with an intersectional methodological approach. Of course, it is quite safe to evaluate how these sources did or did not provide an intersectional approach; my published work may be held to these very same standards. After this section, I address two of the main special issues in sexuality and ethnic studies that help us consider these reframing questions. I will focus on two interrelated tasks to stake this chapter’s claim: first, I will review two specific, recent moments of sociological scholarship on borders, migration, and displacement in relation to sexuality, gender, and the body; then, I will discuss the implications of these studies to a truly intersectional sociology.
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 173
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE In this section, I compare two special issues connecting gender, sexuality, and migration – one, a recent special issue journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies (“Sexuality and Migration at the Border”) and a special issue from several years back in the Sexualities journal (special “Migration and Displacement” issue). I begin with the Sexualities one, then weaving race explicitly with the discussion of the second. Because of space limitations, I center my analysis on articles authored by at least one sociologist. Sexualities and Migration Sociologist Nancy A. Naples, along with Musicologist Rachel A. Lewis, guest edited a special 2014 issue of the Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society, on “Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement” (Lewis and Naples 2014). Among the special issue contributors are two articles, out of six articles (excluding the afterword), co-authored by trained sociologists. Motivated by the increasing exposure to the issues faced by queer (or LGBTQI, in the special issue’s language, referencing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex) immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Given the focus of the editors, which was “to bring queer migration and sexual citizenship studies into critical conversation” (911), their stated claim is their wish to connect migration and sexuality studies. Drawing on feminist and queer scholarship which has queered migration studies, Lewis and Naples sustain, and seek to expand on, previous scholarship that called on the heteronormativity of migration studies (until the 1990s if not 2000s) while recognizing the interdisciplinary efforts of the foundational work in the field. As well, the introduction situates an inherent articulation of sexuality with race, class, gender, and nation, in order to interrogate how borders are managed, made impermeable, and how internal and international migration take shape because of the impact of the hierarchies in those intersectional aspects (912). Cantú figures at the center of these analytics, as his work depends on the mutual constitution of gender, sexuality, migration, and the material conditions connected to migration quests, as well as the conditions once in the US. At the time of their writing, politics swayed the practice of migration and refugee experiences for LGBTQI refugees and asylum seekers, given the engagement of President Barack Hussein Obama in – at least in principle and verbal commitment – support of these populations. Indeed, one of the editors’ claims is that law and policy have often remained the privileged site of study (913). Their focus in the introduction also centers the question of citizenship, perhaps narrowing a bit the larger set of variables connected to processes of migration: from desire to migrate, to attempts to do so, to “settlement” in host countries or territories. In my estimation, so much of how gay and lesbian rights in the late 20th century were framed already invoked questions of State-sponsored citizenship – that is, of becoming legally, formally recognized by the State as departing one’s country of origin when assuming (assimilating) the US as a home country, the country that incorporates sexual minority immigrants. In a future interdisciplinary scholarly effort, a focus on belonging, instead of citizenship along the lines of sexuality, will prove more open to porosity and the management of geopolitics across a border, for instance, and will diminish the principle of equality inherent in the language of citizenship (in other words, undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and international border migrants may not center a quest for citizenship in the limited ways the term suggests).
174 Research handbook on intersectionality What would it mean to imagine transnational subjects whose legality is temporal, indicative of statuses in between citizenship and so-called illegality? If, as Lisa Lowe registers in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), acts of forgetting encapsulate a politics of memory and thus, colonial erasure, then thinking citizenship beyond Nation-State notions of citizenship – and the very idea of insider and outsider in such studies – is necessary. How malleable is it for non-citizens to be in that stage of liminality, even with limited mobility or access? Can non-citizens forego the dream of becoming citizens – is that unintelligible to those of us who are citizens? Following Lowe’s (2015) lead in the context of empire, how must we reimagine research projects that re-evaluate gayness in and through citizenship and rights? These are elements central to the genesis of any project, including its research design, because the premise beneath these conceptualizations embeds the process, and it potentially reduces a chance of it being intersectional – as we shall see next. Sociologist Jorge Fontdevila, along with public health scholar Héctor Carrillo, coauthored research based on Carrillo’s R01 National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Carrillo and Fontdevila 2014). Their research expands on the earlier research focused on Mexican immigrant men who have sex with men, and in particular, challenges the notion that these Mexican men bring their own “pre-migration” ideas of gendered sexualities (based on the activo-pasivo model), and furthermore, that they assume a gay-based identity model upon arrival and “settlement.”2 With a sample size of 80 participants, Carrillo and Fontdevila extend previous analyses of same-sex desire in order to give more nuance to interpretations of the relationship between sexuality and migration. An inherent critique through a comprehensive intersectional lens is the scope of the article by the authors. While on the surface, focusing on Mexican immigrants may be perceived as raced, racialized, or even ethnic, this is not discussed in their contribution. Diversity is only evoked in terms of about half of the Mexican states from which their participants migrated; however, the race/class continuum is reduced to how “they vary in terms of their social class position, education, and skin color shade and ethnic features” (923). Similarly, discussions of sex and space in the Mexico/US binary portrayed reproduce the very underdeveloped/modern pattern that the authors seek to interrogate: in one instance, a 21-year-old young man from Oaxaca, Armando, is portrayed as exploring sex with gay men in the US, and he “also began seeking sex in gay bathhouses” (928). Mexico has a multitude of cities where gay bathhouses, and non-designated baths where men gather, also have sex – but that clarification goes absent. Furthermore, the sexual relations, intimacy, and emotional links of some of their immigrant participants who expressed being in some type of relationships with non-self-identified gay men, called mayates, is not addressed in terms of its racialized markings: a mayate is often referenced as a non-gay, usually of dark skin, and working-class man (similar to what a bugarrón is referenced in the Caribbean) who “tops” gay men (for more on mayate, refer to Almaguer 2017). Their sampling includes a person whose experience is that of a “top” sexual partner, who had a girlfriend; however, we know nothing about this participant’s ethno-racial markings, identifications, or how these connect to the choice to be the penetrative partner. We are left with the tension between a kind of international model of gay respectability politics, where Mexican men can show that they too can be gay, while not engaging in questions of how racialized sexualities operate in the lives of the interviewees, or their sexual partners, while on the other, a non-gay identification is unimportant to the researchers. Because the focus is on pre and post migration of same sex desire, it is inherently assumed that neither the Mexican racialization of Mexicans in Mexico merits discussion, nor that those migrant Mexicans both
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 175 become racialized and now engage in racializing readings of other Mexicans, other Latin Americans, and other non-Latinos – and that racialization still, if not structures, at least influences such desire (whether in object choice models or not). In research on non-US populations, the assumption that we only address race in terms of how immigrants are racialized in the US absorbs, and dismisses/evacuates a whole host of racializing practices, dynamics, even invocations of mestizaje in their countries of origin that play a significant role in self racialization and racialization of other non-US populations, as well as African Americans from the US. Still, data from which the authors develop their analysis is a powerful public health and sociological analysis of, and critical stand against, logics of Mexico as a place where gay men understand their experience in highly gendered terms. Their results show that less patterns of interpretation and practice of same sex desire result from their migration to the US. The categories Carrillo and Fontdevila utilize in their paper are fruitful in sustaining a provocative sense of a less underdeveloped Mexican gay man, while also showing how migrating influences the interpretation of experience and practice as less varied as in their countries of origin. Based on the article, the codebook lens to select coding categories was narrowed to migration and sexuality, identity, and experience, thus shrinking chances for race, class, and gender identity and experience in their analyses. A promise for an intersectional project on sexuality and migration among Mexican men who have sex with men requires moving beyond the negation of raced discussions – if not in terms of self-identification of participants, at least in terms of unpacking racialized categories deeply imbued with gendered and racialized sexuality meanings. I suggest how the mayate might have been a point of departure from which to begin to do so in this article, but I also want to be cautious that outlier categories like a non-self-identified Mexican gay man becomes the intersectional one in this type of research: what I have meant to suggest is that categories of identification, and non-identification with gender and sexuality nomenclatures, are often racialized by social scientific projects, and to begin to consider how to do so in scholarship, whether it calls its project intersectional or not. Further sociological work on migrants, and people from other countries, should – whether focusing on intersectionality or not – situate race as more than a US American reading or – as some call it, obsession – by taking a stand against the invisibility and negation of race elsewhere, by weaving in a better acknowledgment of how distinctively unique racialization, and racism, operates in those other countries, so that it is not, by default, read as a United States insistence on seeing race (where one ought to).3 Carol Bohmer, sociologist and lawyer, coauthors an article on cultural silences, and gender and sexuality in asylum processes with anthropologist Amy Shuman. Having worked with political asylum applicants, the authors consider the invisibility of addressing gender and sexuality circumstances in legal proceedings, and how that may have disastrous results for them. The authors demonstrate non-state actors’ perpetuated violence against gender and sexual minorities as the criteria used by policy makers in reviewing asylum applications. Gender is central in their analysis, however. Shuman and Bohmer sharpen the courts’ analyses where rape ends up being considered outside the purview of non-state actors’ violence, since it often times happened among family circles or by family members (2014, 942), showing the impossibility of how notions of different violence markers such as incest, rape, and unlawful or non-consensual sexual relations get excluded from the mandate of claims considered. Their quest is to show how ultimately the presence of gender markers produce an exclusion that serves women and sexual minorities as excluded from the asylum processes because there are
176 Research handbook on intersectionality no direct political actions influencing their lived experience with violence. It is only in the 1990s when this begins to shift. Their article is based on over a decade of cases for political asylum that they have intercepted/worked with at both the Community Refugee Immigration Services offices (Columbus, Ohio) as well as with “refugee aid lawyers and organizations in New England and London” (942); they supplement at times with already published cases in order to guarantee the asylum seekers’ safety and anonymity. From here on, I refer to their work as a legal case study, given their insistence on “reviewing the law.” Their approach is certainly interpretivist, aiming to provide a discursive analysis of “cultural silences” – what I interpret as assumptions about both the sending country and the host society dissecting their asylum case; those cultural silences often clash with the imminent pressure to name and disclose experiences, violence, and to decode sending countries’ cultural and social norms and mores, all as a matter of factual evidence in asylum cases. What’s more important is that familiar and cultural or religious forms of violence and molestation or rape are not considered clear evidence by US or UK asylum legal systems if the sending countries’ governance does not categorize them as violence or rape. Quests for political asylum claims are not universally understood nor applied similarly, and because they are often “measure[d] [against] public display, exposure, and/or recognition” (944) of sexual minorities, the efficacy of the claim may render the claim itself as credible enough, or lacking credibility. In some of the cases Shuman and Bohmer discuss, sexual behavior itself is not considered a fundamental base for prosecution if that behavior is potentially camouflaged or disguised. As well, stereotypical aspects of gay identity based on gender markers such as effeminacy, or taste for specific music or arts and fashion are considered valid elements for interlocutors to inquire about, as discussed in the article. (In a US case, a gay man was denied asylum since his gender presentation was “too masculine” for the courts to see it as a threat to his life; in a UK case, a video showing sexual activity was proposed as evidence of homosexuality.) The complexity of these cases is partial to the geopolitical context, the courts’ reading, and the ideas of experience, identity, consumer culture, preconceived ideas of sexual minority subcultures, and gender expression. Gay male cases show a connection between sexual orientation (as potentially innate – at least how it is interpreted by some courts), sexual behavior and desire, and gender expression, and only sometimes crossing into gender identity. Lesbian cases may also offer a complex reading, in that in some countries, stigma is assigned to unmarried women who may defend their lesbian sexual orientation, or their choice to live alone, while in others, marriage is compulsory, and maybe used against an asylum applicant as proof that they aren’t lesbian-identified. (Trans cases are similarly constituted, except that gender identity is a central claim that is disputed by courts as something that is still read as cross dressing.) The use of the direct voices and narratives of applicants complement well the legal language that reveals the asylum granting institutions’ unspoken rules about visibility and translatability. All in all, the article produces a complex asylum-seeking set of procedures where the identities and experiences of those seeking asylum must be intelligible to the host country’s gatekeepers in ways that reproduce a global north and global south, a developing other and a developed core, and silences that serve as failures in the advocacy for asylum. In intersectional research that cuts across racialization, gender, and religion, considering the conditions of violence narrated by the applicants are insufficient for a suspect State. Intersectionality in these procedures might not ever be articulated in terms of a straight law, and what the asylum seekers produce as
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 177 evidence. But complicating the situation in the “global south” with, say, both advances and contradictions in countries that grant same-sex marriage, but where the Police is the primary violent actor against LGBTI people in procedures and paperwork, including expert witness affidavits, helps elucidate the complexity often reduced to “underdeveloped” elsewhere (Cantú 2005). Yet as noted before, the article foregrounds gender (and sexuality), to the detriment of the raced processes that, on a global scale, produce a global north and global south that have unequal access, and a global south that is often racialized. Using an intersectional lens to potentialize their analysis, one could argue for an unpacking of the mechanisms from the institutions in the global north that misread, and perhaps intentionally misinterpret, cues and experiences from migrants from global south regions, in order to regulate the border. As well, this is inherently central in notions of symbolic and actual citizenship for these asylum seekers. This article is one of the few ones that elicits thinking about mixed methods as a potential way of successfully engaging the politics of asylum systems and their evaluations – in particular, a project of combining policy with quantitative data on number of cases and variables with those asylum seekers’ narratives. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to argue whether quantitative methodologies are (or not) suitable to think through intersectionality; suffice it to say that qualitative and interpretivist approaches seem to be foundational to a complete understanding of how intersectionality is operating in and through sexuality and migration. Thus, while “immutability” is at the center of these social readings that validate a claim based on gendered expression, this is not always the measure from which courts depart. While particularly effeminate behavior among assigned male at birth applicants get a lot of attention – whether they are gay or transgender (although both carry different weight depending on the political context of the country where they come from, and of course, the political turn of the era), this might be the case for lesbian women as well, and for trans men. In sum, while early on, the inherent claim was that their identity was conceived as unchangeable and thus irrevocable, added elements have complicated the quest for asylum based on these claims. In the end, Shuman and Bohmer make gendered cases based on a notion of specific public/ private scenarios in ways that make the asylum processes multilayered and complex beyond the typical gay activist seeking asylum. This set of readings then complicate the pathways of not only migrants, but sexual messages as well as intelligible sexualities and genders that can be validated by the US (even though they are most likely racialized in the process). The focus on sexuality and citizenship provides a symbolic use of the category citizen, either by virtue of the possible salvaging of one’s body and integrity by recognizing violence to it; the symbolic citizen is also that which assumes an object choice, identity-driven (not behaviorally driven, nor engaged in highly gendered sexual readings) in opposition to the (non-citizen) left behind. The border is less porous in these instances, as there is an understanding of a before and after that does not get problematized because the border crossing is seen as a variable of impact in this before and after. The readings from the Sexualities special issue on queer migration, asylum, and displacement engaged with qualitative interviews and legal case studies, although in both cases, while data collection was differently produced, it offered a more systemic, discursive level of analysis for the models the authors sought to explain (for the former, on the traditional gendering versus object choice/gay migrant; for the latter, on the discursive capacity for explanation in the interrogation of asylum system logics that perpetuate cultural silences as lack of evidence). Their analysis remained grounded at the level of data presented, with codes and cases cementing the specific project they brought forth in their articles. In some ways, the narrow focus
178 Research handbook on intersectionality on Carrillo and Fontevila’s concepts/models prevent an opportunity to think intersectionally – if one assumes that an immigrant gay man is already intersectional. In an era of individual identity-making as legitimate politics (inside and outside academia), scholars and activists claim an intersectional stand that denies any reading of racial systems, racialization, and power. A discussion about how these articles could potentially address their projects through an intersectional lens is a way to develop a path forward. Another would be to continuously question the premise of the salient intersectional categories – be it race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, ability – as a scholar is exploring a case study, an interviewee’s excerpt, the social context of a focus group, or an ethnographic account. The special issue of the Ethnic and Racial Studies helps illustrate a more complex mapping of the “here” and “there” that makes for a stronger transnational engagement.
BORDER CONTROL, MIGRATION, AND SEXUAL POLITICS Billy Holzberg, a sociologist in an education, communication, and social studies unit in Kings College, along with Anouk Madörin (“Minor Cosmopolitanisms” in Germany) and Michelle Pfeifer (Media, Culture, and Communications) edited this special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, focusing on “The Sexual Politics of Border Control,” in 2021. Two of the eight contributions to the special issue are written by trained sociologists, to which I turn my attention after discussing their introduction. Like the introduction to Sexualities seven years before, the introduction to this special issue connects the issues of sexuality and migration. However, and perhaps because of the time between the two issues, perhaps because of the several significant moments of “migration crisis” in the world, or perhaps because of the switched focus on sexuality on the ethnic and racial (not on migration, but migration as a connector to race and ethnicity), the volume as a whole offers more critical analyses of migration systems, by focusing on the border – and border control. The editors explicitly name the border – and border control – as a racialized method that sustains populations and core groups as inherently different, and keeps them apart. Also because of the impact of COVID-19 on the writing of the special issue, a focus on disease and possible contagion is evidenced in Ethnic and Racial Studies in ways not visible in the Sexualities special issue in terms of HIV/AIDS, for instance. (An HIV/AIDS diagnose served as a ban against a lot of predominantly gay men from entering the US for decades in the 1980s and 1990s.) These three editors underline the border regimes much more clearly – in parallel ways to how the Sexualities editors did with asylum procedures, but in clear conversation not with agents and institutions of the State – but the State itself. They, plainly and directly, “argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering” (1487, emphasis in the original). The notion of borders as transnational was evidenced in the Sexualities special issue, but it becomes a central topic for the 2021 special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. This might also be related to the number of scholars from non-US universities that contributed to the Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue. (While the Sexualities journal is also located in Europe, the two are distinctive in how many non-US scholars collaborated, and how much non-US work is included in Ethnic and Racial Studies.) Criminology and legal studies scholar Grace Tran addresses marriage in Canada for Vietnamese women who agreed to “fake wedding” (a literal translation of the term đám cưới
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 179 giả), or marriage fraud, in order to migrate, by paying their hosts or sponsors large sums of money to marry them. This article is based on three interviews (out of a study for which 18 interviews were completed) with women whose experiences of paid arranged marriages evolved into a newer intimacy with their husbands; those interviews were supplemented, like other articles reviewed in this chapter, by ethnographic, part-time employment at an immigration law and consulting firm as a legal assistant – in her case, 15 months of such work (2021, 1574). Perhaps because of her positionality as a Vietnamese-Canadian (who also happened to be in a relationship with a non-Canadian), her article seems to be one of the best in triangulating data access, data, and forms of data collection. This important research takes place against the backdrop of moral panics that signal to these arrangements as marriage frauds, which Tran insists is a way to try to elevate ideas that presuppose the immigration system is coherent across the board, honorable in its intentions, and neutral or objective when encountering marriages of this kind. Tran documents how some of her informants had indeed begun to form emotional ties to their sponsors, and in doing so, shows us how “‘fake’ marriages only come into being and are rendered necessary through exclusionary and racialized border policies of the state” and furthermore, crystalizes the ways in which “the messiness of intimate relationships do not fit neatly into the migration policies and logics of nation-states” (1570). Governance that seeks to sanitize and “straighten” migration and marriage is faced with these slippages that may exceed the surveillance mechanisms in place. Another significant element to underline is the fact that when emotional bonds and romantic feelings are developed – either by being in close proximity, because of the arrangement itself, and a potential anticipation that develops into a bond and emotional ties – then love and romantic feelings fall outside of the essentialized experiences that are often assumed to emerge before a commitment is made. “Legitimate” and “authentic” relationships get suspended in a temporality that no longer presume love and romance happens before the marriage contract is established – making evident how all marriage contracts run the risk of losing that legitimacy based on “real” emotional romantic love. Overall, Tran contributes to the larger academic debates on border control discourses with “strategic intimacies” – what serves them in negotiating their relationships, but also, how these may serve as building blocks that both enrich relationships to a point of emotional involvement, while questioning (and in many ways, queering) the boundaries of legitimacy and authenticity in marriage. All of her informants lead the author to consider an alternative view to strategic intimacies, which Tran calls “transformative moments.” In this model, kissing for the first time, giving a speech appreciating having their new partner in their life, even how the distribution of the money as the foundation of the transaction in these marriage contracts was reconfigured are all examples of how “fake” and “real” are imagined and reimagined by Tran’s informants in ways that collapse them, giving those transformative moments new evocative meaning for the couple. Tran resorts to Goffman’s ideas of frontstage and backstage to trouble that logic in the marriage relationships she was able to document through her research. The power relations embedded in Asian migrants marrying Canadian citizens is subtly discussed in the article. The author seeks to utilize her article to foster more “empirical and intersectional undertakings of research [in migration scholarship] on the variety of other forms that transnational intimate relationships can take” (1585). This, however, is framed in the context of the form of marriage arrangement, as well as whether it is successful or not – when Tran illustrates a tri-part comparison (between “genuine” marriages across border, successful spousal sponsorship, and unsuccessful or rejected ones) would better respond to
180 Research handbook on intersectionality this empirical question. Beyond this mention, Tran does not go further in this publication in pushing the notion of intersectionality with methodologies or theoretical proposals. Yet the concept of “strategic intimacies” is itself loaded with potentiality around notions of power and ethno-racial, classed, and migration hierarchies, making her contribution an early step in this direction. I look forward to reading and engaging with Tran’s wonderful contributions. Sociologists Nicola Mai, Calogero Giametta, Heidi Hoefinger, and Jennifer Musto, along with P.G. Macioti, Calum Bennachie, and Anne E. Fehrenbacher (2021), focus on the racialized border politics by connecting the experiences of Asian cis women and Latina trans women across four countries: Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. The focus of these sites’ research brought together migration, sex work, and trafficking as experienced by their informants. They conducted ethnographic fieldwork and interviews between 2017 and 2020 in those four countries based on the Sexual Humanitarianism (SEXHUM): understanding agency and exploitation in the global sex industry (ERC Consolidator Grant 2015-682451), including 221 sex workers sampled for semi-structured interviews, and 80 informants. While Australia focused on cis gender Asian migrant women, in France, the study focused on this population, along with Nigerian cis women, and Latin American/Latina trans women. This was, out of the articles in these special issues, the one most connected to intersectionality, in that the lives, experiences, identities, and social locations from the interviewees offered potential analysis. Namely, this multi-site data collection research project conceptualized the focus of their interviews as based on cis and trans racialized women – although their larger sample included cis gender Asian migrant women, Nigerian cis women, and Latin American/ Latina trans migrants, the article offers a four-site comparison of Asian cis women and trans Latina women. They explain this comparison in the following assertion: “The strategic value of this comparative focus is supported by existing research highlighting the way Asian cis women and trans Latina sex workers are stereotypically racialized and represented respectively as passive victims and offenders while both are constructed both as non-citizens/outsiders, and therefore targeted by law enforcement and immigration controls” (Mai et al. 2021, 1609). Their focus on cis Asian women and trans Latina sex workers helped them illustrate a focus on “extreme bordering” – a concept they deploy in thinking about the new interrelation between State operations/sovereignty with globalized labor and neoliberal capitalism that return to a state of xenophobia and nationalist discourses, leaving behind a more neoliberal form of border control that still intended to portray itself as progressive (1608). The authors do state that the research team “adopts an intersectional and self-reflexive approach to understand and analyze existing inequalities, hierarchies and divisions” (1610), which they consider an “ethical and methodological approach” (1610). Given the Whiteness of the research team, a conscious decision to incorporate and collaborate with members of the groups being studied, including shared engagement in data collection and publications – although they consider this a post-colonial and decolonial theoretical influence. Thus, the reduction of a mention of intersectionality to methodology is noticeable as a tool for easing for the research team the very evident structural barriers – of not having peer-research team members with training and recognition that aren’t White, which is systemic, and is only temporarily repaired with a band-aid “let’s share the work” approach of bringing in non-White participants to collection and analysis. Yet, it is a start. While in Australia, particularly in their focus on Sydney and Melbourne, the team explored the experiences sex workers had with decriminalization versus legalization through bordering, respectively. In these cities, they found the figure of the Asian cis-female as the main victim of
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 181 exploitation (1611). Critically, they shut down the idea of the victimized Asian parlor woman: “Our data dispute the racialized sexual humanitarian moral panics framing Asian women providing sexual services in ‘illegal’ massage parlors as passive, easy prey for traffickers” (1612). The authors expand on the avoidance of full-service sex work by working on massage pretenses that may allow hand jobs and oral sex for additional money, without the stigma of sex shops. In France, migrant sex workers were the focus of research, and based on 59 qualitative interviews, the researchers explored the meaning given to trans Latina women as perceived to be “marginalized” by the public debates, and Asian and Nigerian cis women seen as most vulnerable and more potentially exploited for trafficking (1614). Social policy attempts to destitute sex workers from continuing to engage in erotic labor by offering 330 Euros through a 2016 law and temporary residence permits, to the contrary, challenged their chances to remain in France; furthermore, the laws targeting the clients lessened their work – all in the name of rescuing them from the industry. And in New Zealand, with 58 interviews with a majority Chinese and other Asian countries, the research team uncovered the contradictory model of rescue that really magnified the xenophobia of the governance. Lack of opportunity to work on the sex trade legally was by far the variable that most influenced the capacity for Asian cis women to retain work and remain in New Zealand; likewise, they would not see medical professionals for migration/deportation fears. And in the US, through 58 interviews, including 20 key informants in Los Angeles and New York, the team found that trans migrant sex workers are at the center of a clash between control and protection in ways that were loose enough to provide a humanitarian “face” yet still regulate and impact the sex work industry. Overall, the “bordering” they documented tended to mask neoliberal forms of regulation and control of migrants via sex work and prostitution regulations, while victimizing them in a “moral panics” discourse. All in all, this special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies pushes the limits of how border control is implemented, symbolically, and in terms of State surveillance. The projects of regulating marriages, on Tran’s work, and the four sites’ experiences with the xenophobia curtailed as care for so-called vulnerable populations by Mai et al. show two sides of the same regulation and control of female (cis or trans) bodies, racialized bodies, and bodies that are perceived to be comfortable enough to be “saved” in the neoliberal yet repressive State.
IN CLOSING My goal with this chapter – a critical review of succinct sources that merit exploration – was to begin to make room for more intersectional lenses applied in the social sciences – sociology in particular. I asked the question: Can intersectionality become more central to social scientific scholarship on gender, sexuality, and migration? Whether intersectionality will continue to operate as a field that ignites sociological scholarship remains to be seen. Meanwhile, sociology continues to maintain a sophisticated line between intersectional methodologies, conceptual and theoretical incorporations of intersectionality, and making operational an intersectional approach – the latter we only saw in one of the two special issue articles discussed. Some of the lessons learned from the review provided in this chapter are specific to the topic at hand, such as when defining a question, and selecting a sample that allows the scholars to collect data that answers the question. First, choosing the sample carefully, evidencing the sameness that often takes place in saturation and moving beyond the common pattern and into
182 Research handbook on intersectionality outlier cases is of utmost importance in qualitative techniques of data collection, and I would argue required in intersectional forms of studying migration and sexuality. This may simply mean making explicit categories of difference beyond common notions of general demographics (interviewees are all from the same country, therefore the diverse sampling is evaluated in terms of SES, religion, urban versus rural, etc.), and also interrogating the sameness in the actual design and conceptualization – even the research question. Second, and related to this previous issue of careful sample determination, is the issue of what constitutes the boundaries of difference within the groups we seek to study. This interrogating of categories demands that we suspend our knowledge about a topic, particularly if we are from the group we seek to study, or mildly identify with some of the components of that group. Regional categories that become naturalized when we operate from a national or ethno-racial group need to be questioned and rethought, in order to seek a deeper level of difference (beyond diversity in sample) that allows for a more pronounced reading of the group as members of various – whether distinctive or overlapping – categories of social analysis such as race, gender, and class. And lastly, I would argue that the boundaries of the project are dependent on re-envisioning categories that connect with intersectional lenses in more intentional ways. The sample size does not need to grow, but the ways scholars formulate the sample composition may offer a more heterogeneous sample. Given the limited work that intentionally zeroes in on intersectionality in gender, sexuality, and migration scholarship, it is important that more training by the professorate embeds an intersectional approach in approaching traditional research, community-based, or participatory action research; that it instills a critical view of how categories of difference on which intersectionality is based are placed in constant conversation, “switching” back and forth those categories to demonstrate how gender is racialized and classed, in the context of migration, displacement, gender, and sexuality more specifically. Perhaps then can the work of sustaining a multi-lens analytical lens and approach be achieved.
NOTES 1. Earlier special issues that go beyond the scope of this chapter include: Mobilities on Love, Sexuality, and Migration (Mai and King 2009); and The International Migration Review (Donato, Gabaccia, Holdaway, Manalansan, and Pessar 2006) on Gender and Migration Revisited. A more specialized linguistic anthropology journal was not included in this chapter; it is the Journal of Language and Sexuality, and its special issue was Queering Borders: Language, Sexuality, and Migration (Murray 2014). Among the journals that do not represent sociological scholarship, or to which I had no access, are: Gender Questions (Unisa Press), entitled Transnational Migration, Gender and Sexuality in the Global South (Rugunanan 2020), accessed here: https://journals.co .za/doi/abs/10.25159/2412-8457/7346; Migration Letters (published online by Transnational Press London), entitled Special Issue: Sexuality and Migration (Cvajner and Sciortino 2019), accessed here: https://journals.tplondon.com/ml/issue/view/5. Special issues forthcoming at the time of this chapter’s writing include: Anti-Trafficking Review, with a call for Migration, Sexuality, and Gender Identity, call for papers accessed here: https://www.antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/ announcement/view/31; Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, with a call on Queering Middle East Migrations, call for papers accessed here: https:// lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/announcement/view/20. 2. Because of space, I will limit the explanation of the focus on activo/pasivo to an endnote. Beginning in the 1970s, White anthropologists (Carrier 1995; Lancaster 1992; Murray 1995) began to explore the non-gay model of sexual engagement between men who were the active (presumably insertive/
Making sexuality, gender, and migration intersectional 183 penetrative, masculine, also read as heterosexual), sexual partners of the pasivo (effeminate, publicly read as homosexual, insertee/penetrated). Tomás Almaguer (1991) elucidated the “sexual aim” (seeking particular sexual activity) of the people engaged in the activo/pasivo equation, based on cultural attributes of Chicano, US Latino, and by extent Latin American culture almost in opposition to US models of “object choice” (a person who is male-identified who sees himself as attracted to other men as seeking a man, not a particular form of sexual release). That binary model has been widely critiqued by numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities (for a sample, see Cantú 2009 and Guzmán 2007), and in the case of this article by Carrillo and Fontdevila, it is criticized as a “traditional” (read backwards) model of cultural understandings of sexuality. See also Vidal-Ortiz, Decena, Carrillo and Almaguer (2010) for more on this discussion. 3. One direct resistance to US American analyses of race is often voiced as the “US obsession with race.” At least in my experience, this language repeats often regardless of whether scholars come from Europe and Latin America – the places I often work with or networks with which I collaborate.
REFERENCES Agustín, Laura María. 2007. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed books. Almaguer, Tomás. 1991. “Chicano Men: A cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3 (2): 75–100. Almaguer, Tomás. 2017. “Longing and Same-Sex Desire among Mexican Men.” In The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First Century Perspective, edited by Ramón a Gutiérrez and Tomás Almaguer, 510–25. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cantú, Lionel Jr. 2005. “Well Founded Fear: Political Asylum and the Boundaries of Sexual Identity in the US-Mexico Borderlands.” In Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, edited by Eithne Luibheid and Lionel Cantú Jr., 61–74. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cantú, Lionel Jr. 2009. “A Place Called Home: Mexican Immigrant Men’s Family Experiences.” In The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, 118–42 New York: New York University Press. Carrier, Joseph. 1995. De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality among Mexican Men. New York: Columbia University Press. Carrillo, Héctor and Jorge Fontdevila. 2014. “Border Crossings and Shifting Sexualities among Mexican Gay Immigrant Men: Beyond Monolithic Conceptions,” Sexualities 17 (8): 919–38. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Cvajner, Martina and Giuseppe Sciortino. 2019. “Editorial: Migration and Sexual Change,” Migration Letters 16 (4): 473–80. Doezema, Jo. 2001. “Ouch! Western Feminists’ ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’,” Feminist Review 67 (1): 16–38. Donato, Katharine M. Donna Gabaccia, Jennifer Holdaway, Martin Manalansan, IV and Patricia R. Pessar. 2006. [Introduction to the Special Issue] “A Glass Half Full? Gender in Migration Studies,” International Migration Review 40 (1): 3–26. Guzmán, Manolo. 2007. Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities. New York: Routledge. Holzberg, Billy, Anouk Madörin, and Michelle Pfeifer. 2021. “The Sexual Politics of Border Control: An Introduction,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9): 1485–506. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lancaster, Roger. 1992. Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
184 Research handbook on intersectionality Lewis, Rachel A. and Nancy A. Naples. 2014. “Introduction: Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement,” Sexualities 17 (8): 911–18. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mai, Nicola and Russell King. 2009. [Introduction to the Special Issue] “Love, Sexuality, and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s),” Mobilities 4 (3): 295–307. Mai, Nicola, P.G. Macioti, Calum Bennachie, Anne E. Fehren Bacher, Calogero Giametta, Heidi Hoefinger, and Jennifer Musto. 2021. “Migration, Sex work and Trafficking: The Racialized Bordering Politics of Sexual Humanitarianism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9): 1607–28. Murray, David A.B. 2014. [Preface to the Special Issue] “Queering Borders: Language, Sexuality and Migration,” Journal of Language and Sexuality 3 (1): 1–5. Murray, Stephen O. 1995. Latin American Male Homosexualities. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Romero, Mary. 2018. Introducing Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity. Rugunanan, Pragna. 2020. [Introduction to the Special Issue] “Transnational Migration, Gender and Sexuality in the Global South,” Gender Questions 8 (1): 1–2. Shuman, Amy and Carol Bohmer. 2014. “Gender and Cultural Silences in the Political Asylum Process,” Sexualities 17 (8): 939–57. Tran, Grace 2021. “‘We’re Dating after Marriage’: Transformative Effects of Performing Intimacy in Vietnamese ‘Marriage Fraud’ Arrangements,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9): 1569–88. Vance, Carole (ed.). 1992. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora Press. Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, Carlos Decena, Héctor Carrillo, and Tomás Almaguer. 2010. “Revisiting Activos and Pasivos: Towards New Cartographies of Latino/Latin American Male Same-Sex Desire.” In Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies, edited by Marysol Asencio, 253–73. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, Brandon Andrew Robinson, and Cristina Khan. 2018. Race and Sexuality. Cambridge: Polity.
Section IIc
Critical indigenous studies
12. Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism Renya K. Ramirez
In this chapter, I examine Native feminisms and Indigenous philosophies of All of Our Relations not only to demonstrate the link between racial and environmental justice movements, but also to challenge settler colonial, racist, and capitalist ideas that privilege humans over more-than-humans and position Indigenous peoples as disposable and their lands as wastelands. I also illustrate that intersectionality, at its core, is ancient wisdom based upon an Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations, meaning the other beings on planet Earth. Because settler colonialism is less well understood than racism in US popular culture and academic theory, Indigenous philosophy has too often been ignored within intersectionality, feminism, and environmental justice scholarship. First, I begin with Indigenous intersectionality based upon All of Our Relations. Second, I describe my journey and decision to become a Native feminist and why intersectionality became so crucial to me. Finally, I address how Indigenous intersectionality is fundamental to environmental justice research and activism, including my own involvement with feminist anthropologists and our struggle against climate change. I highlight Grace Thorpe’s 1996 article about fighting back against dumping of radioactive toxic waste on Indigenous lands and Kim TallBear’s and other Indigenous women’s 2016 battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock to illustrate Indigenous intersectionality. I focus on TallBear and Thorpe as Indigenous women activist scholars to emphasize the enduring and long struggle of Indigenous women’s fight for environmental justice. I conclude with a discussion of incorporating Indigenous intersectionality in David Pellow’s work. The Native philosophy of All of Our Relations incorporates kinship between humans and all living things (Deloria 1973 [1992]; LaDuke 1999) and is fundamental to intersectionality, feminism, and environmental justice research and activism. More-than-human relates to the worlds and complex webs of interdependencies of countless beings co-dwelling on the planet (Whatmore 2006). The term emphasizes beings other than humans—animals, fish, bees, water, plants, and land—without creating a hierarchy, but rather points to how humans and more-than-humans are intertwined and connected (Hernandez 2019; Todd 2017a). More-than-humans as a concept has become particularly relevant in the context of climate change, environmental devastation, and the Anthropocene—a planetary epoch marked by humans becoming the dominant force shaping geophysical processes—compelling us to contemplate the end of the world for humans and other beings and lives (Bernardes De Souza Jr. 2021). Indigenous notions of intersectionality depart from Crenshaw’s definition (Crenshaw 1991) that focuses on humans’ experience of oppression but neglects the struggles of more-than-humans. Indigenous intersectional approaches include all life and use multiple categories of analysis: race, class, gender, sexuality, tribal nation, sovereignty, white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Settler colonialism impacts people, but also more-than-humans, using up resources and dumping toxic waste in the air, water, and on land, contaminating humans and all life (Todd 2017a). 186
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 187 Gaard (2017) noted in her essay on “Feminism and Environmental Justice” that gender, sexuality, age, ability, race, and class issues are often lacking within environmental justice activism and scholarship, thus neglecting women, men, and transgendered persons’ experiences with environmental difficulties. Unfortunately, more-than-humans also occupy the margins of environmental justice scholarship (Pellow 2016). David Pellow (2016) observed that environmental justice research can be categorized into first generation studies that emphasized race and class, and second generation studies including gender, sexuality, and other differences (Buckingham and Kulcur 2010; Smith 2005). He further noted the growing numbers of scholars emphasizing gender, nation, sexuality, Indigeneity, and citizenship (Adamson 2011; Bell 2013; Buckingham and Kulcur 2010; Gaard 2004; Smith 2005). What is often missing from environmental justice research is an intersectional analysis that centers on settler colonialism (Adamson 2011; Bell 2013; Buckingham and Kulcur 2010; Pellow 2016). More recently, Kojola and Pellow (2021) argue for positioning the state in environmental justice studies, through interlocking systems of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and enslavement. Many environmental justice scholars, who research Indigenous peoples, use settler colonialism to frame environmental problems (Bacon 2019; Gilo-Whitaker 2019; Norgaard 2019; Reed 2020; Todd 2017a, 2017b; Whyte 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Yazzie and Baldy 2018). Settler colonialism is different from other colonialisms because the focus is on the elimination of Indigenous peoples and relationships with the land (Wolfe 2006). Patrick Wolfe (2006) asserts that settler colonialism is a structure rather than an event, settlers come to stay, and the land is the primary motive for eliminating the Native. As Wolfe (2006) acknowledges, the elimination of the Native includes genocide, assimilation, and removal. Settler colonialism is a system that not only eliminates Indigenous people from the land but takes the land for capitalistic profit. J.M. Bacon (2019) describes settler colonialism as an eco-social structure that causes extreme and enduring inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples. His analysis illustrates how this structure disrupts Indigenous eco-social relations, causing colonial ecological violence that produces terrible harms and risks for Indigenous peoples. Environmental justice scholars further examine how western and racist philosophy imagines Indigenous peoples as waste and our land as wastelands, justifying the contamination of Indigenous lands by dumping toxic wastes and viewing Indigenous people as disposable (Baker et al., 2020; Reed 2009; Silko 1991; Slough Sayers 2022; Voyles 2015).
INTERSECTIONALITY, ALL OF OUR RELATIONS, AND MY NATIVE FEMINIST JOURNEY Native feminists, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill (2013), contend that settler colonialism causes the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and theory as part of feminism, gender studies, and ethnic studies. I argue that settler colonial positions also eliminate Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations and contribute to its absence in theories of intersectionality, feminism, and environmental justice. Now, I turn to my journey to become a Native feminist. When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s at Stanford University, I was a member of a group of Indigenous women graduate students interested in Native feminisms, including Verna St. Denis (Cree/Metis), Victoria Bomberry (Muscogee), Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), and Tina Pierce Fragoso (Lenni-Lenape). I related to them along multiple
188 Research handbook on intersectionality aspects of our identities, which provided our group a sense of cohesion and feelings of safety and connection. At the time, unfortunately, there was not much written about Native feminism. I recall Lee Maracle’s (1996) book, I Am Woman, Kate Shanley’s (1984) short essay, “Indian Feminism,” and the article, “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North America,” by M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey (1992). However, Jaimes and Halsey (1992) refuse to embrace the term Native feminist and encourage Indigenous women to ignore sexism and instead privilege tribal nation and sovereignty. This article was upsetting to me given my experiences growing up excluded because of my gender and race as a Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe girl. My Indigenous mother, Woesha, called me a tomboy because I hated to wear dresses, refused to play with dolls, and was physically active. She reassured me that growing up she too had identified as a tomboy. My gender identity as a tomboy meant I desperately wanted to play Little League baseball like my brother, but girls were not allowed. In elementary school, my teacher forced me to wear dresses or skirts. My mom told me to do housework, another female activity I despised, and I preferred to take out the trash like my brother did. My brother spent five minutes doing chores daily whereas female family members spent hours weekly washing dishes, and cleaning. As a young tomboy it felt unjust. I received a doll for my fifth birthday, and I yelled, “I don’t want a doll. I want a truck!” I attended a mostly white elementary school, and I happily took out a piece of an Indian frybread from a paper bag and the other kids wrinkled their noses and said, “Ewww, what’s that?” As a little Indigenous girl, I did not feel like I belonged. I felt afraid to speak up in my mostly white classes and hated to hear my tentative voice reading aloud. These memories rushed back as we read Jaimes and Halsey’s article. I understood Jaimes’s and Halsey’s argument that as Indigenous women we should unify with our Native men and tackle racism together and fight for tribal sovereignty. Only after racism is overcome, they argue, can we deal with gender issues, such as sexism and rampant violence against Indigenous women. While discussing these early Native women scholars with my Indigenous women colleagues, I grappled over the decision to claim the term Native feminist. Jaimes’s and Halsey’s stance that feminism is a white idea and automatically means one is assimilated is problematic. Verna St. Denis, my Cree, and Metis Stanford colleague from Canada, pointed out that First Nations’ women were challenging the patriarchy of the Indian Act because many Indigenous women were disenrolled from their tribal nations when they divorced Native men, while white women became tribally enrolled when they married Aboriginal men. Verna St. Denis shared how First Nations’ women in Canada suffered from racism, sexism, and class discrimination and later wrote the excellent 2005 article, “Feminism Is for Everybody: Aboriginal Women, Feminism and Diversity.” Listening to Verna, Victoria, Tina, and Mishuana discuss Indigenous women’s multiple oppressions, reading Maracle’s (1996) book, and Kate Shanley’s (1984) essay, I was motivated to say, “Yes! I am a Native feminist!” After being hired at UC Santa Cruz as an assistant professor, I wrote about Native feminism, “Race, Tribal Nation and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging” (Ramirez 2007). In this essay, I criticize the argument of Jaimes and Halsey that Indigenous women must defend tribal nationalism that neglects sexism to survive as women and to become free of colonialism (Ramirez 2007). I explain how this common idea is problematic because we as Indigenous women perish from domestic violence at much higher rates than other women. Therefore, domestic violence is an issue of survival (Ramirez 2007). I further argue that intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) and Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations can link race, gender, tribal nation, and sovereignty together and justify claiming the term Native feminist
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 189 (Ramirez 2007). After these early beginnings of Native feminisms, there has been tremendous growth on the topic (see, for example, Goeman and Denetdale (2009), Baldy (2018), and Nickel and Fehr (2020) and many others).
INTERSECTIONALITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE In February 2020, I gathered with women of color anthropologists committed to use our research knowledge and experience to reach a broader audience (Ramirez 2021). Our aim was to craft an essay on climate change and the Anthropocene for publication in a popular magazine to bring to public awareness the negative impacts of climate change and the Anthropocene on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. We developed a coalition based upon intersectionality by coming together around our shared identities as feminist anthropologists. We committed to write an essay to contribute to the survival of the earth and all living things and publicize marginalized communities’ struggles with climate change and the Anthropocene. We met in Davenport, a tiny town ten miles north of Santa Cruz, California, for a three-day weekend. We shared stories about climate change, our ethnographic research, the Anthropocene, and the struggles of disenfranchised communities. We decided to write for the environmental magazine, Orion. We named our group, the “Slough Sayers.” I discussed the Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1991) book, Almanac of the Dead, because she tells stories about the sacredness of Mother Earth, the relatedness of all life, and the ecological devastation and destruction created by extraction and dumping of toxic waste into clean water, air, and the land, and contaminating our food. Our intersectional research process began with sharing and discussing stories to identify environmental justice themes emerging from our communities. In analysing these stories, our attention was drawn to systems of domination destroying Mother Earth and all of life. For instance, Almanac of the Dead calls for Indigenous sovereignty and return of all Native lands. The last part of the book advocates for a coalition of humans as ecowarriors to unify and heal Mother Earth. I announced to the group, “We are ecowarriors coming together to fight for the earth and all living things!” Following Silko’s call to action, I used Indigenous intersectionality based on the philosophy of All of Our Relations to connect us as ecowarriors, build a coalition across differences to come together as scholars and activists to fight for all beings. Our group entered the research and writing process as scholar activists, sharing stories, and the process of coalition building, identifying systems of domination of humans and more-than-humans—all activities intersectional projects include. We published our essay on disenfranchised communities, the earth, humans, and more-than-humans’ struggle for survival in Orion (2020). Along with other environmental justice scholars, we conceptualized Indigenous intersectionality by incorporating more-than-humans in analysing intersecting systems of domination destroying Mother Earth. I discuss the meaning of Indigenous philosophy’s respect of all life that does not privilege humans over more-than-humans, which is fundamental to an intersectional analysis that links racial and environmental justice.
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INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY—ALL OF OUR RELATIONS In my essay, “Race, Tribal Nation and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging,” I analyse the Lakota concept of All of Our Relations to discuss how this Indigenous philosophy offers an alternative vision of tribal sovereignty. This Lakota concept encompasses the connectiveness between humans and more-than-humans, including animals, plants, birds, insects, land, and all beings. In my 2018 book, Standing Up to Colonial Power, I explain Ho-Chunk philosophy relating to animals by drawing on a 1941 speech of my Ho-Chunk grandfather, Henry Cloud made to the Wildlife Society in Pendleton, Oregon. He said, Conservation of game bulked large in the Red Man’s Philosophy. According to [Ho-Chunk] tradition, animals were created before man. Priority of existence carried to the Indian mind the endowment of greater powers. The great Creator gave the animals something more than He gave to man. Animals therefore were akin to the beings known as supernaturals [or spiritual beings]. Animals belong to the category of creatures meriting worship and adoration from man. It was believed that the animals also could do the work of supernaturals. These [supernaturals] had power and control over the Red man’s most vital interests—over sickness and health, victory or defeat in war, success on the hunt and chase. In the foregoing I have used some big words simply to say that when the Indians’ respect for the animal kingdom amounts to a religion, wanton destruction of game can find no room in his thinking. Such practice has never been heard of in Indian experience. From time immemorial game was the means of subsistence for the Indian. Its conservation meant self-preservation for the Indian race itself. Its conservation meant self-preservation of the Indian race itself … When Indians killed deer, buffalo, or any other game they never wasted any part. The hair was made into mattress material. Pads were made of it while it was wet for pack saddles. Ropes were made from buffalo hair. Indian trunks were made from buffalo hide. The tail was used for head dress, and in buckskin dresses. The hoof was heated to be cut for ornamental dress purposes. When cut and strung, it had a clear, ringing sound. The Indians ate the inside of the hoof. Tripe was cut, its contents emptied, cleaned thoroughly, and cured by smoking for winter food, or boiled for eating immediately. The lungs were soaked for winter use. The bones were cut into pieces and preserved for soup making in winter. It was cut very thin and hung up. Sometimes it was broken up for tallow by making it into cakes. The meat was sliced very thin and hung to dry in the sun and inside the tepee. The ear a most valuable dish for the Indian. The skin was peeled, and the ear gristle was eaten as a great delicacy. The hide, Indians make into gloves, moccasin and ready to wear clothing. The horns were used for drinking purpose, rings for decoration of the hand, awl handles for scraping hair off the hide. Elk hides were used for robes with hair retained like buffalo robes. When hair is removed, Indians use it for blankets and robes, and for panoply decorations with long fringes on horses. The bearskin being waterproof was used for drum coverings and as throw rugs. (Cloud 1941, 1–2)
My grandfather’s narrative shows how stories are essential for identifying what is important, and points to the types of data to be collected and analysed. Part of the intersectional research process is examining how systems of domination intersect, which Cloud shows in explaining the reciprocal link between animals and humans. As Cloud’s account demonstrates, animals, an example of more-than-humans, are central to Ho-Chunk spiritual philosophy and are valued above humans—very different from white and western assumptions that rank and privilege humans over animals. Cloud stresses a deep sense of human and animal respect and kinship. Furthermore, Cloud links the preservation of animals to the survival of humans. Unlike white hunters who track and kill animals for sport, Natives hunt to feed their loved ones (Ramirez 2018). Indeed, settlers tried to kill all buffalo to take away Natives’ food source and as a tactic of genocide (Phippen 2016), another settler colonial example of elimination.
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 191 This Indigenous respect, care, and environmentally sustainable relationship between animals and humans is very different from the settler colonial and capitalistic worldview that causes widespread poisoning of Indigenous peoples, animals, fish, and all beings from oil spills, uranium mining, toxic dumps, and pesticides that threaten Native peoples’ very survival and all of life. I argue that an Indigenous conceptualization of intersectionality links systems of domination to race, tribal nation, gender, and the environment. Therefore, Native feminisms contribute to our survival as human beings, and fundamental to being a Native feminist researcher is to use intersectional methods. Native feminist environmental justice researchers employ an expanded notion of intersectionality that includes humans and more-than-humans as research subjects and utilizes an ethic of care and respect. While conducting research, the connections between all life are incorporated into multiple categories of analysis. According to Hernandez (2021), ethics of care and respect must come from love (Moraga and Anzaldua 2015). Respectful relationships between humans and all of life can be healing and create collaborative futures (Hernandez 2021). Researchers listen respectfully and carefully to Indigenous peoples’ stories regarding all living things and the land (Baker 2019, 2020; Simpson 2017). Stories become significant data in examining relationships between all life, how both Indigenous people and more-than-humans are threatened by the same policies and practices embedded in settler colonial domination. They follow Indigenous philosophical and intersectional frameworks to examine Indigenous people and all beings as active and powerful agents, who have real bodies and lives that co-create, intersect, and overlap (Baker 2019, 2020; Black Elk and Baker 2020; Hernandez 2021; TallBear 2014, 2019; Todd 2017a). Researchers use archival and/or ethnographic methods, such as collecting government documents, environmental impact reports, letters, newspaper articles, attending meetings, interviewing tribal and government officials, and conducting field and participatory observations of more-than-humans and humans (Hernandez 2021; Hoover 2017, 2018; Manning 2018; Todd 2017a). They often utilize both macro and micro levels of analysis, analysing how systems of oppression at the macro level impact Indigenous people and all of life at the micro level. Environmental justice scholars argue that western, colonial, and capitalistic discourse connect Indigenous peoples and waste and their lands as wastelands (Baker et al. 2020; Reed 2009; Silko 1991; Slough Sayers forthcoming; Voyles 2015). From the start of colonization to the present, colonizers have treated Indigenous lands as empty and undeveloped (terra nullis), Indigenous peoples as savages, and along with more-than-humans as ultimately disposable waste (Anderson 2013; Reed 2009). In Almanac of the Dead, Silko maps the wasting of Indigenous peoples and lands as continual and uninterrupted. Natives continually fought against the colonizer stealing and taking over Indigenous lands with their guns and disease in the sixteenth century and the toxic colonialism of the twenty-first century, such as the dumping of toxic waste on Native lands. The neutral terms may shift and change, such as “national security logic” to “national sacrifice zones” but the wasted lands or wastelands include Indigenous reservations and the impoverished neighborhoods of people of color (Reed 2009). This mapping process constructs an Indigenous framework that compares western, colonial, and capitalistic ways of seeing and knowing.
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CASE STUDY: GRACE THORPE In the following, I discuss the Native feminist, intersectional, and environmental justice work of Grace Thorpe (Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and Menominee) by analysing her scholarly writing and activism against the dumping of toxic waste on Indigenous lands. I recollect my mom, Woesha Cloud North, talking about Grace Thorpe fondly, whom she met while she lived on Alcatraz Island during the 1969 Native occupation of Alcatraz Island. Her daughter, Dagmar Thorpe, lived with us on the mainland while she attended Stanford Law School. I remember Dagmar as tall, thin with long blonde hair and as incredibly smart and beautiful. Because Dagmar lived with us, I decided to write about and honor her mom’s scholarship and activism. I was happy to find archival material about Grace Thorpe’s work in the National Museum of the American Indian archives. My Native feminist intersectional methods consisted of using a life story approach by searching archival material, including newspaper articles, pictures, newsletters that her family had collected. Thorpe was a World War II veteran, having served as a Women’s Army Corps corporal in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a paralegal degree from the Antioch School of Law in Washington, DC in 1974. After her involvement in the occupation of Alcatraz and her founding the Native American Women’s Action Council, Thorpe served as a Congressional Intern for Senator James Abourezk from 1974–75. She was later appointed Legislative Assistant for the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs and as a Task Force Program and Policy Analyst for the American Indian Review Commission. As the daughter of the Olympic athlete, Jim Thorpe, she restored her father’s 1912 Olympic record in 1983. She returned to her tribal homelands and became active in tribal affairs. In later years, she was a tribal judge, health commissioner and an environmental activist and scholar, opposing nuclear waste on tribal lands (Grace Thorpe Collection; Indian Country News 2008). Grace Thorpe, Intersectionality, and All of Our Relations Thorpe’s environmental justice activism and research was based on intersectionality shaped by Indigenous wisdom and philosophy. She collected data in archival research of government documents, newspaper articles, scholarly books, essays, and environmental justice meeting reports; as well as notes from ethnographic research of community meetings and interviews with people about how humans, the land, and all of life were being harmed by radioactive waste (Thorpe 1996). This data collection provided Thorpe with material to analyse micro and macro levels, and uncovered a more inclusive understanding of how all living things suffered from systems of oppression of settler colonialism. As an environmental justice scholar and activist, Thorpe (1996) published a powerful article, “Our Homes Are Not Dumps: Creating Nuclear Free Zones,” in the Natural Resources Journal. Thorpe was a corporal stationed in New Guinea at the end of World War II when the first atomic bomb was released into the air and exploded over Hiroshima. While decades had passed since Hiroshima, Thorpe emphasizes the lack of safe disposal of radioactive waste from commercial and military reactors. Thorpe stresses how rich capitalists have more access to government representatives and the media compared to the disadvantaged; thus, the nuclear industry targets those without close contact with the powerful. Consequently, impoverished neighborhoods, and Indigenous lands, become places to dump nuclear waste.
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 193 Thorpe begins her article by noting: The Great Spirit instructed us that, as Native people, we have a consecrated bond with Mother Earth. We have a sacred obligation to our fellow creatures that live upon it. For this reason, it is both painful and disturbing that the United States government and the nuclear power industry seem intent in forever ruining some of the little land we have remaining. (Thorpe 1996, 955)
In this quote, Thorpe uses Indigenous philosophy, encouraging Native people to feel a spiritual connection with Mother Earth and to protect the land and all living things. She contrasts this Indigenous philosophy with the United States government and nuclear power industry that seem committed to spoiling Indigenous land. Her words appear to suggest a settler colonial, racist, and capitalistic mindset that facilitates dumping toxic waste on Indigenous lands, endangering Natives’ lives, and land bases, contributing to a settler colonial process of elimination. Thorpe’s intersectional research using race, class, settler colonialism, and environment together provides macro-level analysis that shows how the nuclear industry operates as a system of oppression, which negatively impacts Indigenous peoples at the micro level, making us sick. She reports that between 1950 and 1980, approximately 15,000 people worked in uranium mines located on Navajo and Pueblo land, and one-quarter of these laborers were Indigenous. She points out that radiation from tailings piles—the debris after uranium has been extracted—leaches into groundwater that ends up in Indigenous homes, ranches, and farms. Furthermore, high concentrations of radon gas constantly seep out of the radioactive piles and Natives breathe in this toxic gas and experience radiation at dangerous levels. Therefore, she argues that Natives who reside near uranium mines experience the same negative health consequences as those working in underground uranium mines. Thorpe’s macro and micro levels of analysis establish the nuclear plant industry’s settler colonial process of elimination and environmental racism: building a nuclear plant near Indigenous land and people, contaminating their drinking water, endangering their health and safety, and potentially causing sickness and death. Fundamental to settler colonialism is eliminating Indigenous peoples for settlers’ land use and capitalistic exploitation. Thorpe (1996) examines the consequences of operating a nuclear power plant in Minnesota near the Prairie Island Mdewankanton Sioux. A consortium, Northern States Power (NSP), contacted Minnesota state officials about building a storage facility near the NSP plant at Prairie Island. This nuclear plant was built on an old tribal village and burial mound that was more than 2,000 years old. While the NSP plant supplies 15 percent of the state’s electricity, no energy had reached the Mdewankanton community, which is adjacent to the plant. On October 2, 1979, there was a 27-minute release of radiation that forced evacuation of the nuclear plant. Plant officials did not notify the nearby tribal nation until several days later. By 1989, radioactive tritium was found in the drinking water, compelling the tribal nation to build an 800-feet-deep well and water tower that was not finished until 1993. The Prairie Island Sioux fought the nuclear waste proposal and won and determined their Prairie Island Reservation a Nuclear Free Zone. The United States Department of Energy (DOE) started to consider placing a permanent nuclear repository in basalt and granite hard rock deposits in Minnesota. The United States government considered the White Earth reservation as a disposal site. The Anishinaabe, who live on White Earth, conducted a study on the potential health impact to humans and all of life to assess the overall harm of radioactive waste. At the micro level, they investigated the negative effects of toxic waste on humans and more-than-humans. They investigated the negative
194 Research handbook on intersectionality effects of radioactive waste on living beings. Nuclear power and government officials’ decision to dump toxic waste on Indigenous land showed the intersection of systems of oppression the Anishinaabe faced. In response, the Minnesota legislature passed the Radioactive Waste Management Act, stating that this kind of nuclear repository could not be built within the state’s boundaries without the legislature’s authorization (Thorpe 1996). As a Native feminist and environmental justice scholar and activist, Thorpe acknowledges the agency of Indigenous peoples as powerful actors as they struggle against environmental racism and settler colonialism. An example is the creation of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans (NECONA) in 1993—an organization developed to fight against Monitored Retrieval Storage (MRS) or any nuclear waste dumping on Indigenous lands, and to encourage tribal nations to proclaim their lands as Nuclear Free Zones. As fewer and fewer tribal nations considered locating MRS on their lands, the pressure on Washington increased. NECONA was able to convince US Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to contest the MRS on the energy and appropriations committee. Consequently, Congress did not fund the MRS program (Thorpe 1996). At the same time, Thorpe (1996) reports that Congress voted to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, which is located 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land. Federal officials planned to open the facility in 2010. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, government officials began searching for a temporary facility for nuclear waste until Yucca Mountain became operational. Again, tribal nations and Indigenous lands were targeted. Thorpe (1996) describes the process of tribal nations being approached to accept the MRS facility to store uranium waste on Indigenous land. At the time Thorpe wrote the report, 17 tribes had been approached by federal officials. The three remaining were the Mescalero Apache of New Mexico, the Goshutes in Utah, and Fort McDermitt Reservation in Nevada, which includes the Paiutes and Western Shoshone (Thorpe 1996). Furthermore, Thorpe (1996) stresses the complicated political landscape of Native Americans and the nuclear power industry. She recognizes that tribal officials do not all struggle against nuclear utility companies, but some agree to build MRS facilities on Indigenous land. As Thorpe notes (1996), NSP had signed an agreement with the Mescalero Apache to build an MRS facility in New Mexico. The agreement required the tribe to sign two 20-year licenses to provide a repository for 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. NSP estimated that total revenues over the 40-year period would be $2.3 billion, and the tribe would receive $250 million. Using its authority, the Tribal Council believed it could work towards this agreement and presented a public referendum to tribal members. The January 31, 1995, referendum was voted down by 490 to 362. Soon after the vote, a petition asking for a new election started circulating. Tribal members voted again on March 9, 1995, and the measure passed 593 to 372. At the time the essay was written, there was uncertainly of what would happen at Mescalero. Opponents of MRS sought another referendum. The State of New Mexico prohibited transport of already used nuclear fuel to overturn the proposal. At the same time, NSF officials announced they planned to move ahead with the project. Thorpe provides an example of how systems of oppression of capitalism, environmental racism, and settler colonialism cross national borders. Thorpe (1996) recognizes that the issue of nuclear waste on Indigenous lands is not isolated to the United States, but also is a problem in Canada. Federal and utility company officials in multiple countries consider Indigenous lands as suitable places for the dumping of toxic waste and Indigenous peoples’ health and
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 195 lives as collateral damage for capitalistic profit. Thorpe supports this claim by pointing to the free trade agreement article between Canada and the United States that forbids Canada from stopping nuclear waste from entering the country. The Meadow Lake Cree in Saskatchewan considered the proposal to become a permanent repository made by the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a corporation of the Canadian government, which sells nuclear technology throughout the Americas. Thorpe (1996) describes the situation in Mexico as even more horrible because of a lack of environmental regulation. NECONA had heard of “jelly babies,” babies born without bones because of environmental contamination. Thorpe (1996) astutely analyses the complications of tribal sovereignty. Tribal officials at Mescalero and other reservations invoked tribal sovereignty in support of building an MRS facility on Native lands. Thorpe analyses the use of tribal sovereignty as a reason to not protect the environment. She wonders about telling tribes not to build MRS facilities on tribal lands to protect the earth. Tribal officials respond by claiming their right to do as they please to exert tribal sovereignty. While Thorpe recognizes that in a sense, they are right, their argument is not truly an expression of sovereignty but sells tribal sovereignty. Thorpe asserts the issue is not sovereignty, but the real concern is Mother Earth’s and all of life’s survival and environmental racism. She explains that the goal of NECONA is to encourage tribal nations to articulate their sovereign rights in support of Mother Earth and unite an increasing number of tribal governments that are proclaiming their tribal lands as Nuclear Free Zones. She points to the contradiction of utility companies working for years to abolish tribal sovereignty, and now are promoting tribal sovereignty to dump nuclear waste on Indigenous land. As a Native feminist researcher and activist, Thorpe’s analysis of environmental racism, settler colonialism, and capitalism points the finger at nuclear utility and federal government officials. Assuming Native lands are suitable for dumping toxic waste is an example of environmental racism. Placing toxic waste on Indigenous land is a settler colonial process of elimination as Indigenous peoples often get sick and die; and are, therefore, sacrificed for utility companies’ capitalistic profit. Thorpe (1996) documents the DOE and utility company officials’ normalizing Natives’ acceptance of nuclear waste and dumping it on their lands as natural. Utility company officials have persuaded some traditionalists, who are keepers of the land, to accept nuclear waste. Thorpe (1996) argues governmental and nuclear power officials try to frame the acceptance of nuclear waste as part of Natives’ strong role as earth stewards. However, as an activist, scholar, and powerful actor, Thorpe had already declared to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in 1993 that such an interpretation was a perversion of our beliefs and an insult to our intelligence to say we are natural stewards of these wastes. She argues the goal of the United States government and the utility companies is to dump this highly hazardous waste on Native lands and to continue to create more of it. As stories are central to Native feminist and Indigenous intersectional research, they provide data on the harm that yellow powders from uranium poses for humans and all life. Thorpe (1996) calls attention to the many hundreds of years our traditional Indigenous spiritual leaders cautioned us against extracting resources from the land. They warned us that the earth will become ruined and destroyed. She describes a Navajo story that forewarns the hazards of uranium, The people emerged from the third world into the fourth and present world and were given a choice. They were told to choose between two yellow powders. One was yellow dust from the rocks, and the other was corn pollen. The [People] chose corn pollen and the gods nodded in assent. They also issued
196 Research handbook on intersectionality a warning. Having chosen the corn pollen, the Navajos were to leave the yellow dust in the ground. If it were ever removed, it would bring evil (961).
Thorpe (1996) cautions that living near uranium mines, nuclear power plants, and nuclear testing puts one at high risk for cancer. Because of nuclear testing in Nevada, thyroid cancer rates among the Western Shoshone increased. They contracted leukemia and are losing their lives at a young age—something not experienced before. Similarly, pollution and toxic waste from the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in the State of Washington threatened and still threatens Native people who fish and eat Columbia River salmon (Thorpe 1996; Tolson 2014). Thorpe (1996, 961–2) stresses that “those who visited all of these horrors upon us want us to accept their nuclear waste, too.” She continues with a quote from Darelynn Lehto, the Vice President of the Prairie Island Mdewankanton, who testified before the Minnesota State Senate while fighting against putting a MRS on their tribal land. “It is the worst kind of environmental racism to force our tribe to live with the dangers of nuclear waste simply because no one else is willing to do so” (Thorpe 1996, 962; Lehto 1994, 17). Thorpe asks why as a society do we tolerate the manufacture of products that cannot be safely disposed of. While honoring the activism of a tribal official and NECONA, Thorpe portrays the federal government and uranium utility companies as oppressive forces of settler colonialism and environmental racism, placing toxic waste on Indigenous lands, and alluding to the common perception that Indigenous peoples are waste, and our lands are wastelands. Thorpe ends her essay, As a mother and grandmother, I am concerned about the survival of our people just as Mother Earth is concerned about the survival of her children. There is currently a moratorium on construction of nuclear power plants in the United States. There is also current legislation, however, that would allow new building if arrangements were made for the waste. Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and for our Mother Earth? The Iroquois say that in making any decision one should consider the impact of seven generations to come. As Thom Fasset, who is Iroquois, reminds us, taking such a view on these issues often makes us feel we are alone, rolling a stone up a hill. It keeps rolling back down on us. That may be the only way, however, for us to live up to our sacred duty to this land and to all of creation. (963)
Thorpe as an activist and scholar underscores the importance of respect, care, and kinship between humans, Mother Earth and all living things, while critiquing nuclear plant officials’ perversion of tribal sovereignty that opens the door for placing radioactive waste on Indigenous lands. She criticizes tribal officials as genocidal and short-sighted by asserting this twisted sense of tribal sovereignty and choosing not to protect the health of Mother Earth, humans, and all life in exchange for money and profit. She highlights federal and nuclear plant officials’ efforts to use Indigenous lands as toxic waste dumps, threatening Indigenous peoples’ health, causing cancer, and shortening our life spans.
INTERSECTIONALITY, STANDING ROCK, AND INDIGENOUS WOMEN ACTIVISTS/SCHOLARS Native women activist scholars have continued to research, write, and fight against capitalist and corporate interests using Indigenous lands to make a profit. An example is the Native feminist anthropologist Kim TallBear’s 2019 essay, “Badass Indigenous Women Caretake Relations.” TallBear’s chapter is part of a collection of essays, Standing with Standing Rock,
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 197 edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon (2019) that connect #NODAPL to centuries of Indigenous resistance against gender violence, white supremacy, environmental destruction, capitalism, and colonization, Using Indigenous intersectionality, TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) interviewed Native activist scholars, collected data from newspapers, books and essays, listened to interviews on CNN and other news sources to examine how humans and more-than-humans were negatively impacted by the Dakota Access Pipeline and the process Standing Rock organizers used to build coalitions with other movements and people across differences to increase their political power. TallBear identified women of the Oceti Sakowin or Seven Council Fires to be central to the Standing Rock movement. They created allies in many countries as they worked to protect the water and land from the capitalistic interest of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Her research found that the Standing Rock movement builds on the energy of the Idle No More (INM) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements. In 2012, three Indigenous women, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon, and Nina Wilson, and one non-Indigenous woman, Sheelah McLean, founded INM. TallBear (2019) describes how INM linked Bill C-45, an omnibus bill affecting over 60 acts, legislation that was supported by the Conservative Harper Canadian government that opposed environmental protections. The foundation of their movement is based on Indigenous ways of knowing and sovereignty to fight to safeguard our air, water, land, and all life for future generations. They recognized that Indigenous peoples connect our lives and treaty rights to the well-being of our more-than-human relatives. This linkage is not only to protect Indigenous peoples’ lives but the lives of everyone. TallBear (2019) honors LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, founder of Standing Rock’s Sacred Stone Camp and a Standing Rock Tribe’s historic preservation officer, who tragically died recently on April 10, 2021. Brave Bull Allard (2016) as a scholar activist analyses settler colonialism and genocide. She describes how federal officials not only ordered genocidal killing of our people, but also used another elimination tactic, the cutting of our deep relationships between our more-than-human relatives and the land. She considers police violence against the peacefully protesting Standing Rock Water Protectors, linking the fate of Indigenous people to the destiny of more-than-humans and the land. She emphasizes that the land was cleared of our relatives and the buffalo nation for white ranchers to graze their cattle. Brave Bull Allard (2016) uses Indigenous intersectionality, describing how settlers worked to cut Indigenous peoples’ deep connection to the land and more-than-humans by removing Natives from their land and widespread killing of the buffalo—an important resource of buffalo meat, leather for clothing, and blankets to keep us warm. TallBear (2019) argues that white supremacist citizens and the United States settler colonial state includes white ranchers and the fossil-fuel corporate executives in the past and in the present, who worked hard to eliminate Indigenous peoples’ relationship to our more-than-human relatives, the land and water, while supporting white occupation and capitalistic profit. These processes of elimination are indeed examples of settler colonialism (TallBear 2019). TallBear’s use of Indigenous intersectionality as a research method and analysis is evident in her inclusion of both more-than-humans and humans. In connecting #NoDAPL to other struggles, TallBear notes that Faith Spotted Eagle, founder of the Brave Heart Society and Ihanktonwan Dakota elder, showed how assaults on all life contribute to increased sexual violence against Indigenous women. Laborers who build pipelines to carry oil and fossil fuel live in “man camps” and Indigenous women near these camps experience high rates of sexual assault (Cook 2019). Spotted Eagle identified
198 Research handbook on intersectionality the connection between settlers sexually assaulting Indigenous women and itinerant workers committing sexual assault and environmental damage. According to TallBear, Spotted Eagle honors the revival of nations, which includes humans and more-than-humans nations having good relationships. TallBear emphasizes that her name “Faith” is not Barack Obama’s US exceptionalist “progress” or “hope” for restoring the nation-state founded on white supremacy. Instead, using Indigenous intersectionality, TallBear (2019) argues, it is the faith in Indigenous women as the leaders of environmental justice movements, who stress relationships of care and respect with other humans and more-than-humans, and the planet. Again, using intersectionality, TallBear (2019) identifies the central role that Two Spirit leadership has been in both the Idle No More and Standing Rock movements. Alex Wilson is a Two Spirit Scholar and Idle No More activist and defines Two Spirit peoples’ role in the struggle is to encourage and motivate others to transform and grow politically and personally. Melody McKiver, a Two Spirit videographer with Idle No More, argues that Two Spirit people motivate open-mindedness and play various roles in different Indigenous communities they belong to. At Standing Rock, they built a Two Spirit camp and are part of a Two Spirit Nation. The significance of Two Spirit people in the environmental movement is recognized by Indigenous nations and TallBear cites the case of Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres as another leader who connected Indigenous rights and environmental justice work with LGBTQ oppression. Caceres argued that the same powerful interests attack both the planet and LGBTQ vulnerable communities. Sadly, she was killed in her home on March 3, 2016, after many threats to her life (TallBear 2019). TallBear (2019) honors the activist work of Black Lives Matter founded by African American women, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. This movement began in 2013 as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin in Florida. BLM as a movement responded to police brutality against African Americans nationwide. BLM also worked on behalf of other vulnerable communities’ rights, including queer and trans people, criminal justice reform, domestic workers, immigrant justice, and for human rights overall. This political coalition work across differences is based on intersectionality and increases the political power and strength of disenfranchised communities. TallBear sees their activist work as strong acts of queer and women-led governance and activism (TallBear 2019). As a Dakota feminist and strong supporter of BLM, TallBear (2019) sees the connection between Black women of BLM with Indigenous women leaders of Standing Rock and Idle No More. All these women are caretakers of their relatives and kin. TallBear clarifies the word “kin” and differentiates it from white, settler colonial, and patriarchal notions of relationships. TallBear, however, stresses that she does not view only women as caretakers, but also includes men as caretakers too. She honors Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II, and his fight against Dakota Access Pipeline’s invasion on Oceti Sakowin territory and the young men on the frontlines of the #NoDAPL movement (TallBear 2019). Standing Rock, Idle No More, and BLM incorporate intersectionality into their organizing to help build coalitions between people from various racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, tribal, and other identities. All benefitted from the momentum of BLM. Both Standing Rock and Idle No More use Indigenous intersectionality involving humans and more-than-humans and the planet. In this way, Standing Rock and Idle No More movements link racial justice and environmental justice movements. Now, I turn to Erik Kojola and David Pellow (2021), two critical environmental justice scholars, who use intersectionality. Pellow (2016, 2018) works to develop a framework of
Indigeneity, feminisms, and activism 199 critical environmental justice studies, which builds on and extends earlier generations of environmental justice studies. He pays attention to how multiple categories of difference are involved in environmental injustice, including race, gender, sexuality, class, and species. David Pellow (2016) expands Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality by including humans and more-than-humans, arguing that BLM is both a racial justice and an environmental justice movement, while making the connection between intra-human inequality and oppressions and their interaction with human and more-than-human oppression. If BLM as a movement was created to challenge state-sanctioned violence against Black people, Pellow (2016) argues, one understands why BLM activists choose to address environmental racism. Pellow (2016) argues environmental racism can be seen as a form of violent control over bodies, knowledge systems, and space, yet state violence is an analysis often lacking in environmental justice scholarship. According to Pellow (2016), both BLM and environmental justice activists might consider how to make communities places of safety beyond state control. The BLM and environmental justice activists and scholars have relied on the state to control and regulate industry and deliver justice. The track record of the state’s law enforcement and regulation and control of industry in communities of color has been awful, as when Indigenous peoples and communities of color are viewed as disposable or as waste. To address this problem, Pellow (2016) recommends that critical environmental studies must view communities of color and more-than-humans as subjects of research and essential and imperative to our collective futures. What is missing from Pellow’s (2016) analysis, however, is a deep engagement with settler colonialism—a pivotal category of analysis to understand Indigenous peoples and their environmental difficulties. Settler colonialism as already mentioned was, however, addressed more recently in the 2021 article of Kojola and Pellow, “New Directions in Environmental Justice Studies: Examining the State and Violence.” Like TallBear and Brave Bull Allard, Pellow (2016) acknowledges a historical link between using violence against animals, killing of livestock as food sources during wartime and colonization of Indigenous peoples (Pellow 2016; TallBear 2019). As Native feminists, scholars, and activists, we encourage critical environmental justice scholars to take seriously critiques of settler colonialism and its implementation and to acknowledge we are on Indigenous land (Teves and Arvin 2018).
CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argue that Native feminism and Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations helps bring together racial and environmental justice scholarship and activism and challenges the racist, and settler colonial mindset that Indigenous peoples are waste, and their lands are wastelands. Intersectionality shaped by Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations encourages me to claim my identity as a Native feminist and enables me to see the connection between race, gender, tribal nation and sovereignty, and environmental justice. Indigenous intersectionality has been a research methodology and concept that motivated me to work together with a group of women of color anthropologists, the “Slough Sayers,” to support Native women-led environmental justice activism, and research. Indigenous intersectional environmental justice research includes humans and more-than-humans as research subjects, investigates with respect and care all life, including the land, the relationship between humans, plants, animals, birds, and all living things. It also uses multiple categories, including
200 Research handbook on intersectionality race, tribal nation and sovereignty, gender, class, sexuality, and settler colonialism at the center of the analysis. I argue that intersectionality, at its core, is wisdom and philosophy of All of Our Relations that includes humans and more-than-humans. I argue that settler colonialism contributes to the erasure of Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations. As a critical legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw did not consider more-than-humans in her definition of intersectionality since the legal framework used for analysing civil rights and discrimination is a settler colonial construct. Finally, I argue that Indigenous women activists and scholars influenced by Indigenous philosophy of All of Our Relations certainly contribute to feminism, intersectionality, and environmental justice research and theory.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Zoe Todd, Janelle Baker, Anna Tsing, Paulla Ebron, Rosa Ficek, Sarah Vaughn, Karen Ho, Darcey Evans, Yve Chavez, Mary Romero, and Karie Marie Norgaard for feedback.
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13. Intersectionality and ethnography Robert Keith Collins
The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite – that it frequently conflates or ignores differences. (Crenshaw 1991, 1242)
INTRODUCTION When Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) wrote, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” one of her goals was to illuminate the problems of ignoring intragroup differences and how these differences shape lived experiences, particularly for African American women. In the epigraph above, she reminds us that ignoring differences within groups lends to conflict among groups based on inconsistencies between racial and class identities, racial and sexual identities, etc. This chapter expands on this theoretical discussion by examining the need – and useful observation and interviewing tools – for investigating the subjectivity of race and culture in lived experience. Central in this discussion is an examination of the relevance of intersectional research to ethnography and how taking intersectional lived experiences as the central focus of analysis lends to theoretical descriptions and specifications of how individuals make sense of their multidimensional identities. The fieldwork examples provided, and the lives that informed the research conducted, will show how being a self-reflexive researcher, while observing individual interactions within social and cultural environments, and focusing interviews on what individuals say and do during these interactions, provides insight into the multidimensionality of experiences and identities that individuals can embody. These complexities in experiences and self-understanding can often be missed using standard ethnographic approaches. Although the discussion in this chapter may seem like a critique of standard ethnographic approaches, it is merely an attempt to expand on these tools, illuminating the strengths of an integrated intersectional and person-centered ethnographic approach. For over 20 years, my rationale for using an integrated approach to the study of African-Native Americans or individuals of blended cultural and/or racial African and Native American ancestry, particularly during the creation of the Smithsonian’s traveling banner exhibit, “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” (Tayac 2009), is that it enables respondents to explain how they see the consistencies and inconsistencies between social recognition and self-identification (Collins 2009, 2021a). These explanations further enable the investigation of how race and culture, being both African American and culturally specific Native American, are navigated and negotiated in individual lives, when and in which social contexts self-understandings conflict with and are not determined by race and culture, and how individuals make sense of racial and cultural experiences (Collins 2006). Understanding that race and culture influence individual senses of being and belonging within families and communities scratches the surface of the many meanings behind identities. The challenge for ethnographers is to develop more tools that expand our abilities to investigate the consistencies and inconsistences between racial and 204
Intersectionality and ethnography 205 cultural identities in a person’s life and why public racial identities may shape self-understanding for some, while private cultural identities shape self-understandings for others. Discussion of the need for an intersectional ethnography is particularly timely as ethnographic approaches within anthropology are actively being modified to understand the lived experiences of multiethnic and racialized populations in the United States. Twentieth century descriptions of culture offered generalized mappings of everyday life guided by seemingly stable community or racial group expectations. Twenty-first century ethnographers are attempting to understand what it is like for community members and members of racialized groups to navigate and negotiate these cultural and racial expectations, particularly within racialized cultures, and why some aspects of culture are accepted as elements of self-understanding, while others are rejected (LeVine 1963, 1982; Valverde 1999). These new approaches to understanding lived experiences within racialized cultures seem to be evolving in tandem with anti-racist liberation movements and re-examinations of the anthropological record that reveals how and why race and culture intersect in a person’s life over time and that a cultural construct, like race, is not “master programmer” of these intersections (D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Strauss 1992, 1–2). An ethnographic approach to the intersections of race and culture can enable greater understandings of the conflicts that inconsistencies between the two create in a person’s life. In practice, such an approach can aid ethnographers’ abilities to speak to respondents with attention to when race and culture cause individuals of similar backgrounds to have different understandings of self within different contexts related to appearance and lifeways. The response received can lend to greater academic attention to – and explanation of – explanatory gaps in the literature on the overlapping relationships between race and culture that manifest in people’s lives. The remainder of this chapter discusses and illuminates the relevance of intersectionality to person-centered ethnography, explanatory gaps in analyses of intersectional experiences, the relationship between intersectionality and how person-centered ethnography leads to constructing intersectional interview questions, preparing for intersectional interviews, showing respect, and examining what people say about intersectional experiences, what people do with intersections, how people embody intersections, and the implications an intersectional approach holds for future research into subjective racial experiences.
THE RELEVANCE OF INTERSECTIONALITY TO ETHNOGRAPHY Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality is a term used to describe the confounding and converging ways in which race, class, and gender shape the experiences that identities represent. Centered in legal scholarship, the coining of this term is premised on the notion that too often analysis of these elements of lived experiences, particularly within the United States, are “predicated on a discreet set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the intersections of race and gender” (Crenshaw 1989, 140). The relevance of Crenshaw’s assertion to ethnography becomes evident when observing and listening to African-Native Americans. One can see and hear individuals navigating and negotiating cultural, racial, and gendered experiences in pursuit of being and belonging within community, family, and society (see Tayac 2009). While culture and race shape these experiences, their intensity and subjective nature may also vary given the gender of the individual. These experiences generate everyday understandings of what life is like for the person to live within
206 Research handbook on intersectionality cultural, racial, and gender dimensions of being African-Native American (Chamberlain 1891; Collins 2006, 2009, 2017, 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Hallowell 1955). Over the past 30 years, intersectional legal studies of race, class, and gender have produced a body of analytical research that illuminates the subjectivity of human experiences with these social constructs that offer tools for ethnographic analysis. For example, Crenshaw’s (1989) exploration of how “single-axis” frameworks provide a foundation for understanding how marginalization occurs and produce multifaceted subordination experiences. Devon Carbado’s (2013), “Colorblind Intersectionality” sought to expand the discussion of intersectionality to include the extent to which critiques of the approach led to new arenas of investigation in which intersectional experiences could become the central focus of analysis. Three critiques that illuminated the need for methodological expansion were that intersectionality “is only or largely about Black women, or only about race and gender,” “is a static theory that does not capture the dynamic and contingent processes of identity formation,” and “is overly invested in subjects” (Carbado 2013, 812). These scholarly critiques sought to illuminate the limitations of the legal theory based upon how it was applied. For the ethnographer, mapping the normative concerns held in people’s lives about race, class, and gender and how these same individuals have come to understand their own experiences over time offer new avenues for investigation (Alcoff and Mendieta 2003; Cho et al. 2013; Sacks 1989, 1994). During the same year in which Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, anthropologist Karen Brodkin Sacks (1989) highlighted the need for – and relevance of – “a unified theory of class, race, and gender” in comparative anthropological studies of culture. These studies, grounded in ethnographic case studies, have been central to anthropological practices. On the one hand, the goals have been to “understand, appreciate, and interpret cultural uniqueness in its own terms.” On the other, the goals have been “to generalize, to discover similarities amid diversity, and to develop cross-cultural explanations and theories that proceed in practice from a much more restricted range of Western cultural frameworks” (Sacks 1989, 534). For Sacks, these goals were contradictory and in need of attention to the differences that exist within the class, race, and gender sameness that was characteristic of Marxist and social feminist theorizing of the time. By investigating the extent to which race and gender “reduce” to class in the United States, scholars are encouraged to expand their expertise in the tensions between “specificity and generalization in cross-cultural comparison” to include ways in which comparisons of race, class, and gender could reveal the tensions of social transformation, how class could produce communities just like cultures, the agency of people of color and white working-class women within these communities, and how and why gender identities, particularly the gender identities of women, should not be considered analytically separable from racial and class identities in a person’s lived experiences (Sacks 1989, 534).
EXPLANATORY GAPS IN INTERSECTIONAL STUDIES Although theoretically sound, when trying to understand the relationship between intersectionality and lived experiences, two major explanatory gaps can be found in the literature. One, it is difficult to find how many aspects of culture and race intersect in the lives of individuals. Building from Crenshaw’s foundation, scholars of intersectionality have explained the importance of understanding the salience of intersecting experiences with race, class, and gender. What remains elusive is what it is like to experience and make sense of racism, violence, etc.
Intersectionality and ethnography 207 in everyday life and over time (Carbado 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Devereux 1968; Sacks 1994). Two, as Crenshaw and others have asserted and observed, experiences with race, class, and gender are varied in the social and cultural worlds that individuals navigate and negotiate. For example, the experiences of women of color, at the intersections of race and gender, reveal a need for qualitatively different analytical frameworks for understanding their experiences than those used for white women; however, “representational intersectionality” can lend to explorations of the similarities and differences in women’s identity politics and experiences with discrimination (Crenshaw 1991, 1245). This variation in experiences with discrimination suggests the need for an ethnographic approach that accounts for how individuals cope with discrimination in the cultural and racial worlds that they share, live as individuals representing marginalized groups, and make sense of as part of their own identities. These gaps lend to an incomplete picture of how individuals navigate and negotiate these intersections, and understandings of being and belonging within context, particularly when formulating the answer to the question, “Who am I?” (Bauman 2001; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Bourdieu 1977; Csordas 1997; Hollan 2005). Do analyses of intersectionality only lend to qualitative analyses of cultural constructs like race, class, and gender? The multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences discussed by Crenshaw and those that followed show the limitations of generalizations about women’s experiences. It is not that generalizations are not useful for understanding common trends in experience and identities; however, to understand how these experiences relate to individuals’ lived experiences requires methodological approaches that transcend these generalizations and illuminate their significance in context. This ability to account for variations in racial experiences within social and cultural worlds suggest that intersectionality is relevant to more than the current foci and scopes of analyses.
INTERSECTIONALITY AND PERSON-CENTERED ETHNOGRAPHY How does one holistically investigate, interrogate, and understand the unique cultural and racial experiences that created the variation that individuals embody? For scholars of culture, the relevance of intersectionality to ethnography can be seen when an ethnographer takes intersectional identities as the central focus of analysis. For example, when I began researching African-Native American lived experiences, a standard ethnographic approach was used with individuals of various tribal backgrounds and varying degrees of African American and Native American cultural and/or racial ancestry and knowledge of tribal specific cultural practices and languages. Interviews occurred during one session, with perhaps a follow-up. Questions centered on telling me about being African-Native American experiences with racism, and the extent to which individuals felt accepted by society. These narrated experiences enabled me to explore the experiences of African-Native Americans and offer generalizations about their marginalized interactions within Native American communities and societies when encountering anti-Black sentiments from relatives, tribal members, related and non-related individuals of European and Native American ancestry, and skin discrimination or colorism from other African-Native Americans; however, an explanatory gap emerged that made my investigations limited: my analysis centered on social recognition and what African-Native
208 Research handbook on intersectionality Americans experienced from others. What was it like for respondents to be African-Native American and how did the ways they made sense of their experiences shape how they saw and understood themselves? Integrating the intersectional frameworks into this research provided a lens through which to examine the convergence of cultural, racial, and social worlds salient in collective African-Native American experiences; however, wedding this lens with an ethnographic approach centered on subjective human experience further illuminated how variations within group experiences occur, and how individual African-Native American lived experiences both related to and differed from generalized common experiences. Such an approach expanded my understanding of how African-Native Americans made sense of the dynamic natures of acceptance, discrimination, and rejection experienced in everyday life, in their own words, while simultaneously expanding the implications of person-centered ethnographic approaches to understand individual experiences within cultural and social worlds. Person-centered ethnography has made significant contributions to academic understandings of individuals’ subjective experiences within cultures and societies. A frontier for person-centered analyses is exploring subjective experiences in racial contexts. Originally used by Robert LeVine (1982) to describe ways anthropologists sought to gain first person insight into subjective human experiences and associated behaviors, person-centered ethnography is a useful tool for exploring how the dynamics of individual experiences are shaped by social and cultural processes. During interviews, attention is centered on respondents as both responders to questions asked by the interviewer and informants about how they make sense of their own experiences within culture and society. Respondents are also understood as active – rather than passive – agents in the formulation of their own identities and the nexus of variation in identity formation that exists within cultures and societies (Briggs 1986; Csordas 1997; Gorden 1992; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996; Levy and Hollan 2015; Wikan 1990). To map how person-centered ethnographic interviewing and observations have been used to research African-Native American lives, it is important to map the approaches characteristic of the person-centered ethnography. Three approaches characterize person-centered ethnography: (1) What do individuals say about their experiences? (2) What do people do during their experiences? (3) How do people embody their experiences? Although all these questions are analysed simultaneously in my fieldwork and can be found to have similar usage with both person-centered ethnographers and scholars using person-centered approaches, it is important to note that these approaches can be used independently.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT INTERSECTIONS? For over a century, ethnographers of culture and cultural identities have focused on what respondents say during interviews, as this is the easiest way to obtain responses to research questions that offer an understanding of what it is like to be them. What an individual discusses during the interview process reveals how they answer the question “Who am I?” and how these events have shaped the answer given in a variety of contexts, from family settings to social settings with non-familial members of the same ethnic or racial background. Narrated lived experiences also reflect respondent comments on the experiences that have shaped their lives. Most ethnographers assume that this is the respondent’s answer, which is why participant observations are often wedded with interviews that illuminate what respondents say about
Intersectionality and ethnography 209 their experiences to gain a more holistic understanding of what respondents go through and the nature and source of conflicts that arise within cultures (Hollan 2005; Obeyesekere 1984; Quinn 2005; Rubin and Rubin 1995; Wikan 1990). Person-centered studies expand on the strengths of what respondents say and have observed during interpersonal interactions by adding tools intended to limit the overlook of potentially important information. For example, scholars taking both a standard ethnographic and person-centered approach to identity engage interviewees as informants on research topics and respondents to interviewer questions. Subsequent analyses examine how individuals’ self-identity, and their ethnic and racial group affiliations are achieved and maintained. The ways interviewees talk about ethnicity, identity, race, their intersections, experiences with racism, even when class and/or gender is or is not salient in the interview. Although the similarities between standard ethnographic and person-centered approaches represent the strengths found in studies aimed at revealing the relationship between class, gender, identity, race, etc., two major differences emerge from the person-centered approach that reveals information potentially overlooked (Collins 2006, 2009, 2017, 2020, 2021a; Hollan 2005; Quinn 2005; Rubin and Rubin 1995). A major difference is the length of the interview. For users of the standard ethnographic approach, this usually consists of one interview session with a follow-up. Using a person-centered approach, individuals may be interviewed 15 to 20 times over a longer period stretching into years. Person-centered interviewers can learn how the respondent’s understandings of cultural and racial identities, for example, change over time and within various social and cultural contexts, vary by socio-economic status, and ultimately reveal the inconsistencies between identification (self-understanding) and recognition (what one represents to others). While both practices are frequently discussed as “identity,” categories like race often gain and hold importance in publicly asserted understandings of self-formulated by individuals over time. Taking race as the central focus of investigation in one interview session may limit the depth of lived experiences with race and culture that a respondent can convey. Interviewing individuals multiple times enables the respondent to think about the situations where their own culture(s), class, race, and racism experienced in interpersonal interactions converged and had an impact on their understandings of self and their experiences, and elaborate further on the meanings these events held. Interviewing over time generates a more holistic description of recalled circumstances, events, and situations. Respondent understandings of variability in identification and recognition, within context, becomes more evident (Bauman 2001; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck-Gernscheim 2002; Douglas 1985; Hollan 2005; Quinn 2005; Rubin and Rubin 1995). Ethnographies of identity also tend to examine social constructs like class, gender, and race, etc. as aspects of identity. In many studies, interviews and observations tend to focus extensively on what respondents feel and think about class, gender, and/or race, or infer bias from an event, and leave the interpersonal and social situations that influence experiences with racism, for example, and how they are confounded and complicated by class and gender illusive and in need of further investigation. Ethnographers using person-centered approaches have also conducted interview and observational fieldwork in international settings and with indigenous communities. In both settings, their attention to the interpersonal interactions where gender impacts class attitudes towards community responsibilities, social acceptance impact social mobility, etc., sheds light on the situational complexities that caused different individuals to make sense of and talk about experiences with class, caste, gender, and racial bias in both dif-
210 Research handbook on intersectionality ferent and similar ways while remembering reactions to such oppression (Hollan 2005; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996; Parish 2008; Whyte and Whyte 1984).
WHAT PEOPLE DO WITH INTERSECTIONS? It is important to engage in participant observations of human behavior, as interpersonal interactions often reveal the actions that serve as motivations behind why people say what they say. Observations of what people do can also shed light on the relevance of culture to racial identities. Since narratives and oral histories are frequently viewed as having an element of “tall-tale” associated with the respondents’ motives, engaging in participant observation affords the interviewer a chance to observe what people do when making sense of circumstances and events where culture and race intersect (Bauman 2001; Collins 2006, 2009, 2020). For example, during my own fieldwork, I have observed numerous respondents’ claims of Native American heritage being challenged as the assertions of “wanna-be” Native Americans by African American, Native American, and non-Native American co-workers, despite the presence of the individual’s full-blood grandmother or grandfather, or the individual speaking a tribal language to his or her grandparents. Other observations have included those of African-Native American respondents retaliating against similar acts by ignoring the taunts of co-workers or in some cases resorting to violence or merely identifying as only African American because it is “easier” for the respondent to go along with the expectations others have of how he or she should identify (Collins 2006, 2009, 2020). Using a person-centered approach to examining how African-Native Americans coped with the inconsistencies between identification and recognition, I found that many respondents’ actions matched their words. Not only did they defend their right to identify as tribal specific Native Americans, both culturally and/or racially, the ways that they identified educated detractors about the misplaced nature of the expectations they held about the respondents’ identity, and simultaneously reinforced their pride in being of African descent as well. Although, a longer interview period is more conducive to understanding the evolving ways that respondents remember their lived experiences, when time is of the essence, this format is useful. Not all ethnographers have one to two years to devote to the ethnographic process. The following are examples of person-centered interviews on a short research time frame with respondents that had the previously discussed experiences. Conducting multiple small interviews, over the course of two days, while observing the gathering of the California Creek Association, during the creation of the traveling Smithsonian banner exhibit “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” (Tayac 2009), enabled me to understand the linkages between what African-Native Americans said and did. It is important to note that the African-Native American individuals that participated in the California Creek Association were not only of Creek or Muskogee Native American ancestry. This community organization was intertribal and therefore the African-Native Americans interviewed were of several different cultural backgrounds (i.e., Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, etc.). For example, observing Mr. Reed, his actions matched his narrative. He was not only active in the association but was enthusiastic to share his understanding of the inconsistencies between how he identified and how he was recognized by others.
Intersectionality and ethnography 211 Mr. Reed: … I am Cherokee citizen … Around the age of 16, I moved out to Muskogee, Oklahoma. That is where my father is from. In some way it is good, because the communities are small. Muskogee is small. Every kind of knows everyone. “Oh, you’re a Roberts. I know your family.” You know. But, on the other hand, people are still part of the past and race relations aren’t where they should be in Oklahoma. Me: What were race relations like? Mr. Reed: Very segregated. Like in high school. I went to Muskogee High School, graduated … At lunch time … the blacks would sit on one side … the whites would sit on one side. You know, coming from California, I was not used to see Confederate flags and, you know, Confederate flag clothing and stuff like that. You know, I was not used to that. There were not a whole lot of interracial couples. It was totally different. We have a long ways to go, you know, living up to our Constitution … living up to being a great country. Me: How does this make you feel? Mr. Reed: Well the skin tone issue is twofold. Because one, being African American, you kind of catch it from the African American community too. There is this whole light skinned – dark skinned thing that, of course, can go all the way back to slavery. There is an issue for the African American community, but for the most part, you’re black, so you are accepted. But, you know, every once and a while, there is still that tension. The ways I was raised is you know … you are this. This is your background. You’re black, you are Euro-American, and you are Native American, but society is going to treat you this way, so be prepared. Me: So how do you answer the question, “Who am I?” Mr. Reed: I am African American, but I am also Cherokee … At no point in time do I choose, oh I am just Native American. I am just that: A black Cherokee. I also have Euro-American ancestry … but most of all, I am just a human being. Me: What does being Cherokee mean to you? Mr. Reed: You know, being a Cherokee, to me, is just being a survivor … Specifically, I am a descendent of Freedmen … and that this different. I run into Black Indian all the time. I am Sioux and black; I am Navajo and black. That it totally different from being a member of one of those five tribes … because my ancestors were chattel. They were slaves … that legacy alone is clearly unique … to me, I am a survivor. I got it two-fold. My ancestors were enslaved by Euro-Americans. We made it. We survived. They were enslaved by Native Americans. We adapted and we survived. So, I am a survivor.
This interview illuminates the complicated intersections of race and culture in the lives of African-Native American individuals. He is not only proud of his Native American ancestry that is a result of enslavement by Native Americans, but also of the African and European ancestry that characterizes how he is recognized.
HOW DO PEOPLE EMBODY INTERSECTIONS? The embodiment approach engages how the bodies of individuals represent cultural constructs and “become culturally elaborated into experiences of self and other” (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 228). The focus on the body in relationship to what people say and do enables the interviewer to consider how race, age, ethnicity, class, and gender (etc.) shape respondent’s identification practices and influence how they are recognized by others. Scholars using this person-centered technique tend to focus on qualitative information received from – and observations of – respondents, which includes “how bodily senses become culturally elaborated in different ways in different places” (1994, 228). How individuals embody and experience cultural and racial difference is most relevant to intersectional studies, particularly where gender is concerned. Examining what individuals have to say about their experiences with
212 Research handbook on intersectionality gender discrimination or how gender shaped interpersonal interactions, wedded with participant observations, enables the researcher to analyse the relationship between the body and subjective experiences. Such analyses also enable the researcher to explain how interviewees make sense of why there are difference in interpersonal interactions based on the body or bodily appearance. A frontier for ethnographic investigations is the relationship between body and subjective experiences, particularly as discussed by scholars of intersectionality. “Who Made That up?” The following is an example of an interview using this approach. To protect their anonymity, these respondents, Ms. Bird and Ms. Brown, are given fictitious names. They are sisters that grew up in and around the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and affiliated with the California Creek Association. Their different lived experiences reveal how Choctaw lifeways can vary even between African-Native American individuals, when upbringing is varied. This notion is important to raise, because Erik Erickson, who analysed the notion of identity crisis in the social sciences, reminds us that people gain their identities from their parents; however, this interview illuminates what happens when upbringing occurs with varying parentage (Tayac 2009). Me: What was life like growing up for you? Ms. Brown: For me, I really did not understand that I have two cultures until my teens … but I am getting it now. Ms. Bird: For me, it’s been really different. I mean we grew up together … It is just hat I am darker complexioned. OK. I have always known that we are Choctaw and African American, of course. And, I have always held that like dear to me. I have known both. So when you have to fill out applications or things in school and you put on there, you know, African American and other, which is Choctaw, people would go, “What is that?” “What are you talking about?” I have even had teachers that would erase that and say, “You just need to go with one.” And that was basically with what you look like. OK. So I have had it really different because I am dark complexioned and people take you for what you look like versus what you really are. You know, I have always known who I was, since a little girl. You know, my parents always told us, you know, what background we come from – who we are. Me versus my sister … I was on both sides … you know, I kind of grew up in it because I went to an all Native American school. You know, I went to the boarding school, and I did stuff like that, and I went to the Pow-Wows and all of the gatherings and stuff like that so, you know, it was really difficult, and it made other people learn too. You know, not to look for people on the outside, as that is what they are. Now, as an adult, it is really good, I fine with everything. I’m good. I’m blessed. Ms. Brown: You learn to embrace both sides. Me (Asking Ms. Brown): So, what was it like for you? Ms. Brown: You know … I did not go to the Pow-Wows, but as far as, how they taught their children in school, I didn’t know because I was not around like that … I learned a lot from her. Me: So, this term Black Indian? When you hear it, what does it mean for you? Ms. Bird (Smirking and Sighing): You know, honestly, it kills me. You know, I kind of hate to hear the term and this is why: it’s because, here I come, walking up, coming from somewhere and the majority of people would say, “That’s a black girl.” OK. “That’s an African American girl.” OK. But you are only going on the outward appearance. Then, when you speak to me and I speak to you about being Choctaw and my ways, you know, really, when you speak to me and I tell you about my ways and things that I like to do, it’s not what a lot, the norm would like to do, it’s not … The norm people like to do the worldly type of things … I like to keep the old ways dear to me. Like prayer is very dear to me. That’s the number one thing, you know is prayer, and knowing where you came from and what it our purpose here. You know, it’s just basically other people having to accept. You know. I’m good. I’m fine.
Intersectionality and ethnography 213 Ms. Brown (Smirking): I personally think that it’s ignorant to say black Indian, white Indian. Ms. Bird: If you come across, white complexioned, they were gonna’ say you’re a white Indian. Ms. Brown: You know, what is that? Ms. Bird: Really. It’s kind of strange to say, “Here we have some black Indians” … I don’t know who came up with that. But that is kind of crazy. I am not a black Indian. I am Choctaw and African American and I am a woman.
In this interview, despite interrogation from non-family members, memories of childhood map to concerns about inconsistences between identification and recognition, but also the roles that appearance and gender play in the respondent’s senses of being and belonging within their family. Although the previously discussed interview data is contemporary, person-centered questioning, particularly what people say about their subjective experiences, can also be applied to analysis of historical interviews of African-Native Americans. Between 1936 and 1938, Works Project Administration (WPA) fieldworkers conducted over 2,000 interviews with former slaves. Although the fieldworkers did not claim to use a person-centered approach, their desire to research the life histories of former slavers and what they said, in their own words, about how they experienced slavery is consistent with the approach. Interviews, such as that of Mr. Lindsey, whose father was full-blooded Creek and mother was half Creek and half African American, offer an examples of former slave vernacular, enslaved African-Native American identity, and why an enslaved individual, despite being three-quarters Native American, would identify as only African American. More specifically, as WPA fieldworker Lottie Major heard in October 1937 in Wichita Falls, Texas: Why I don’t tell dese ‘ventures at one time is ‘cause I can’think of it all at same time. Didn’t all happen same time, did it? Well, den dah you is. I’s mo’ Injun mix dan I is nigger, but makes no difference. I’s a nigger. You all know how dat is. I’s proud of it. I was borned in Rocky Branch, Kentucky, on October 10, 1847. My mother was half-breed Creek Injun – half-Negro, half-Injun. Her name was Charity. She died ‘long ‘bout 1853. My father’s name was Faithful. He was a full-blood Creek. He was killed in the war ‘tween Mexico an’ ‘Nited States. (Minges 2004, 145; Library of Congress 1936)
To understand Mr. Lindsey’s identity, one would have to interview him, like WPA fieldworker Lottie Major, with questions that explored his recollection of what it was like to be a slave. We could assume that society told him that he was African American or that his mother told him that he was because slavery followed the condition of the mother. Unless he recalled this imparting of identity during the interview or had observed the interaction through participant observation, our assumptions would be mere speculation. During the interview, one would need to have asked questions aimed at understanding why Mr. Lindsey said what he said. Through participant observations, one would need to examine why he did what he did, or what aspects of his cultural practices or everyday lifeways suggested that he was only African American. Much can be learned from the participant observations missing from Mr. Lindsey’s interview. While we can’t go back and observe Mr. Lindsey’s everyday experiences, these two practices, interview and observation, used in tandem with one another during current fieldwork, can illuminate the consistencies and inconsistencies between words and actions and interviewer bias and the realities of respondent lived experiences. Participant observations would have also allowed us to accompany him during everyday interpersonal interactions, which could reveal the when, where, and in which contexts Mr. Lindsey’s identification of
214 Research handbook on intersectionality self was consistent or inconsistent with how he was raised and recognized by his community, family, and the larger society (Erikson 1959). This “situational variance” in identification and subjectivity in identity assertion would also offer the ethnographer insight into the relationship between Mr. Lindsey’s appearance or body action, and his experiences (D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Quinn 1992, 2005). The researcher could also observe how other people reacted to his appearance in the context of interpersonal exchanges, how these reactions shaped memories of self-understanding over time, desires to accept or reject how he was recognized by others or changed identification practices to reduce the extent to which the African American identity he asserted was challenged. While standard ethnographic approaches create useful maps of how recognition impacts the identification practices of individuals, individual-centered approaches, like person-centered ethnography, lead to descriptions of what it is like to live with misplaced recognition of identities. For example, as a soldier, Mr. Lindsey encountered Geronimo. This is what he remembered: I see ole Geronimo jus’ befo’ he s’render to Gen’l Miles. I wasn’t as dark as ah is now, mo’ red like. Geronimo see me, he say “You ain’t no nigger. You’s an Injun.” Ah say, “My fathah may been Injun, but my mother’s a nigger, an’ ‘at’s the race I chose … In 1885, ah was sent to Arizona to he’p hunt fo’ Geronimo. (Minges 2004, 148)
Ethnographers using these contemporary and historical approaches have developed a body of literature that is amenable to intersectional analyses of identity. These works draw distinctions between experience near (emic) and experience distant descriptions (etic) of subjective experiences. The goal is to avoid imposing social and cultural constructs, like cultural and racial identities, allowing them to emerge in people’s interviews to a greater or lesser degree. The ethnographers seek to understand how individuals perceive their world from the inside and as it intersects with structural aspects of being and belonging, like kinship or legal status (Hallowell 1963; Herskovits 1928; Katz 2012; Lauber 1913; Porter 1932; Woodson 1920). Like WPA fieldworkers, historical individual-centered analysis does not refer to their approach as “person-centered,” despite sharing characteristics with contemporary practices. In a similar vein, scholars of African-Native America did not refer to person-centered ethnography, despite taking the experiences of African American individuals and populations as the central focus of analysis. For over a century, scholars have engaged in socio-cultural studies of Americans living at the intersections of culture and race and created the foundation for using person-centered techniques to research on African-Native Americans. For example, Alexander Francis Chamberlain (1891, 90), in “African and American: The Contact of Negro and Indian” reminds us that studies of the individuals resulting from the contact and intermarriage between African Americans and Native Americans must include “the results of intermarriage of Indians and negro, the physiology of the offspring of such unions” … “the social status of the negro among the various Indian tribes”… “the influence of the Indian upon negro, and of the negro upon Indian, mythology and folklore” and the physical anthropology and social and cultural formulations of being and belonging that shaped their lives. Frank Speck’s (1915) examination of the lived experiences of the “Moor Indians” or “Nanticoke” illuminated how the community self-segregated along color lines, which not only created variation among individual’s identities as Native Americans, but also how they included and excluded one another. For example, in reaction to the State of Delaware classifying the Nanticoke as Negro, and providing them with schools, many individuals refused to associate or intermarry with African Americans. They formed the “The Indian River” and
Intersectionality and ethnography 215 “Warwick Indians,” which led to the creation of the “Nanticoke Indian Association.” Those who did not desire to be called “Indians” in Cheswold, Kent County, Delaware, continued to intermarry with African Americans, particularly those of lighter phenotypes, and became known as the Harmonia people (Foster 1976, 17; Speck 1915, 2–9). With the aid of his research assistant Zora Neale Hurston, Melville J. Herskovits (1928) studied the frequency and nature of racial variation among African Americans in Harlem, NY, students at Howard University, and various communities in West Virginia (Herskovits 1928). Among students at Howard University, they found that out of a total of 1,551 individual interviews, 97 identified as Negro mixed with Indian, 106 identified as more Negro than white, with Indian, and 133 identified as Negro, Indian, and white (Herskovits 1928). For Herskovits, this indicated that knowledge of Native American ancestry and self-identification as being of Native American ancestry was not a recent phenomenon. This also suggested that these individuals were raised in families with the same identities. J. Hugh Johnson’s (1929) research revealed the dilemma faced by commissioners taking the first Creek Nation census in 1832. The commissioners’ desired to assess the rights and status of community members of African American ancestry, to make definitive decisions about their being and belonging. They encountered both Creek men living with an enslaved African American wife and free African Americans that were culturally Creek. For Laurence Foster (1976), this data, and others examined in the creation of his dissertation titled, “Negro-Indian Relationships in the Southeast,” suggested that the identities these individuals embody reflect variations in contacts with Native Americans. For example, some individuals descended from direct intermixture between African Americans and Native Americans, but others descended from more complicated intermixtures between African Americans and Caucasian-Native American ancestors. According to Foster, this data could be interpreted as: The social order is so constructed in the United States that a person classed as white must have no Negro blood; and in cases where the Indian is classed as “white”, he must not have a “drop” of Negro blood. But where it is financially or politically advantageous, one drop of Indian blood does not make a white man an Indian. In the final analysis this all explains why there are so many different colors of persons in the United States classed as Negroes. (Foster 1976, 73)
A. Irving Hallowell’s (1963) research into people of African and Native American descent, like his earlier research on persons of European and Native American descent, was conducted within Native American communities. His study of families and social groups revealed how the phenomenon of Native American culture impacted all three populations. The resulting phenomenon he called “transculturalization” whereby individuals became permanently identified with Native America. Coined by Hallowell in 1963, “transculturalization” is “the process where individuals, under a variety of circumstances, are temporarily or permanently detached from one group to enter the web of social relations that constitute another society. To a greater or lesser degree, they come under the influences of the new customs, ideas, and values” (Hallowell 1963, 523). For individuals that have gone through transculturalization – like their descendants – changes in culture, such as manners, speech, values, etc. may vary greatly or slightly from both groups which they embody, and produced different lived experiences, identities, and lifeways. A theory of transculturalization was crucial for Hallowell since anthropological approaches to the study of experience had been predominantly culture-centered, and that empathized the
216 Research handbook on intersectionality actions of the group and group cultural impact on individuals; little to no attention was paid to the behavior of individuals within cultures or cultural environments. Consequently, cultural and experiential data derived from interviews leaned towards the analytical focal points of the participant observer, rather than the “meaningful aspects of the world of the individual” as experienced, motivated, or satisfied by him or her (Hallowell 1955, 88). The latter potentially reveals consistencies and inconsistencies in cultural practices, the experiences of minority populations and conflicts have within culture and their contributions to intracultural variations. Edward Sapir’s (1958) linguistic analyses and studies of subjective experiences would cause him to later suggest that: The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meaning which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions. (Sapir 1958, 515)
While the cultural studies conducted by these scholars illuminate examples of the depth and breadth of ethnographic literature focused on subjective lived experiences, individual and person-centered ethnographers, like Hallowell, have created a useful body of interviewing techniques, as well, that allow for the investigation of subjective intersectional experiences within socio-cultural constructs (Hollan 2005; Quinn 2005; Spradley 2016; Valverde 1999; Wikan 1990). As previously discussed, person-centered ethnography describes anthropological attempts to describe subjective experiences, based in human behavior, as close to first person experiences as possible. Three lines of inquiry characterize the person-centered approach to intersectional investigations: Why do people say what they say? Why do people do what they do? How do people embody subjective experiences? (Hollan 2005; Lowe and Strauss 2018). Using these questions to approach a research problem, either individually or in combination, helps develop academic understandings of the need for individual-centered studies of cross-cultural conflict and experiences. To analyse the questions also enables the separation of individuals’ experiences as themselves and as members of groups. As individuals recall their experiences, participant observations enable interviewers to witness the person’s actions during subjective experiences, such as how the body, especially racial appearance, may cause individuals to represent an identity to themselves that they do not represent to others. Although often separated for the purposes of analysis, these questions provide the framework for questions constructed and asked during interviews, as well as providing a rationale for the resulting intersectional analysis (Berry 1969; Cobb 1939; Collins 2009, 2020; Forbes 1983; Foster 1976).
CONSTRUCTING INTERSECTIONAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS Drawing from person-centered interviewing strategies, which take individuals as active agents in their lived experiences, intersectional interviews with marginalized or racialized individuals require an understanding of how embodied individuals respond to interview questions. Therefore, it is important for questions to be both open-ended and focused because identity is both public and private: public in the sense that race shapes their lived experiences and private in the sense that culture and family identities may have similar, if not more, importance and relevance to the answer to the question, “Who am I?” For example, there is a difference between asking African-Native American respondents, “Please tell me how race impacts
Intersectionality and ethnography 217 African-Native Americans?” and “Have you experienced racism?” “How did that anti-Black experience make you feel?” (Biehl et al. 2007, Borneman and Hammoudi 2009; Briggs 1986; Hollan 2005; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996; Spradley 2016). The first question, which person-centered ethnographers would refer to as treating the interviewee as an informant, may illicit a performative response. The respondent may provide a general response about what he, she, or they know about their own experiences – and those of others – with individuals directing anti-Black opinions and sentiments towards them. The respondent may also attempt to provide the interviewer with what he, she, or they believe(s) should be said about the impact of race on African-Native Americans. It is important to note that anti-Black sentiment is being used here as an example, which is a more prevalent experience among the African-Native American respondents that I have interviewed over the past 20 years than anti-Indian or Native American sentiments. The second question and sample follow-up can enable respondents to be self-reflexive and consider their own experiences. Their experiences may include examples of how African Americans and Native Americans that are non-family members mis-identify the respondent and accuse them of trying “not to be Black” by claiming Native American ancestry (Collins 2009, 2017, 2020; Hollan 2005; Sturm 2002; Whyte and Whyte 1984). On the other hand, these examples may also reveal how the individual felt about the experiences and coped with the accusations. On the one hand, did the respondent feel the need to internalize the accusations and assert a culturally specific or tribal specific Native American identity in the face of this racism, or on the other hand, did the respondent reject the assertions and respond with silence? Did the coping mechanism cause the respondent to feel more belonging with family members, rather than other African American and Native Americans? This second line of questioning is important because usually, as with standard ethnographic approaches, the first line of questioning is asked only once in an interview setting. What enables the tools of the person-centered approach to engage the intersectional experiences of individuals is that both lines of questioning may be used simultaneously over a period, usually 20 interviews over the course of one to two years, depending upon fieldwork time constraints. The constraints can include, but are not limited to, respondents’ abilities to participate, dissertation deadlines, grant report deadlines, etc. (Hollan 2005; Lowe and Strauss 2018; Quinn 1992; Rubin and Rubin 1995). The simultaneous use of informative and responsive questioning, over a period, also reveals how individuals recall information to make sense of their experiences. For example, initial experiences with racist acts may provoke anger, the respondent may lash out of pride in kinship and self. However, discussing and recalling these experiences as part of their everyday life over a period can lead to respondents understanding the recalled situation(s) differently. The respondent may not have reacted because such experiences were typical of everyday experiences within or outside of familial settings with other African Americans and Native Americans (Collins 2006, 2009).
PREPARING FOR INTERSECTIONAL INTERVIEWS When preparing for intersectional interviews it is important to understand the cultural and social intersections that one may encounter in the lives of respondents. Where intersections of culture and race are the central focus of analysis, required preparation includes knowing the
218 Research handbook on intersectionality literature of the ways skin color confounds or shapes identities based upon sex or sexuality and the ways that race shapes or negates cultural identities (Campbell and LeVine 1961). Like all ethnographies grounded in lived experiences, it is important for researchers to have competence in respondent’s language(s). Although working with racialized populations in the United States is likely to ensure that English is the language of the interview setting, working with populations, such as African-Native Americans, whose Native American origins may represent different tribal specific populations, from respondent to respondent, knowledge of their language makes the interview setting more comfortable and more conducive to receiving a genuine response to interview questions. This also holds true when working with historical narratives such as the previously discussed slave narratives. Studying and understanding the vernacular used by former slaves or Black English Vernacular in general allows contemporary researchers to check bias projects onto past forms of speech and use the everyday speech of individuals to explain their experiences (Collins 2006; Hallowell 1955, 1963; Kahn and Cannell 1957; Labov 1972).
SHOWING RESPECT Although most Americans are familiar with surveys, there are those that are still unwilling, in both rural and urban environments, to participate in surveys, and even more so in interviews. From big cities to small towns, showing respect is crucial. African Americans and some Native Americans in the urban environment of the United States still maintain the respectful forms of Mr., Ms., and Mrs. and not being alone with unmarried individuals without a chaperone. Although these cultural practices may not be fashionable in this digital age, they can be the key to respondents agreeing to being interviewed, or complete rejection of one’s research project by potential respondents. In both urban and rural Native American communities, knowing the proper ways of self-introduction, showing respect to elders, youth, and those in between, land acknowledgement, and sharing one’s own background, before asking information about another’s, can be crucial to merely recruiting interest in one’s research project (Campbell and LeVine 1961; Collins 2006; Lowe and Strauss 2018). For multicultural and multiracial populations, like African-Native Americans, these practices may be magnified because racism may have caused individuals to not only avoid strangers but reject participation in research because of past misrepresentation. And, as with all populations, it is important to know that some things may not be conveyed during interviews, because some things that others freely talk about in US society should just not be discussed. The latter is particularly relevant for anthropologists and ethnic studies scholars alike because it takes local populations a long time to forget research and researchers that cast their communities in a negative light or caused social rifts that lasted longer than the research project that created them (Collins 2006, 2009, 2017). Establishing rapport, interacting with individuals within the community, attending non-restricted community functions, and being seen within the community is often crucial to building trust. In some communities, respondents assuming that researchers are not beneficial is a natural defense mechanism to ensure harmony and stability. Although less common in big cities, in small communities, particularly tribal communities, or small Southern towns, where everyone knows everyone, it is important to show respect in all interaction and observe the customs of the community. The jargon that is spoken in academic settings does not always
Intersectionality and ethnography 219 translate within these contexts. Potential respondents may be more willing to talk to an outsider with good manners than a fellow community member, for fear that their “business” will be shared with their peers. It has been my experience that people living in these communities are willing to teach researchers what they know; however, bad manners can turn even the starkest enemies into allies, with a common goal of rejecting proposed research (Collins 2006; Hollan 2005; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994).
IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION The goal of this chapter is to show the relevance of intersectionality to ethnography, particularly tools useful to illuminating how individuals cope with the intersections of race and culture. The intended outcome is an expansion of intersectional identity analyses to include person-centered understandings of lived experiences within cultural and social worlds, particularly race and culture. Overlooking variation within identities has been a limitation of group-centered ethnographic analyses. Identity politics, like standard ethnographic approaches, has limited academic understanding of the complex identities that individuals embody. By taking multidimensional understandings of self as the central focus of ethnographic analysis, researchers can further reveal the aspects of class, race, class, culture, gender, and other culturally constructed environments that shape senses of being and belonging within identities (Bernard 2011; Bernard and Gravlee 2015). Exploring an integrated intersectional and person-centered approach reveals opportunities for much needed theoretical description and specification of how individuals make sense of their multidimensional understandings of self. As diversity within racial and cultural continues to increase, it is no longer viable to assume that group-centered approaches can account for the variations in lived experiences that exist within them. The limitations of this line of inquiry can be seen in the inability to account for several phenomena. First, the links between culture, race, and gender and sense of being and belonging in one or more of these cultural and social worlds are alluded to without a clear specification of how they manifest in the lives of individuals. Second, the illusion is that cultural and social worlds are salient in the lives of all who seem to publicly represent them, even though constructs like culture and race are internalized differently by different individuals due to life circumstances. Third, different individuals will accept and/or reject different aspects of cultural and racial expectation due to experiences with acceptance and rejection during interpersonal interactions within culturally and socially constructed environments. To understand the lived experiences of individuals navigating and negotiating the intersections between culture and race requires an approach that is amenable to ethnographic descriptions of this variation within groups. Intersectionality and person-centered ethnography provide tools that lend to such a methodology (Crenshaw 1991; Hollan 2005).
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14. Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology Andrew Jolivétte
When I first began conducting research within queer spaces in 2007, the impetus arose from my own personal experiences as a queer man of color. I was particularly interested in understanding the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality from a critical mixed-race, Afro-Indigenous perspective. We still know very little about trans-disciplinary routes and research methodologies that are impacted by culture, Indigenous knowledge construction, and genealogies of queerness and gender fluidity that pre-date most Western models of research. Creating an archive of Indigenous knowledges is one of the first and most important steps for any intersectional methodology that seeks to document, understand, and transform the disparate measures for addressing justice, liberation, and self-determination at the community level. Today, my scholarship is grounded in the philosophy of Research Justice developed by the DataCenter in Oakland, California, where I was a board member for several years. According to the DataCenter, “Research Justice is a strategic framework that seeks to achieve self-determination for marginalized communities. It centralizes community voices and leadership to facilitate genuine, lasting social change” (DataCenter 2013). In addition to the restorative and transformative nature of Research Justice, I am also guided by my training in American Indian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology. Taking community voice, experience, and what I term in this chapter as inheritance refusal into account, I argue that a full array of intersectional methodologies must focus on the subjectivities of the community(ies) involved in the research, but this type of research must also address the inheritances of Western empiricists that have sought to silence, erase, and foreclose the leadership and knowledge of communities seeking to find solutions to their own problems. Speaking of “problems” we must remove the specter and violence associated with research agendas that seek to begin from a place of identifying queer, Indigenous, Black, and people of color communities as starting from a place of “damage.”1 In this chapter I seek to outline both the ideological and operational steps necessary to develop and practice a Thrivance Circuitry and Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness Model (TC-CCRM) within queer Indigenous communities (QIC) as well as across other queer communities of color (QCOC).
THRIVANCE CIRCUITRY AND COLLECTIVE CEREMONIAL RESEARCH RESPONSIVENESS (TC-CCRM) PRINCIPLES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Center Kinship Relations Engage Inheritance Refusals Foster Relational Accountability Embolden Radical Love Envision Multiplicity 223
224 Research handbook on intersectionality 6. Prioritize Transformative Justice 7. Activate Ceremonial Responsiveness 8. Weave Collective Thrivance Circuits Together these principles should inform intersectional research approaches within and across queer, Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color. TC-CCRM aims to disassemble, redirect, and co-construct a research system based on intellectual and cultural stewardship at individual, community, researcher, knowledge keeper, and institutional levels with direction starting from community rather than institution. In what follows, I describe and layout the tenants and tools for each of the eight principles to encourage whole-system reform and dialogue at every level of society where research is conducted and more importantly where knowledge is constructed, articulated, and remade.
CENTER KINSHIP RELATIONS To center kinship relations is to focus on the form, length, and quality of relationships built between communities and researchers. In this principle, community experts and scholars work together to co-construct new knowledge while advancing existing understandings of culture and history, as well as political, social, economic, and legal constructs. A defining aspect of this principle is the development of ceremonial bonds that place the greatest value on community wellness, collective stewardship of place-based experiences, and a deep commitment to research that is hope based, rather than trauma informed. Much of the research about queer communities over the past several decades attempts to address the disparities in knowledge about queer people of color and non people of color people. In a kinship relations approach, we begin by taking stock of the place and site of initial identity development to foster an understanding of the populations that we are working with to uncover the ways that location impacts not only identity, but individual and collective belonging. If all research started with a kinship relationship, with a place-based framework, we would lessen the many assumptions related to trying to “solve social problems” by acknowledging the unique implications of landscapes, sites, and territories as meaning making for the development of all aspects of queer life. This principle also supports a model of distinctiveness among queer peoples by highlighting how each social location differs from the others. An example of site-specific relations and centering kinship stems from my work with the Native American AIDS Project (NAAP) in San Francisco from 2010 to 2012. My work with NAAP came to fruition because of my teaching which is deeply interwoven into my research and community work. It was the spring of 2007, and I was teaching a People of Color and AIDS course at San Francisco State University. The course hadn’t been taught for several years and a former middle school student of mine, Jordan Auleb’s grandmother Ann reached out to me (Ann was a Professor in the Biology Department at San Francisco State and was part of the original faculty group that created the course) and one summer we were talking, and I mentioned my personal interest in HIV/AIDS in communities of color and she asked if I’d teach the class and get it back in circulation. I agreed and revamped the course and during the second cycle of teaching I invited one of my mentors and a leading national and international expert on HIV to give a guest lecture in the course. Dr. Rafael Diaz, author of Latino Gay Men and HIV (1997), shared during his lecture that mixed-race identified young
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 225 men between the ages of 15 and 22 had the second highest prevalence rates of HIV. Rafael turned to me at one point and said, “Andrew you study mixed-race issues, and you are now looking at HIV … something has to be done so we can understand what is going on here. You should look at this.” Usually when a mentor tells me something I try to follow their advice. So, I set out in earnest over the next several years to conduct a project on mixed-race gay men and HIV and eventually I landed on working with NAAP to try to initially understand how ethnic-specific community-based health organizations responded to the needs of Indigenous and people of color differently than mainstream, non-ethnic-specific hospitals, and medical centers. Eventually my focus turned really to listening to what NAAP told me (Jolivétte 2016). As I began conducting focus groups it struck me that this was also a mechanism where kinship was not only being centered but it was being cultivated, honored, and celebrated as a mechanism for achieving what I would later define as radical love. Radical love is about being vulnerable. It is about being unafraid to speak out about issues that may not have a direct impact on us on a daily basis. Radical love is about caring enough to admit when we are wrong and to admit mistakes. Radical love should ask how the work in which we are engaged helps to build respectful relationships between ourselves and others involved in social justice movements. Radical love asks if we are each being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Finally, radical love in a critical mixed-race studies framework means asking ourselves if what we are contributing is giving back to the community and if it is strengthening the relationships of all those involved in the process. Is what is being shared adding to the growth of the community and is this sharing reciprocal? Is what we are working toward leading to a more peaceful and equitable society? (Jolivétte 2012, 219)
Radical love is also something that stems from sharing our collective vulnerabilities with those who come from similar backgrounds and struggles. So, it was in this space at NAAP that myself and the participants in a study on HIV, mixed-race Native, and queer identities came to form an urban Indian kinship network of support that would allow us to share our stories and to heal and to identify ways that we could thrive. In intersectional research we must ask is it really an intersection of identities or is it the full sum of who we are embodied in one experience that speaks the truth of who we are as people? When we center kinship relations in queer intersectional research methods, we are identifying the ways that our stories are interconnected and that our resolve is deeply intertwined.
ENGAGE INHERITANCE REFUSALS Engaging inheritance refusals means recognizing both the positive and negative inheritances we have received. On the one hand, we engage the inheritance and teachings and knowledge systems of our communities while also refusing those colonial inheritances that extend violence, terror, and subjugation against the bodies of queer, Indigenous, and Black communities as well as other marginalized populations. We should first engage before we can fully refuse to ever engage these ideas again. For example, the who, what, why, how, and where of research in the Western world is deeply based on a system of knowledge that was created to control rather than to understand. To speak for rather than to listen to communities. We refuse the inheritance of research systems that place a higher value on that which can be measured,
226 Research handbook on intersectionality quantified, and validated using applications that do not consider the experiential, spiritual, and community-driven understandings of how knowledge is created, reproduced, and transformed. Inheritance refusals open the necessary space for marginalized populations in colonial nation-states to address, deconstruct, and abolish those previously understood and canonical methodologies that are intrusive, temporal, and pathologizing. Previous scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Eve Tuck (2009), Browne and Nash (2016) and others have articulated counter-hegemonic methodological approaches both within Indigenous and queer communities. While intersectional research has been articulated by feminist of color scholars such as Audre Lorde (2018) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994), I want to offer an additional concept to this approach which is deeply centered in the notion of inheritance refusal. While an intersectional approach examines various social identities such as race, class, gender, and sexuality it also lends itself to a compartmental analysis of each category rather than a whole-self approach. The whole-self approach activates all our collective identifications into one complex, multifaceted identity that cannot be understood as intersectional so much, as it should be articulated as a complete and inseparable, fully integrated identity.
FOSTER RELATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY Over the past year I’ve given over two dozen talks, workshops and other presentations. In the Trumpian and COVID era we see the re-emergence or perhaps the more publicly visible face of ongoing racism, xenophobia, anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-Indian violence, and ideology across the United States and elsewhere. In these talks and presentations, I often focus on the need for what many refer to as relational accountability. But what does this mean in an intersectional queer research framework? We cannot begin to foster relational accountability until we build the types of intentional, loving, and sacred relationships that support the liberation of all peoples. I’ve had much to reflect on over the past summer months. The passing of Indigenous Rights and Multiracial Justice Movement icons, Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez (2017) and Haunani-Kay Trask (1999) remind us that organizing and justice struggles must be linked across individual and group identities, so in a queer, relational paradigm for research justice we must activate our understanding and sincere commitment to humbly learn from those who are different from us. We must fight for justice and decolonization in Palestine, we must fight Asian hate, we need to also honor our past and present work to dismantle systems of knowledge production that disappear our long histories of working across race, sex, class, gender, and nation to thrive. In my own struggles these past months, whether from a deep sadness with family health care needs or anti-Black racism against Afro-Indigenous peoples, I have witnessed how relationships can heal. The most central aspect of this principle is accountability. We must show up for the long term as researchers and organizers. A friend many years ago said to a crowd of us, “Anyone can be an activist, but it takes real commitment to be an organizer.” His statement struck me as significant for two reasons. First, it spoke to the temporal and spatial aspect of research and struggles for social justice. Activism is often temporary or focuses on the individual or singular figure. An organizer often works over many years and without much attention for their efforts. The organizer not only fosters relationships but remains deeply accountable to communities.
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 227 As a queer, Afro-Latin, Afro-Indigenous researcher I work to listen, share, and advocate in ways that speak directly to the multiple identities that I carry. I also seek to foster relational accountability by asking questions rather than making assumptions. The key to fostering relational accountability is acting with humility and actively listening to community. For queer communities to thrive there must be a connection across identities that are not simply based on sexual identities. An example of relational accountability in my own journey was after my HIV/AIDS diagnosis in 2002. Dine medicine man, Daniel Freeland, was a dear friend who told me during ceremony that I had a responsibility to carry the stories of others and that this responsibility was greater than my own story and personal experience. When we endeavor to produce new knowledge or conduct research, we must follow these steps in our efforts to foster relational accountability: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Stop and listen Build and co-create Reflect and re-assess Shift and transform
When we stop and listen, we are demonstrating our deep concern for the well-being of the whole person whether it be in a queer context or otherwise. We see one another as relations. Building and co-creating is an active and intentional process of claiming and reclaiming those aspects of our lives that have been ravaged by colonial systems of violence and erasure. Co-creation entails mutual respect and accountability for the outcomes of research, and we see these outcomes and “data” not as end points but as the beginning of an ongoing cycle that leads to healing, collective ceremonial research responsiveness, and queer thrivance across difference. Once data has been built and co-created between researcher and community we must always reflect upon findings and re-assess next steps to ensure those most marginalized have had their voices and concerns represented. When we start from this place of centering those least heard, we know that we have not left anyone out. This reflection and re-assessment in turn provides a space for shifting and transforming current structural conditions and systems that perpetuate colonial violence and queer erasure. We know that much of the research data in and about queer communities usually ignores Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Arab, Asian, and other racially coded bodies. Relational accountability calls upon all researchers, both those of color and white, to resist the urge to simply “solve a problem” and to instead build a relationship based on kinship, healing, and responsibility.
EMBOLDEN RADICAL LOVE Once we can foster relational accountability, we can then turn to embolden radical love. A project that emboldens radical love focuses on creating new and ongoing opportunities for queer individuals, communities, and organizations to identify areas of shared vulnerability while also addressing collective and individual trauma. During a talk at the University in Oregon I suggested that “To turn our traumas and vulnerabilities into moments to change our lives, is radical love.” We embolden radical love by making self-love possible. There is so much pain and fear within queer spaces that we often seek out more injury or assume that others in queer spaces will injure us. We must begin from a place of trust which is incredibly difficult. How do we as social science researchers, and researchers more broadly, engage in
228 Research handbook on intersectionality the type of scholarship that does not presuppose that this type of involvement is unethical? In the Western canon we are to remain “impartial,” and “objective” and the truth of the matter is there is no such thing as impartiality or objectivity. In a queer intersectional research approach, we embolden radical love by setting an agenda that is first and foremost about healing and identifying circuits of joy. Here I define circuits of joy as the passing of joy from relative (person/community) to relative (person/community). From this place of intentional healing, I believe that radical Black Indigenous queer love is born again and again for the generations still yet to come. And from this point of departure, and with a centering of the Indigenous Thrivance Model (see Figure 14.1), we can collectively find joy through healing with others with whom we share common kinship. When we thrive … When we center reciprocity and culture as medicine … we will know that no matter what, we will always remain a people connected by common and divergent histories. A project that emboldens radical love in queer spaces might bring together trans youth of color with experiences in foster care, for example, to explore meaning making in terms of gender and family structures. In this context meaning making refers to how individuals and groups make meaning out of their lived experiences with social structures and institutions by sharing their experiences with others who share similar experiences and identities. In 2016 I created a group called Black Men’s Space to make meaning out of the shared and diverse experiences of Black men in US society. This gathering space allowed us to not only make meaning out of shared stories and experiences, but it also emboldened radical love by enacting collective healing with other Black men. Such a project for queer and trans youth of color would immediately understand that there isn’t a “problem” to be solved but rather a story and experience to be articulated. In other words, in research we should never start from a place of pathologizing victimhood, social problems, etc. Instead, research should be a space to address issues of healing but more important it should center hope not trauma, damage, or despair which has been a central feature of Western research with queer, Indigenous, Black, and people or color communities. When operationalized, radical love is not an easy process. It takes time for community to share their stories but even before sharing can happen, trust must be built. In this example of a trans of color radical love project, we would want to begin by understanding the youth and that can only happen when they tell us who they are and who they hope to become. Often in research, and particularly in queer research, the basis of our analysis stems from trying to define people, events, and ideas/social phenomena. Rather than seeking a closed definition we must remember as Clifford and Marcus (1986) suggest that all research is a type of “partial truth.” I would like to add to Clifford’s notion of partial truth, however, by arguing that there are whole-partial truths or whole-specific truths. Clifford argued that time and place told us only about that moment, place, and experience for the group or set of individuals involved in the research. However, the word “partial” implies that it can never be a whole truth or a whole-specific truth for those people. We are telling complete and whole truths that might be partial for that group of people, but we should try not to make sweeping pronouncements about the experiences of all queer people or any community of folks. We must invite queer people whether researchers or community members to embolden radical love by activating their truths in ways that aren’t dependent on social constructions of what has been, but rather on what can be. An intersectional queer paradigm must embolden radical love by prioritizing the whole person—mentally, physically, and spiritually. Projects that value spiritual and experiential knowledge as valid and significant will always capture the
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 229 whole-partial truths of queer communities. To embolden radical love in this sense is to focus on multiplicity rather than singularity.
ENVISION MULTIPLICITY Intersectionality is ultimately about multiplicity. Multiplicity in research is accepting the many realities and contradictions that exist simultaneously as opposed to presupposing an either/or answer to research questions. When we envision multiplicity, we embrace the full stories that each individual and each community brings to bare based on a full array of life experiences. As a person of multi-ethnic heritage, I’ve had to navigate multiple spaces, issues, and communities. In this experience I have learned that multiplicity opens possibilities. In research singular or linear steps and processes limit and silence participants. In Indigenous communities and queer communities, multiplicity is essential to one’s existence. To envision multiplicity in a queer, Indigenous, intersectional context one might conduct a project that speaks not only to tribal/nation diversity, but also to gender diversity. Ultimately in this principle we want to get away from the Western empirical urge to define everything and everyone and make space for open, fluid, and evolving stories. In my work with the American Indian Cultural Center in San Francisco this has been abundantly clear. The needs, wants, histories, and goals are multiple. The community focus includes veterans, elders, youth, two-spirit and queer, housing, women and families, cultural bearers, and others. We work to bring the full complexity of all these various segments of our populations together, so no one is left behind. Another salient aspect of envisioning multiplicity entails a reimagining of cultural protocols that center our past and our present. In other words, how we balance living in both Western, colonial societies where we can also see examples of how we thrive when we center our own cultural knowledge systems and practices. When I was studying Native American cultural contributions to Louisiana Creole identity, I found so many hidden or unknown aspects of Indigenous (North American and African) practices that have sustained and allowed Creoles to thrive even in the face of a colonial system that has sought to reduce their identity to one group or practice over the others. Louisiana Creoles are a prime example of multiplicity. In their language, foodways, spiritual practices, and ethnic make-up they are deeply impacted by not one but all ethnic groups (Jolivétte 2007). I think about my own great-grandmother, Rozina Guillory Fontenot, for example. A deeply Catholic woman, on the one hand, because of the French and Spanish colonial influence, she was also a traiteur or a medicine person who specialized in the treatment of blood disorders and conditions. Traditionally, the knowledge of the traiteur is passed down to the opposite gender, so in Rozina’s case from a male relative. Gender balance and maintenance of traditions is an important aspect of both Creole and Ishak (Indigenous) culture. Having both male and female traiteurs/medicine people will ensure continuity across the entire group where no one gender holds and passes down cultural knowledge and practices. This approach fosters a collective sense of responsibility by all community members where multiple people shape the present and future of the Ishak and Creole people. Western, non-Native, science and research has not respected this form of medicine or spirituality. Here we see the bringing together of multiple aspects of one’s identity to address real life issues such as health and well-being. Rather than separate our health and wellness from our spirituality as is done in the colonial United States, we respect and honor the traditions
230 Research handbook on intersectionality passed from generation to generation. Rozina is the embodiment of multiplicity. Together with my great-grandfather, Francois Fontenot they were land stewards or what some call “farmers.” In this research principle we understand that words carry meaning and that it is important to have many ways to describe and explain the complex histories of formerly colonized peoples. In other words, envisioning multiplicity requires an articulation of group practices using Indigenous (Ishak) concepts and words rather than those given to us by colonial governments. Distinguishing a farmer from stewardship takes us from an individual framing of “the farmer” to a community or multi-person framing of stewardship which involves responsibility beyond one’s own individual land base. Queer intersectional research cannot work within Indigenous and other communities of color without a deep commitment to transformative justice. We can only transform society by seeing the “intersectional” or the multiple identities we hold as a whole-self/community phenomenon.
PRIORITIZE TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE Centering the whole self in a queer intersectional, Indigenous framework requires a commitment to seeing the various aspects of one’s identities as all equally connected not as separate identificatory labels. As a young sociologist one of the very first questions I was asked in an undergraduate seminar was about the goal of sociology. “Is the goal of sociology [the sociological researcher] to reform or transform society?” As the event co-coordinator and moderator for a panel on research justice, years later, I posed the same question to Dr. Angela Davis, Chief and Traditional Leader of the Winnemem Wintu, Caleen Sisk, and Dr. Jason Ferreira. Something Dr. Davis said that night has remained with me since. She said, “it’s both!” I’ve always argued that our mission or at least the one I’ve tried to take up as a sociologist of race, ethnicity, and sexuality is to transform society. And if we see our priority as transformative justice we must begin from a reformative place. We need to understand that transformation cannot take place until we reform the manner and methods we use to achieve greater understanding of the human experience. This is again a moment of both/and rather than either/or pedagogical reasoning. As a former board member of the DataCenter and the GLBT Historical Society and Museum in San Francisco, I am all too familiar with the challenges of an agenda that seeks to center transformative justice. Often in the belly of the neo-liberal beast that is embedded in the non-profit industrial complex, the goal can sometimes be too narrowly focused on donor base, marketing, and mission-central activities. We must be careful, however, not to overstate the importance of representation. The GLBT Historical Society and the DataCenter worked to create exhibits and community-led research justice initiatives that came from community rather than from a board or staff perspective. Some of these projects include migrant worker-led campaigns in Marin County, California, to obtain fair housing access and employment benefits, a queer of color and two-spirit exhibit curated and led by the people being represented. Research justice requires that any project give authority to community experts in developing research questions, tools, and frameworks. This type of reformative and transformative work is never easy in a colonial nation-state where we have all been conditioned to see the world in either/or terms.
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 231 As the Board President for the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture (Speak Out), and later as a public speaker, I have found myself responding to the kind of colonial and white supremacist “well-intended” campaigns of universities and non-profit organizations. I can recall speaking out against the Dan Savage campaign, “It Gets Better” to combat anti-LGBTQ bullying in schools. Savage and his husband Terry Miller launched (n.d.) the “It Gets Better Campaign” in September 2010 to address the growing number of LGBTQ youth suicides across the United States. The campaign failed to understand the diversity of LGBTQ youth and oversimplified the intersectional identities that make life more difficult for queer youth of color, queer immigrants of color, trans youth of color, and a whole host of other double and triple marginalized queer people. The co-occurrence of race and sexuality-based discrimination continues to be a pressing concern for researchers, organizers, and everyday community members who want to live in a better world. Transformative justice seeks to dismantle the structural systems that not only produce in-school bullying against queer kids, but against kids of color as well. If we prioritize transformative justice, we begin from a place of assuming everything that we think we know is wrong or incomplete. When we start from this place of unknowing, we are honoring queer and Indigenous communities and we are operating from a place of humility and relational accountability. Transformative justice, social justice, and justice itself have at times become co-opted terms or terms that get over-utilized with no specific actions connected to these terms. Keeping this in mind I’d like to outline five specific action steps to work towards transformative justice in queer, Indigenous, intersectional research: 1. Deconstruct and challenge US, European, and other colonial methodological practices. 2. Redefine research as space based rather than measurement based. 3. Intentionally co-create research as opposed to replicating disproportionate power relationships. 4. Make no permissible for all involved in the research process. 5. Shift the ideology of research from university based to community based. As discussed throughout this chapter, intersectional research by necessity must not only challenge but completely move away from Western approaches to science. We must start anew rather than constantly face the fight of legitimizing other forms of knowledge production. As we do this, we will have to redefine research as space based—focused on people and relationships and active listening rather than measurement based, where we seek to “solve problems” or tell people “What’s wrong with them” and we should stop centering measurement/ quantification. An intersectional, Indigenous queer approach turns to forms of kinship and inter-relationships space of social, cultural, political, and legal location. As we move towards an embrace of familial or kinship relations rather than “participant” or “data set” relationships we are more likely to work with specific intention to co-create, produce, and disseminate our shared learning. In summary, transformative justice is an approach that attempts to move away from controlling knowledge production/dissemination to actively seeking to learn for the sake of learning. In other words, sometimes a research project should simply focus on learning and articulating social realities as opposed to “solving” or “fixing” things that queer and Indigenous communities may not see as broken. At times we also need to be able to say no, hear no, and respect no. When Indigenous and queer folks say no to working with you, accept it! When you as a queer, Indigenous researcher are asked to take on yet another level of commitment without compensation or without respect for your work and ideas, say no
232 Research handbook on intersectionality and mean it! Finally, transformative justice as a principle of queer, Indigenous intersectional research must move away from the university as the cite where research is stored or to be more specific, the place where knowledge gatekeeping transpires. We must understand that the mere word, “research,” as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) argued more than 20 years ago, is a dirty word. Let us move the work and knowledge production to a place where we activate what I’ve defined as ceremonial responsiveness. What happens when we replace the word research with the words, ceremonial responsiveness? Our intentions, our practices, and most importantly our responsibilities and commitments shall also shift to a place of care.
ACTIVATE CEREMONIAL RESPONSIVENESS To activate ceremonial responsiveness, I call on researchers to imagine culturally relevant mechanisms to expand how we conduct research and that we excise the colonial violence of research by using models that come from within queer communities. These models should lead to collective healing and more importantly, it should move from resilience to thrivance. Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness is defined as: CCRR in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships by yielding to the specific needs or community experts and researchers. An example of CCRR in action would entail the creation of cultural protocols and IRB (Institutional Review Board) procedures controlled not by universities alone, but in a separate review process controlled by community groups. (Jolivétte 2015, 7)
CCRR shifts the colonial power relations involved in research from not just a practice standpoint, but perhaps more importantly from an ideological framework. While some might caution that the invoking of ceremony in research is dangerous like any theoretical approach it all comes down to intention and ethics. As Cree scholar, Shawn Wilson (2008) notes, research as ceremony shifts us away from the disproportionate power relations to a place of what he terms, “‘relationality” or “relational accountability.” In the five years since the CCRR was first published some of my thinking has evolved on this issue. I now think we must go even further in the cultivating of relationships and these relationships need to be based on kinship. In many social justice movements over the decades, there has been a focus on terms like “solidarity,” “allyship,” “co-conspirator,” and “accomplice.” I hope kinship is one way of moving away from these temporal and transactional or Eurocentric terms. To co-conspire or be an accomplice implies that something is being doing that is illegal when struggles to decolonize research and everyday life are about much more than one singular moment or event. To be in solidarity with someone also can turn to the performative. It doesn’t go far enough. Allyship and solidarity are alliances that seem to be based on singular issues and struggles rather than deeply aligned ways of understanding and moving in the world. Similarly, it is my hope that
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 233 queer, Indigenous, intersectional, or whole-self research (as noted above intersectionality implies a division of parts rather than a unified whole person in one body with different lived experiences) will turn from resiliency to what I define as thrivance.2 In Figure 14.1, we see an approach specific to the Ishak or Atakapa-Ishak peoples of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas.
Figure 14.1
Model for Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance (Jolivétte)
Among the Ishak tribe, Wi hokišak kuš means we are all related/relations/connected. The Ishak traditional territory extends from the Southwest region of Louisiana in Opelousas and St. Landry Parish all the way to Southeast Texas, into present day Harris County and the city of Houston. For the Ishak people the concept of kinship has allowed us to not only “survive” but to resist, maintain, and thrive under the brutal conditions of forced land cessions and attempts at cultural genocide. When we go to the water, we are going to be with relatives. We are going to offer prayers. We are remembering and giving thanks for the ability to live and sustain our communities because of everything that the land offers. As I seek to dismantle colonial research methodologies steeped in white supremacy in this chapter, I want to center the Indigenous knowledge systems and practices of my own tribe to suggest that when we see all living things as connected and treat those living relatives as if we really love them and care for them, then we allow humankind to collectively thrive. So, when we make relationships as queer, Indigenous peoples with humans, as well as with land and water, we can then create cer-
234 Research handbook on intersectionality emony (relationships) that allow us to see one another as medicine and to share that collective healing and joy work through an Indigenous model of thrivance that sees us all as connected/ as relatives. The model for Louisiana Indigenous Thrivance depicts the interconnected, intersectional components of a research process intended to support relational accountability and collective ceremonial research responsiveness. As this book works to identify the routes by which intersectional research can advance new and important methodologies for examining the holistic experience of research participants, the thrivance model offers one Indigenous-specific framework for articulating a method to move from problem-based inquiry to culturally based methods to enact communities where thrivance is more possible. As more queer and Indigenous communities enact methods for thrivance, they can create circuits where more communities share approaches for living better lives. This co-sharing primarily takes place through a collective weaving process where communities work together to identify and dismantle structural barriers to wellness and joy production within and across queer and Indigenous populations.
WEAVE COLLECTIVE THRIVANCE CIRCUITS When I traveled to Sydney, Australia, for the first time in 2014 for the International Indigenous Pre-Conference on HIV/AIDS, I quickly noticed many similarities between the local Indigenous communities there and with Native communities in the United States. The relationship building felt like a weaving process as stories were shared and kinship was created in a sustainable way. To this day, I continue those relationships with Indigenous peoples I met from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The theme of the conference where I was to deliver a keynote address spoke powerfully to this concept of collective weaving to produce thrivance circuits, “Our Story, Our Time, Our Future” centered our interdependent relationships as community members, knowledge keepers, organizers, scientists, and researchers. It was during the conference meetings and events that I got this strong sense of kinship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that I was fortunate to meet. The best way to describe the experience is that I felt like I was at home in Louisiana. Reflecting on that moment, it wasn’t just the similarities in terms of gift exchanges, land acknowledgments, or cultural protocols and dances, it was the shared sense of humor, the connection around land and food and family. I also felt one of the strongest senses of belonging in my life. Black Australians, like me, face color discrimination and yet are quite proud of their identities even in the face of anti-Blackness and “settler” violence. It was there, in those moments, that I knew kinship, not citizenship was the driving force behind Indigenous thrivance. Enacting queer Indigenous kinship requires an understanding and a centering of Indigenous practices, knowledges, and critical engagements of reciprocity or what Shawn Wilson (2008) terms “relational accountability.” To examine queerness across Indigenous landscapes in different regions of the world, it becomes necessary to “indigenize queerness” (Tallie 2019, 9). To indigenize queerness in this sense requires a re-evaluation of how queer life is studied, understood, and archived across time and space. As a queer, mixed-race, Afro-Indigenous person of Latin-European descent, I’ve grown up unknowingly weaving for the better part of my 46 years of life. To me it wasn’t so much about the intersections … these were all equally important parts of the same person. It was indeed outsiders—people, institutions, lovers, government, that sought to reduce or gatekeep, or perhaps most violently inform me of who
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 235 I was or who I could be based on a Western notion of “purity” and “authenticity.” Thus, to archive queer life, is to document, map, and explain the stories, histories, and contemporary experiences of queer folks outside the colonial confines that limit archival work to museums, libraries, and other institutions. Here, I am talking about a living archive mapped by queer and Indigenous people themselves in their tribal nations and communities as well as in social, cultural, and political spaces. So, what then does collective weaving look like? It includes showing up for one another across Indigenous and queer communities, it means developing a global force where ideas are transmitted across time and space in ways that honor our own knowledge systems. It means deconstructing a queer archive, so we know there isn’t just one archive but rather there are many archives, many voices, and many stories. I think of the erasures of queer people of color and who get left out of public archives when scientist center Western empirical knowledge over community-based knowledge construction. For example, I think of the organization, Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS, https://www.baaits .org) who celebrate their 11th annual Two-Spirit Powwow in 2022. They created this space to celebrate, honor, and acknowledge two-spirit cultural contributions to the broader American Indian community where two-spirit people have often been silenced or erased or objectified by colonial and Western archives of American Indian and queer people respectively.
CONCLUSION So, what then is queer about these eight theoretical principles for queer intersectional research from a collective ceremonial responsiveness approach? Everything. During the writing of this chapter, I shared my initial thinking on several of these principles in very different settings. In one context as a consultant to the San Francisco Unified School District on implementation strategies for incorporating Ethnic Studies into Social Studies curriculum. In another context, at a google talk for Pride month where I was asked to speak about the intersections of mixed-race identity and queerness. Audiences in both instances were drawn to the ideas of weaving and thrivance because they focused on action, kinship, and relational accountability. Both audiences also appreciated the shift not just in ideology, but in practice, in method. Queerness is about transformation. It is about a movement away from those normalized everyday colonial ideas and practices that we are all taught to comply morally, socially, culturally, and political. So, to be queer, is to be different, to challenge heteronormativity and colonialism. Therefore, everything about these principles is queer. They challenge, reconfigure and map out other ways we can and have been working outside the confines of imperialism in the United States and globally. It is crucial that graduate programs re-examine their methods courses to ensure that they truly focus on the robust and growing ways that intersectional, queer, and Indigenous-centered research provides important pathways for achieving new knowledge and practices to transform the world in ways that are more just and equitable. One goal of thrivance circuitry and collective ceremonial research responsiveness is to address real and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, land, and communities. As more and more universities and institutions (including non-profits) seek remedies to adjudicate and reconcile injustice for queer and Native peoples we must turn to more meaningful and strategic actions. Two specific areas that come to mind in this regard are calls for Cultural Protocols to address research in Indigenous communities and Land Back/repatriation and rematriation plans that seek to do
236 Research handbook on intersectionality more than simply acknowledge the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. This chapter is a call to action to all researchers from early career to senior scholars who want their work to be connected to transformative justice rather than an ongoing arm of colonial terror in queer Indigenous communities. Let your work be done in connection, in kinship, and in ceremony. Let your work be linked to a deep responsibility to people not institutions or to tenure and promotion. Let your work seek to create and expand thrivance networks across geographies, communities, and ideologies. As you begin, always center relationships over findings. The stories are here waiting to be told.
NOTES 1.
For more on the problems associated with research agendas that center “damage” in Indigenous and other marginalized communities, see Tuck (2009). 2. I defined thrivance circuitry as “the ability to use pre-colonial, settler colonial, and contemporary experiences (both negative and positive) to adjust, reset, build, and center Indigenous histories, languages, intellectual traditions and relationships with a focus on self-determination, collective wellness, and joy” in my edited book, American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century. San Diego: Cognella (2019).
REFERENCES Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits. 2022. Accessed 14 January 2022. https://www.baaits.org Browne, Kath and Katherine Nash. 2016. “Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction,” in Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Kathereine Nash, 15–35. New York: Routledge. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1994. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” in The Public Nature of Private Violence, edited by Martha Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk, 93–118. New York: Routledge. DataCenter. 2013. Research Justice: A Strategic Framework to Achieve Self-Determination for Marginalized Communities, Accessed August 1, 2021. http://www.datacenter.org/services-offered/ research-justice/ Diaz, Rafael. 1997. Latino Gay Men and HIV: Culture, Sexuality, and Risk Behavior. New York: Routledge. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2007. Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2012. “Obama and the Biracial Factor: An Introduction,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew Jolivétte, 218–20. Bristol: Policy Press. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2015. “Research Justice: Radical Love as a Strategy for Social Transformation,” in Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change, edited by Andrew Jolivétte, 5–12. Bristol: Policy Press. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2016. Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Jolivétte, Andrew. 2019. “Conclusion: Indigenous Education as Lifeblood,” in American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century, edited by Andrew Jolivétte, 251–70. San Diego: Cognella. Lorde, Audre. 2018. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. New York: Penguin Classics.
Thrivance: an indigenous queer intersectional methodology 237 Martinez, Elizabeth. 2017. De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century. London: Verso Books. Savage, Dan and Terry Miller. n.d. It Gets Better Project. Assessed January 20, 2022. https://itgetsbetter .org/ Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Tallie, T.J. 2019. Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in South Africa. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1999. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Tuck, Eve. 2009. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3): 409–28. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point: Fernwood Publishing.
Section IId
Citizenship studies
15. Intersectional insights into lived citizenship1 Daniela Cherubini
FRAMING “LIVED CITIZENSHIP” IN INTERSECTIONAL TERMS Since the late 1990s, an interest in lived, embodied and subjective experiences made its way into citizenship studies. The notion of “lived citizenship” was proposed (Lister et al. 2003) to signal this new research direction. This concept overcomes the normative idea of citizenship as coinciding with a formal status and static set of rights and opens to an exploration of meanings that people attribute to being citizens (or non-citizens), their experience of access to or exclusion from rights, and the practices used to demand recognition as citizens. In other words, it refers to “how individuals understand and negotiate the three key elements of citizenship: rights, belonging, and participation” (Lister et al. 2007, 168). Against the idea of citizenship as an abstract and neutral device, this perspective focuses on concrete subjects, contexts, and power relations, to understand “the ways in which people’s social and cultural backgrounds and material circumstances affect their lives as citizens” (Hall and Williamson 1999, 2). The focus on lived citizenship is part of a broader micro-sociological and cultural turn in the academic debate on citizenship, which renewed a research agenda focused on normative dimensions and extended the analysis to multiple aspects of everyday life (Kallio et al. 2020; Ong et al. 1996; Rosaldo 1994). It is rooted in feminist, anti-racist and difference-centred approaches that expanded the notion of citizenship to include the perspectives of women and other disadvantaged groups (Carey 2009; Collins 2000; Lister 1997; Moosa-Mitha 2005; Pateman 1988; Roseneil 2013; Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). These critical reconceptualizations draw on the experience of subjects who are far from the “ideal citizen”, the latter tending to be defined as male, adult, white, heterosexual/procreative, cisgender, worker/ consumer, physically and mentally able, native-born, secular, or Christian, as we will see. For this reason, these subjects hold marginal or outsiders’ positions in the structure of rights and privileges that comes with membership to the community of citizens. In tune with these conceptual roots, the lived citizenship perspective allows us to see how citizenship is experienced and negotiated, but also reclaimed or contested, by disenfranchised people located at the margins of a social and political community. It focuses on the redefinitions of citizenship emerging from “below” and from the “margins” (Caldwell et al. 2009; Cook and Seglow 2016; Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; Kabeer 2005; Moosa-Mitha and Dominelli 2016; Neveu et al. 2011; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005; Warming and Fahnøe 2017). Moreover, it sees citizenship as a governmental mechanism that categorizes subjects according to normative notions of belonging; but also as a space of struggle which involves those who lack the legal and symbolic recognition of belonging to the community and who do not have full rights. In other words, the idea of lived citizenship can be explored as both a disciplinary and emancipatory tool, testing the possibilities of building a more “inclusive” citizenship2 (Kabeer 2005; Lister 2007). In this chapter, I show that lived citizenship is key to the study of the current processes of inclusion, exclusion, and transformation of citizenship in plural societies. I contend that, when 239
240 Research handbook on intersectionality framed in intersectional terms, the lived citizenship perspective allows us to recognize that “the specific location of people in society – their group membership and categorical definition by gender, nationality, religion, ethnicity, ‘race’, ability, age or life cycle stage – mediates the construction of their citizenship as ‘different’ and thus determines their access to entitlements and their capacity to exercise independent agency” (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999, 5). In addition, an intersectional understanding of lived citizenship centres the experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and the agency and transformative potential of people located at the margins and/or at neglected points of intersection between multiple axes of social division. To show the utility of this approach, in the first part of the chapter I reconstruct how critical studies advancing a lived, difference-centred, and intersectional perspective have reconceptualized the three key elements that constitute citizenship, namely, rights, belonging, and participation. In the second part, drawing from my research work, I discuss an ethnographic study of migrant women promoting their own grassroots associations in a Southern European context, and their lived experience and practice of citizenship. In the conclusion, I go back to the central questions of the book and share some methodological thoughts, lessons learnt and open challenges, arising from the application of intersectional lenses in this research field. I reflect on how the situated intersectional approach and the ethnographic gaze adopted in my case study help to: (a) capture the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis involved in the study of lived citizenship, (b) grasp the contextual and emergent character of the intersecting identities and social divisions around which the contestations of citizenship are articulated, and (c) acknowledge the (re)making of citizenship on the ground by multiply-marginalized subjects.
HIERARCHIES OF STATUSES AND DIFFERENTIATED RIGHTS Citizenship defines rights, duties, and legal statuses. Regarding this first dimension, the critical approaches under analysis in this chapter emphasize the processes of inclusion and exclusion lived by people with different positions in society. Instead of looking at the “community of the citizens” as an internally homogeneous field, these approaches bring to light the structure of stratified rights and unequal opportunities which emerges in the space between full citizenship and non-citizenship. In this space, people may find themselves located at different positions, according to their legal status (formal citizenship, type of residence permit if foreign citizens, illegal stay) as well as their social identity and background (age, gender, social class, education, cultural capital, ethnicity, race, ability, family situation, and so on). As such, they may experience different gradations of “second-class” citizenship, for instance, if they lack the resources to exercise the rights they are formally entitled to, or if they have a reduced set of rights, compared to those enjoyed by other (full) citizens. Some may suffer severe forms of exclusion, with no recognition or enjoyment of basic rights, when they find themselves in a condition of “non-person” (Dal Lago 1999). Different authors have proposed the term “civic stratification” to describe this layered structure (Kofman 2002; Lockwood 1996; Morris 2002), which is shaped by three interrelated processes: “civic inclusion/exclusion” (the differential granting of rights by the State), “civic gain/ deficit” (informal mechanisms hindering or enhancing the enjoyment of rights), and “civic expansion/reduction” (changes in rights regimes resulting from the recognition/withdrawal of new rights and new categories of citizens) (Lockwood 1996, 536–46; Morris 2002, 7).
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 241 Migration policies certainly constitute a preferred field of application for the concept. A growing literature shows how these policies create different legal categories for international migrants, and while they expand the rights granted to some (qualified workers, long-term residents, European Union (EU) citizens, and so on), they also restrict the rights of others (asylum seekers, unqualified workers, sex workers), who often enter precarious and illegal stay. In doing so, these policies actively produce internal borders and act as mechanisms of differential inclusion (Bauböck 2006; Ong 1999). Yet despite their relevance in contemporary societies, migration policies are not the only factor at play, nor do they operate alone. In fact, current research advances an intersectional understanding of civic stratification and shows that migration regimes interact with other systems of social and political regulation, such as the nationality model, the welfare and labour regime, the gender and care regime, and the racial and sexual politics that characterize each context. For instance, the partial citizenship of migrant women (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006; Lister et al. 2007; Spijkerboer and Walsum 2007; Staiano 2016) and of migrant domestic workers (Bosniak 2006a; Luppi et al. 2018; Parreñas 2013; Romero 2002; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005) has been pointed out by several scholars as resulting from the interplay of migration, labour, care, and gender regimes operating at transnational, national, and local levels. More broadly, according to this intersectional view, gender, nationality, origin, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, social class, and education have proven to be significant factors of stratification in immigration policies, including those regulating entry and employment (Anderson 2013; Kofman 2002), family migration and reunification (Kofman 2018; Kraler and Bonizzoni 2010), asylum (Danisi et al. 2021; Giametta 2017), naturalization (Fortier 2021), sex work and trafficking (Mai et al. 2021), access to social rights (Amelina et al. 2019), and law enforcement and deportation (Romero 2008). In my view, this literature should be brought into dialogue with the large body of studies showing how civic exclusion, civic deficit, and civic reduction also mould the experience of several other subjects – beyond international migrants – limiting their access to the range of rights enjoyed by most “fully-fledged” citizens. Among them, women, ethnic and sexual minorities, racialized people, the working class and those in poverty, the disabled, dependent people, children, and underage citizens. For instance, feminist citizenship studies have pointed out women’s historical exclusion from civil, political, and social rights, as well as their imperfect citizenship status today, due both to formal and informal (but systemic) mechanisms of exclusion (Lewis 1998; Lister 1997; Lister et al. 2007). Another example comes from the literature on sexual, reproductive, and intimate citizenship, which has shown how people who do not meet dominant norms of gender identity and sexuality often hold second-class citizenship. These may include, among others, people living outside conventional family forms, transgender or non-binary people, sex workers, and single or non-heterosexual people wishing to access medically assisted reproduction (Hanafin 2013; Roseneil 2013; Roseneil et al. 2020; Sabsay 2011). Lastly, recent critical interventions in migration studies look at the connections between the experience of inclusion/exclusion of both migrants and non-migrants, address the “migrant-citizen nexus” and invite academics to “de-migrantise migrants” and “migrantise citizens” (Dahinden and Anderson 2021). Coupling the insights from these multiple strands of scholarship, in my view an intersectional and lived citizenship focus enables us to see how the structural framework is reflected in people’s everyday lives and gives body to different experiences of inclusion and exclusion
242 Research handbook on intersectionality in multiple domains, including those conventionally considered to be “private” matters (e.g., family, and intimate life).
BELONGING AS A TERRAIN OF POLITICS Citizenship is also a matter of identity, belonging, and affection, related to feeling attached and recognized as part of a community3 (Fortier 2010; Isin and Wood 1999). Lived and intersectional approaches in this field start from this widely shared premise and look at belonging as a terrain of power, negotiation, and conflict. They focus on how the definitions regulating the symbolic borders of the community apply to different categories of subjects, on the one hand, and how they are adopted, contested, or rejected by these subjects, on the other hand. They point out how different definitions of belonging (having different normative force) are confronted in our societies, through bottom-up and top-down processes, creating and recreating the frontiers between citizens and non-citizens, insiders, and outsiders. In this regard, Nira Yuval-Davis and colleagues (2006) highlight the importance of the “politics of belonging”, meaning those dynamic processes of self-identification and Othering which are oriented towards maintaining or redrawing the frontiers between “us” and “them” in a political community. The politics of belonging entail two processes, one related to the definition and reproduction of these frontiers by hegemonic powers, and another produced by its adoption or resistance on behalf of other political agents, including social movements and ordinary people. They not only take shape in public policies, laws, and administrative procedures but also in everyday interactions, as well as in discourses and cultural artefacts where shared meanings of “Us” and “the Other(s)” are created and circulated. The politics of belonging should be viewed as spatially, temporally, and intersectionally situated (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006). They are constructed in specific ways – and lead to different political projects of belonging – according to the historical and social contexts, and in relation to a range of social divisions and identities. Research in this field follows a twofold agenda. On the one hand, interventions focus on the normative definitions setting the boundaries of the political community (the nation and beyond) and constructing the figure of the “ideal citizen” as a standard that delineates who is and is not worthy of inclusion. On the other hand, research casts light on how people reproduce, adapt, or contest these definitions both in their everyday actions and discourse. In the first research direction, a long tradition of critical thought has focused on the construction of the “citizen” as an ideal figure that is modelled on a privileged social position, despite being perceived as neutral and universal. The moral, intellectual, and bodily characteristics that are implicitly associated with this “upstanding” and “archetypal” citizen (such as autonomy, impartiality, rationality) coincide with those traditionally attributed to the ideal figure of an adult, able-bodied, cisgender male, belonging to the dominant ethnic or racial group, heterosexual and involved in productive work (in addition to consumption and leisure) (Lister 1997; Moosa-Mitha 2005; Pateman 1988). The literature has also reflected on the racialized, gendered, and sexual borders of the nation and other communities of belonging (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Luibhéid 2002; Mongia 1999). As summarized by Rutvica Andrijasevic (2009), this literature shows that alongside boundaries drawn on essentialized notions of descent, culture, ethnicity, and race, “sexuality and gender play a constitutive role in the formation and definition of the nation insofar as the reproduction of nationhood and citizenship remain premised on heterosexuality and heteromasculinity. These denote certain bodies as
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 243 desirable, and others racialized or non-procreative …, as being a threat to nation’s survival” (Andrijasevic 2009, 390). These types of criteria underlie the negotiations of belonging with which all people must reckon, yet this is especially the case for those who do not immediately match the image of the ideal citizen. These criteria are also at work in policies regulating international migration and access to nationality, setting benchmarks of acceptability for migrants as new citizens, and creating categories of desirable and undesirable migrants (Anderson 2013; Bosniak 2006b). As seen in the previous section, far from remaining confined to the realm of the symbolic and to interpersonal (mis)recognition dynamics, these categories have concrete effects in terms of status, rights entitlements, and structural position. In addition, research on homonationalism and femonationalism (Farris 2017; Puar 2007) demonstrates that such sexualized, racialized, and classed figurations of (un)belonging and (un)deservedness can come through as much from conservative policies in the field of gender and sexual equality, as from seemingly progressive ones. The second direction of analysis focuses on the counter-narratives of belonging mobilized by marginalized subjects to contest the symbolic exclusion – or partial and subordinated inclusion – they experience. Through narrative and ethnographic methods, these studies show how such subjects tactically or strategically negotiate hegemonic narratives that entrench their non-membership and formulate alternative scripts of belonging (Coll 2005; Erel 2009; Miri et al. 2020; Salih 2000). Equally relevant, especially in more recent literature, is the focus on “everyday bordering” (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019), meaning the ordinary and pervasive (re) making of the symbolic, social, and spatial frontiers dividing community insiders and outsiders, which takes place in spaces of everyday life. For instance, in the workplace, at school, in the family, in the urban environment, on public transport and in everyday interactions mediating access to basic goods and services (banking, accommodation, health, mobility, leisure) (Agergaard and Lenneis 2021; Blackwood et al. 2015; Diatlova and Näre 2018). According to these authors, everyday bordering involves people with different locations and social roles, and multiple points of view. As such, they should be analysed through a “situated and intersectional” gaze (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019).
PARTICIPATION FROM THE MARGINS The third dimension deserving attention is that of active participation. The lived perspective is of course interested in the performative aspects of citizenship and centres the research agenda on the practices through which people enact their rights, renew their bonds with the political community, express their sense of being a citizen or seek recognition as such. These include both coded routines (e.g., voting, paying taxes) and dissident practices that break with established norms and roles assigned to citizens. The latter potentially opens new ways of enacting citizenship and generates novel political subjectivities requiring recognition as “citizens”. In this regard, Engin Isin (2008, 18) speaks of “acts of citizenship”, defined as “the moments when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens – or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due”. The focus on and from the margins characterizes the lived citizenship approach and leads us to take as a privileged point of analysis those practices that come from “non-citizens” and “second-class citizens”. This line of analysis includes research on the demands for inclusion by people in conditions of economic and cultural marginality, such as the poor, racialized
244 Research handbook on intersectionality minorities, disabled people (Kabeer 2005; Pontrandolfo 2018; Warming and Fahnøe 2017), or in liminal positions, such as young people and children (Lister et al. 2003; Smith et al. 2005). Equally extensive is the research on migrant participation, including those lacking legal residence status (Koopmans et al. 2005; Martiniello 2006; Suárez-Navaz et al. 2007), and on requests for rights and recognition made by migrant women (Andall 2000; Chun et al. 2013; Tudela-Vázquez 2016). Overall, this literature confirms that while many of the classic channels for exercising active citizenship are difficult or inaccessible to people in conditions of socio-economic, cultural, or legal precarity, these people often elaborate alternative means of participation, which may be understood as forms of “citizenship from below”. Indeed, opportunities and barriers to participation are not equally distributed in society, between genders, generations, social classes, and so on. Many forms of civic-political participation (e.g., party politics, informed and conscious voting, collective organizing, demonstrations) are excessively demanding or inaccessible to some people or social groups, who lack key resources such as time, social and cultural capital, or have different abilities and dispositions. It is not only a matter of resources. Feminist and difference-centred analysis have shown that normative models of citizenship define the duties of an active citizen not only according to the political tradition of each context (e.g., civic republicanism, liberalism) but also in relation to the ideal figure of the “good citizen” described in the previous section. For subjects who deviate from this “ideal citizen”, active participation is channelled towards a limited range of possibilities for legitimately taking the public stage and contributing to the “public good”. The intersectional and lived approaches do not limit themselves to these critical issues, but also bring into focus the question of visibility and recognition of participation practices by multiply-marginalized people. Frequently taking place outside legitimate spaces and forms of the “political”, in fact these practices often have little (or no) visibility and fail to be recognized for their political purpose and value. Again, this tendency has been widely described in the case of women’s participation, which even in its collective and organized forms has been systematically undervalued throughout history. Women’s experiences of empowerment, voicing, and organizing have often been downgraded as having little value and impact, as if they were second-rate forms of participation for being associated either with the private sphere (and therefore, by definition, “apolitical”), or “pre-political” interests and forms of solidarity. These forms have been excluded from the realm of what counts as “active citizenship” (Lister 1997; Naples 1998; Rowbotham 1992). Misrecognition and misrepresentation in the political field are even more pervasive for racialized and migrant women, who are often depicted as incapable of political action, and whose ways of enacting and seeking rights are not read as (sufficiently) political. A large tradition of critical thought, from Black and Chicana, to Third World and postcolonial feminisms, shows that their specific needs and interests as well as their intersectional identities frequently fail to be acknowledged in the political sphere (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1991; Kóczé et al. 2018; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983). Pivotal to an intersectional and lived perspective is the ability to grasp the ways marginalized subjects engage politically and the innovative, transformative forms of engagement that are acted out from below.
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 245
MIGRANT WOMEN’S LIVED CITIZENSHIP: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT In this second part of the chapter, I present a research example that is in dialogue with the body of scholarship explored thus far, incorporating many of its questions and research directions. In detail, I share some empirical and methodological insights from an ethnographic study on migrant women’s collective organizing (Cherubini 2018), which I believe can be useful to the core question under analysis in these pages: that is, how to do intersectional research on lived citizenship. The fieldwork was carried out in Andalusia, Spain, and was based on document analysis, participant observation, and narrative interviews with 40 activists from 27 associations, located in different towns and cities in the region. These are grassroots groups led by and mostly composed of migrant women, either from the same or from different geographical origins (e.g., Latinas’ associations, Moroccan women’s associations, intercultural associations, and so on). Created since the mid-1990s, these associations fight to defend and expand migrants’ and migrant women’s rights, countering multiple discrimination and securing migrant women a better position in society. To this end, they develop community-based services aimed at their members and the local population, campaigns for legal reforms, awareness-raising and lobbying activities.4 Interviewees had heterogeneous profiles. They came from new EU-27 and non-European contexts (Romania, Morocco, Ukraine, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, and Latin American countries). Aged between 23 and 61 years at the time of the interview, they held different legal statuses (temporary or permanent residency, Spanish, or dual nationality, undocumented in a few cases) and had been living in Spain between two to 25 years. Most had a medium to high level of education, and some were pursuing their graduate or postgraduate degrees in Spain. Most of the interviewees were employed as domestic and care workers or cultural mediators or engaged in full-time unpaid family work. Some of them were in other service jobs (call centre shops, hostelry), while a small minority of cases were professionals in the education, banking, and media sectors. The study explored the lived experience and practice of citizenship and the politics of belonging enacted by these activists, both in their associations and in their life and migration trajectories. I first looked at the experiences of inclusion and exclusion from rights and recognition lived by these women in various spheres of life. Second, I explored their formulations of belonging and their self-representations as citizens, non-citizens, or partial citizens vis-à-vis Spanish society and the local community. Lastly, I looked at the participatory practices and collective demands being elaborated in their associations. In the next section, I present some of the main findings related to these three analytical dimensions. Before doing so, I would like to mention my positioning vis-à-vis the research topic and the fieldwork. As a native-born, white, childless Southern European woman, holding an Italian passport, enrolled in a public university as a PhD student and living off my grant at the time of the study, I held the entire array of formal rights that come with European citizenship, I had no major economic concerns and I was not racially targeted. I approached the field as a young researcher, and as an ally. I was interested in the study of citizenship and intersectional inequalities, and I was in solidarity with migrant women’s struggles for rights, respect, reforms in immigration laws and against the interlocking systems of racism, sexism, nationalism, and classism. These intertwined forces produced forms of oppression that did not coincide with what I lived firsthand, but that I cared about as a feminist. I saw my choice of
246 Research handbook on intersectionality research topic, and my relationship with those involved in the study, as a compelling opportunity to create new awareness about mechanisms of social injustice at play in migration laws, in the institutional regulation of work and welfare, as well as in everyday social interactions, which are building an increasingly stratified and unequal Europe (Lutz 1997; Rigo 2007). Mapping Experiences of Subordinated Inclusion To contextualize the women’s accounts of inclusion and exclusion, let us examine the main elements of the civic stratification systems in Spain, and Andalusia in particular, at the time of the study. Among the most noteworthy characteristics is a frame of institutional discrimination (Cachón Rodríguez 2009), which results from the interplay of restrictive and selective immigration laws, a labour regime segmented by gender and nationality, and a familistic welfare and care regime (Bettio et al. 2006; Solé and Parella 2003). This is compounded by widespread mechanisms of discrimination at the informal level, related to forms of everyday racism, sexism, and classism. Immigration policies in effect at the time of the fieldwork regulated (and still regulate) entry, residency, and access to rights, directly by country of origin and indirectly by class, gender, and sexuality (Agrela Romero and Gil Araujo 2005; Lister et al. 2007, 77–108). Other key elements relate to a labour market characterized by high rates of unemployment, irregular work, and gender and ethnic segregation, and to a care regime marked by an imbalance in the distribution of responsibilities between genders, generations, socio-economic layers, and nationalities. The interplay between these structural forces results in high demand for a flexible labour force in the care and domestic sector, which restricts professional options for migrant women. Notably, the laws regulating domestic work at the time of the fieldwork5 restricted labour rights, in comparison with those accorded to other workers. This affected the partial citizenship status of many of the women in the sample. How do the women involved in the study cope with the setting described so far? How does such a normative and structural framework impact on their lives? Analysis of the narratives allowed us to map the most salient issues from the subjective experience of inclusion or exclusion of rights at the time of the interviews, as well as throughout their life stories. Notably, these issues involve many spheres of everyday life commonly associated with discourses of citizenship (management of residency documents and passports, participation in the public sphere and the labour market, mobility and use of urban space, access to public services), and others regarded as private matters in the common sense (family and relational life, intimate choices, emotions, and the sense of self). The mechanisms of civic inclusion/exclusion and gain/deficit reported vary according to the interviewees’ profiles, due to the combination of migration status, country of origin, length of stay, age and phase of life, family and professional situation, education, race, ethnicity, and religion. These elements cast women in different, yet dynamic, positions in the structure of civic stratification, and have differentiated impacts on their life trajectories and their ability to act and pursue their plans. It is not possible in this chapter to illustrate these processes in detail. Nevertheless, I point to two fundamental issues which cut across many of the interviewees’ narratives and may be specific to the migrant women’s lived experience of citizenship. The first one concerns the constraints of “los papeles” (the papers), which regulate the entry and residency of foreigners in Spain, as they strive to acquire and maintain regular immigra-
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 247 tion status, possibly obtain a permanent residency permit providing more rights and guarantees, and in some cases get formal Spanish citizenship. This introduces different degrees of dependence on state authorization in the lives of these women (at least, until they are naturalized) depending on the type of residence permit they have. This constraint has a pervasive impact on the interviewees’ ability to make plans, accomplish their personal and professional goals, and make choices in numerous areas of life. In a nutshell, this issue raises questions of freedom, personal autonomy, and self-determination, which do not have an equivalency in the experiences of women who are citizens by birth. In addition, the emotional dimension to the handling of “the documents” should not be overlooked since it appears to be pivotal in the narratives. The “journey” across immigration statuses is punctuated by feelings of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, insecurity, anguish, anger, pain, loss, relief, and serenity. These feelings depend to a large extent on the permanent or reversible nature of the permit and the corresponding rights, the degree of attaining future regular residence, and arbitrariness and pervasiveness of policing (illegalized) migrant people. The second transversal issue which emerged from the interviews is the gap between “real” and “superficial” inclusion. The former – desired but unattained – condition implies access to equal opportunities (not only to equal rights) and being treated as equal partners of social interaction, as envisaged by Nancy Fraser (2005). The latter refers to a condition experienced in the present and past by most of the interviewees, which results from informal and less visible barriers that “at the moment of truth, stop us from getting ahead in life”6 and confine them to predetermined and subordinate roles in society. Here the problems lie in the mechanisms of discrimination that women commonly face in the labour market, in everyday encounters, and at times in civil society organizations, even when they have relatively privileged formal status as long-term, permanent residents, EU citizens, or Spanish citizens. Counter-narratives and Grassroots Politics of Belonging The analyses of migration, welfare, and labour policies discussed in the previous section, in parallel with studies on media representations of migrant people in the context of the study, converge to paint a picture of national identity that is drawn around ethno-cultural, religious, and economic boundaries. They highlight hegemonic definitions of belonging that are built around a white, European, Catholic and/or secular “us”, opposed to “them”, associated with the non-European and non-Western “underdeveloped” world, the colonized “Other” and, often, with Islam. Within this framework, migration is managed as an issue of the security and integrity of the nation. Thus newcomers, as well as settled migrants, are perceived as more or less “integrable” depending on their usefulness in labour, economic, and social terms, to the extent that they enter essential but low-paid jobs (domestic work being the key example), and according to the perception of their cultural, ethnic, and religious affinity. During field research, a parallel principle of active participation of migrants begun to appear at a rhetorical level.7 This shift in discourse nevertheless had limited effects on the public in the years covered by the study and appears to be ambivalent in the case of migrant women. Once ignored, they are increasingly being addressed in national and local integration policies; however, greater visibility is related to stereotyped representations (Gregorio Gil 2011). Migrant women are depicted as subjects who are over-determined by their “culture of origin” and at the same time, as caring subjects, well versed for mediation and social work. As a result, they tend to be included in the political field only if they embody certain subject positions, either as vulnera-
248 Research handbook on intersectionality ble subjects and recipients of social provisions, or as “mediators by nature” and facilitators of immigrants’ integration processes.8 Interesting observations emerge from the ethnography about how migrant women activists respond to these dominant definitions of belonging, both individually (in their self-presentation and identity) and collectively (in the discourse produced by the women’s groups). The core element of the politics of belonging enacted by research participants relies on simple yet radical demands. They ask to be acknowledged as part of the society in which they live, to be appraised as having as much worth and deserving as much respect as the “native-born” population, and lastly, to be recognized as political subjects. They have something to say and do in collective decisions about how we live together in society. Notably, in departing from the dominant nationalist, culturalist, and sexist rhetoric described above, these demands mobilize alternative understandings of belonging. This does not mean that signifiers of national, cultural, and religious identities are discarded but rather are reworked in original ways. For example, self-definitions referred to as “hyphenated identities” are very common (Moroccan-Spanish, Spanish-Romanian, and the like) as well as terms which refer to transnational and diasporic identities (“a Romanian intellectual of the diaspora”9) and purposive assemblages of affiliations that are widely perceived as irreconcilable (“a Spanish Muslim citizen”10). Overall, they resort to creative reassemblages that erode the “us/them” essentialist dichotomy and pave the way to new citizen identities. Besides that, one of the main arguments mobilized by women in support of their demands for recognition is their “lived experience”, which refers to living in a place, pursuing their lives, daily activities, work, relationships and, sometimes, plans in relation to the neighbourhood, city, and country they inhabit. In other words, the request for recognition is often made based on a rootedness that already exists in the lives of these women (“my life is here now”), and that goes hand in hand with subjective feelings of being at ease and connected to the place where they live (“I feel good here, I feel from here”).11 Equally important is the logic of merit, as a further element that underpins the women’s sense of belonging. The contribution made in the context of residence is understood not only in the economic realm (doing essential jobs, contributing to the economy, paying taxes) but also in the social and political domains. There is a sense of doing one’s duty, playing one’s role within Spanish or Andalusian society, or the local community. This includes working, studying, taking care of one’s family, but also being organizers and playing an active role in civil society. This theme is central in the discourse and politics of belonging enacted collectively by the women’s groups. The associations’ members often present themselves as competent subjects who successfully managed their own “integration” process and who can help other migrants in this challenge. They often take a role that can be labelled “expert immigrants and mediators”, presenting themselves as skilled in cultural mediation and social interventions with female sectors of the immigrant population. In doing so, they rely on the expert knowledge they have in these fields, as well as their gender and migrant identity (variously intersected with nationality, ethnicity, religion, and class) as resources that put them in the position to better understand migrant women’s needs and facilitate the reciprocal comprehension between migrant women and other sectors of society. A last dynamic observed in the processes of negotiating belonging comes from a minority of activists’ and grassroots’ collectives who explicitly distance themselves from the role of the “expert mediator”, and do not want to engage in cultural mediation and service provision for the migrant population. Rather, they carry out cultural and artistic projects (which often escape
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 249 a folkloric and ahistorical vision of the “culture of origin”) and practices of mutual solidarity among the members. These activists and groups denounce the pressure exerted on migrant women when they organize collectively and enter as active subjects in the public sphere. In fact, migrant women tend to be pushed towards just a few circumscribed areas of action and limited (often subordinate) roles, based on a stereotyped understanding of their capabilities, orientations, and roles in the family and the community, as racialized, ethnic minority women. Although this position concerns a small part of the network of associations included in my study, it nevertheless stands out in highlighting the normative force of the categorical definitions of the “migrant woman” described at the beginning of this section. These groups pose a challenge to the mono-dimensional images of migrant women and the narrow views about their potential contribution to the social and political community. (Re)making Citizenship in Migrant Women’s Collectives The migrant women’s associations in the study demonstrate a process of empowerment and collective organizing of multiply-marginalized subjects confronted by forms of exclusion based on nationalism, sexism, racism, classism, economic exploitation, and state bordering and control. Migrant women organizers confront male and reductionist biases of Spanish integration policies, and state agencies and non-governmental organizations addressing the migrant population. They denounce the marginalization of migrant women’s voices, not only in society but also in the political projects that promise to support them (including migrant and pro-migrant organizations). Thus, they create their own self-organized groups to become visible and create solidarity bonds based on common experience and structural location. The collective identity that emerges in these groups is built around their members’ complex positioning as women who are migrants, racialized, working class or professionals who experience descending mobility due to migration, mostly employed in care and domestic work or in other low-paid and precarious jobs. While the nexus between gender and migration, and the specific experiences as “migrant women”, are centred by all the associations I met in the fieldwork, other elements of collective identity vary from group to group. Different associations attribute distinct political salience to the social forces that shape the experience of inclusion and exclusion of their founders and participants (among the ones mentioned above, sexism, nationalism, racism, and so on). They emphasize different parts of their lived experience and various identity traits as the basis around which their practice of solidarity and resistance is organized. For instance, national and geographic origin is a relevant aspect that defines the group (e.g., associations of Ukrainian, Latin American, Moroccan women) and is often intertwined with race and religion. In other cases, it is the professional position that combines and complicates the intersection between gender and migrant status, as in the case of associations for female migrant students, or women employed as domestic workers.12 Lastly, affinity for cultural interests and political orientation also factor in the constitution of the group. As a result, the intersectional collective identity as “migrant women” forged in these associations takes a different nuance in each local context and group. If we look at the activities and political demands put forward by these associations, we see that they simultaneously address distinct systems of power relations, thus reflecting the intersectional position of their members and the collective identity described so far. They involve multiple domains of intervention (socio-economic, cultural, legal, and political) and envisage both short-term pragmatic interests and long-term ambitious goals. In fact, most of
250 Research handbook on intersectionality the associations develop forms of voluntary social work aimed at supporting people in managing the “paperwork” related to residency documents, accessing public services, and dealing with their everyday needs in the context of immigration. They offer legal advice and support with work and training courses, as well as linguistic and cultural mediation. In addition, specific activities address migrant women’s personal well-being and self-determination in the intimate field, such as talks on sexual and reproductive health, childcare, maternal health, education, and family relationships. Through this work, these associations are committed to enlarging the enjoyment of rights and access to key resources that allow a liveable life for their members. A few, larger and long-running associations simultaneously carry out more structured activities, joining working groups which monitor the implementation of local policies on immigration and employment in highly feminized job sectors (domestic work, agricultural seasonal work), or policies against gender-based violence. Another area concerns awareness-raising activities aimed at fostering mutual understanding between Spaniards and migrants, promoting intercultural relations, and fighting ethnocentric and racist prejudice. This is often done through cultural events and artistic projects based on the cultural production of the country of origin, or in a few cases, the diasporic and immigrant community. Beside these specific interventions, other more spontaneous activities bring members together to address their leisure, relational, and affective needs. Lastly, these groups also mobilize for campaigns and demonstrations aimed at reforming migration laws and policies. In my view, such heterogeneous activities suggest that migrant women’s struggles represent a convergence of what Nancy Fraser (2005) called “politics of recognition”, “distribution”, and “participation”. This means that they combine demands for symbolic recognition as legitimate and valued members of society, with demands for equal access to economic and material resources as well as for parity of participation, access to a political voice and capacity to influence public decisions. Indeed, it is difficult to separate these different strands in the social justice struggles developed by multiply-marginalized groups. As Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016, 128) point out, “there is a vast literature documenting how disenfranchised groups tackle the issue of social justice on both fronts and view cultural empowerment (race, gender, sexuality) and economic redistribution (class) as inseparable. Out of necessity, women of color integrated their claims for equality, recognition, and redistribution.” This integration shows how citizenship is reinterpreted by the women who mobilize in these associations. For them, as for other disenfranchised subjects, it does not make sense to divide issues of symbolic, material, and legal inclusion/exclusion. From their point of view, inclusive citizenship concerns the three dimensions of social justice identified by Fraser simultaneously, and they should therefore be addressed together.
DOING INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH ON LIVED CITIZENSHIP: METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS In this chapter I have engaged with the core question of this book – namely, the directions and methodological challenges of intersectional research – through a focus on lived citizenship. My aim has been to reflect on what an intersectional perspective on lived citizenship might look like, how it can be used for exploring the struggles around inclusion/exclusion lived by disenfranchised and multiply-marginalized subjects, and how it can help grasp the transfor-
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 251 mation of citizenship and belonging that arises from these struggles. To this end, I followed a twofold strategy. First, I traced the academic debate, focusing on interventions that help establish an intersectional research approach to lived citizenship. The long-standing and composite tradition of critical thought that emerges in the research reconceptualizes citizenship as a dynamic, situated, and contested construction, whose boundaries are written and rewritten by insiders and hegemonic powers, as well as by outsiders and those at the margins. Such a critical body of thought also redraws the contours of the key elements constituting citizenship, namely, rights, belonging, and participation. It spotlights people’s lived experiences of hierarchical statuses and unequal rights, conceives of belonging as a terrain of contention and, lastly, considers participation to be a performative testing ground of citizenship from the margins. Second, I presented an empirical example to identify possible ways to study citizenship through intersectional lenses, by starting from and being sure to include on-the-ground experiences and practices of migrant women in the picture. My ethnographic work on migrant women’s associations in Spain shows that these subjects live in a condition of partial and subordinated inclusion, which limits their potential for self-determination and their ability to pursue their projects. They nevertheless deploy individual and collective strategies to resist and overcome this condition and assert themselves as equal members of the society, as political agents, and ultimately as deserving to be recognized as new citizens. From a methodological point of view, I implemented an analytical framework that connects the macro and structural analysis of civic stratification, the meso level of collective action, and the micro-sociological analysis of the individuals’ experiences, narratives, and actions. To look at these three levels and their interactions means to observe not only the impact of the structural forces and dominant representations of belonging on the lives of the women involved in the study, but also the ways in which these women exercise agency and cope in the context of individual and collective forms of resistance. As pointed out in previous studies (Lister et al. 2007; Warming and Fahnøe 2017), the lived citizenship perspective does not in fact lead citizenship studies to retreat into individual and subjective aspects alone. Rather, it requires an integration of the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis to pursue “a more holistic study of citizenship, which combines analysis of citizenship regimes ‘from above’ with study of the cultural, social, and political practices that constitute lived citizenship ‘from below’” (Lister et al. 2007, 168). In my view, the lived citizenship approach appears in tune with a “situated” vision of intersectionality (Anthias 2013; Yuval-Davis 2015) which, according to these authors, on the methodological level requires us to combine the analysis of the structural and subjective aspects involved in the intersections among multiple axes of power. In this way, “situated intersectionality” allows us to emphasize the contextual and emergent character of the categories around which social inequalities, as well as social and political struggles, are articulated in each context and at different points in time. This focus requires us to give account of how dimensions such as gender, race, class, nationality, immigration status, and so on may be given different meanings and have different power in structuring migrant women’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and their struggles for enlarging citizenship. A last methodological reflection regards the use of ethnography, which was strategic in grasping the conceptions of citizenship and belonging that emerged from the associations, as well as from the life trajectories of their members. As also highlighted by other works (Caldwell et al. 2009; Neveu et al. 2011), the ethnographic method entails an emic perspective
252 Research handbook on intersectionality on the situated agency of the research subjects which may help in capturing the making of citizenship on the ground. In our case, the ethnographic method aided in understanding the specific experiences of exclusion lived by these women as well as their collective action, both in their own terms, making a point of the resistant and transformative character of these experiences and practices. Notably, it helped to acknowledge grassroots migrant women’s collectives, and the life narratives of their members, as sites of production of a salient critical knowledge on the determinants of their marginalization and possible pathways towards their empowerment (Collins 2000). More broadly, these are spaces of critical thinking on, and action against, the dynamics of exclusion from rights, recognition, and belonging that are at play against migrant and racialized women in the Spanish context, as well as in many other contexts in Europe. From this point of view, the focus on lived citizenship through intersectional lenses is therefore not a mere analytical exercise, but also a political one, which may intersect and contribute to diverse feminist social justice projects aimed at redefining citizenship in more inclusive terms.
NOTES 1. I thank the interviewees for sharing their stories and perspectives. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the book editor for their valuable suggestions. 2. Reformulating citizenship from a feminist, intersectional, and demarginalizing standpoint is the subject of an intense epistemological debate. Scholars have contested the feasibility of talking about an “inclusive” version of an intrinsically exclusionary device. Citizenship always operates through processes of “differential inclusion” (Bauböck 2006; Ong 1999); exclusion and domination are constitutive parts of both its historical development and present history (Bhambra 2015). Thus, while there might be a “more” inclusive citizenship, this inclusion will never be complete(d). Some understand the movements for inclusion of disenfranchised people as assimilationist rather than disruptive (Bhambra 2015), or even as reinforcing “normative violence against abjected others” (Brandzel 2016, x). Other interventions have warned against the limits of using this concept in critical thought (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017): critical studies on migrants’ struggles entail the risk of assuming “citizenship as the yardstick for judging the politicality of migrants’ practices” (91), as a uniforming language that overwrites other ways of thinking about politics and ends up reproducing the modern and colonial notions they meant to challenge. 3. Current citizenship studies address belonging at multiple scales, including the nation as well as local (e.g., the city), supranational (e.g., the European Union) and “post-national” communities (e.g., transnational and diasporic groups, the global ecumene). 4. During my study (2007–10), Spain was hit by the global financial crisis, the long-term consequences of which impacted and partly modified migrants’ collective action in the region. Nevertheless, I believe that the results and methodological observations on migrant women’s lived citizenship are still valid and telling today, under the current global pandemic crisis (and its aftermath). 5. Real Decreto 1424/1985. The following law approved in 2011 partly removed discrimination but failed to equate domestic workers’ labour rights to those enjoyed in other professional sectors (Marchetti et al. 2021). 6. Esmeralda, from Ecuador, in Spain for 12 years. All names are fictional 7. “Active citizenship” was a key principle of the national immigration plan released in 2007 (PECI Plan Estratégico Ciudadanía e Inmigración 2007/2010). 8. Here I am reporting the public language spread in the field. For a critical reading of the idea of migrants’ “integration”, see among others Schinkel (2018). 9. Caterina, from Romania, in Spain for six years. 10. Zineb, from Morocco, in Spain for 15 years. 11. Lidia, from Romania, in Spain for 16 years.
Intersectional insights into lived citizenship 253 12. In the period under analysis, there were no migrant domestic workers’ organizations in Andalusia. This kind of movement started to emerge in the region in the following decade (Marchetti et al. 2021). However, awareness of the exploitative conditions of migrant workers employed in the sector is a relevant factor in the creation of many associations included in my study.
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16. Heterosexual marriage-related regimes Laura Odasso
THE EMERGENCE OF A CONCEPT Embedded in lesbian, gay, and queer scholarship and inscribed in the theoretical debate about citizenship as a lived experience, intimate citizenship sheds light on those “choices that cluster around personal life, which are themselves not just personal but political and social” (Plummer 2003, 70). First employed in his book Telling Sexual Stories (1995) and later developed in the eponym book, Intimate Citizenship (2003), Kenneth Plummer aims to highlight the changes in the making of intimate lives in post-modern societies, and the new language that evolves with them. Grasping the “concerns over the rights to choose what we do with our bodies, our feelings, our identities, our relationships, our genders, our eroticism and our representations” (Plummer 1995, 17), the expression tackles the “public language of ‘intimate troubles’” (Plummer 2003, 13) and the ensuing controversies. By this notion, Plummer seeks to provide a conceptual base and an agenda for understanding the developments in the relation between intimacy and citizenship. Although the term hints at the “sexual” and the “reproductive” (Evans 1993; Richardson 2000; Richardson and Turner 2001), Plummer considers the word “intimate” to be more neutral and inclusive to define what underpins citizenship. Intimate citizenship further retraces and questions intersections, continuums, and frictions between the private and the public spheres. The close intertwining of such spheres is anything but new. As a discourse, history shows that the family becomes a “metaphor, symbol, but also origin of the nation” (Porciani 2002, 12). This discourse goes hand in hand with an increased attention to marital choices, reproduction, birthright, and parenthood, called to “produce” and shape citizens and workers – even conscripts, during certain periods that are respectful of national values. A new culture of family intimacy emerged during the 20th century (Asquer and Odasso 2020). But the increased attention for the nuclear family and the needs of women and children went hand in hand with a closer scrutiny of male-female relations, gender roles and care (Collins 1993; Yuval Davis 1997). According to Donzelot (1977), wealth became a matter of production in the mid-18th century and it became necessary to pace bodies and manage populations, which implies intervention in the family sphere. The family as a unit became the nerve center of the “social sector” developed at the beginning of the 20th century. Intended as a new ideology at the service of national power that extends beyond simple control, “policing of the family” wasn’t, and still is not, the sole prerogative of state authorities. Depending on the contexts and the periods, such “policing” has been carried out by other actors, that is, philanthropic companies, the Church or other religious authorities, education institutions. In the colonial territories, control over affects and surveillance of sexuality were key parts of the colonial project’s racialized and class-based logic (de Hart 2014). The policing of ethno-sexual boundaries and the government of intimate (illegal) practices safeguarded the power relations underpinning the white colonial domination (Pesarini 2020; Stoler 2002). Along with the economic exploitation, this racial 257
258 Research handbook on intersectionality order kept colonial subjects in a subordinate position (McClintok 1995). Thus, legal statuses created by the state conditioned fates and future lives (Saada 2007). Without overlooking this historical context, Plummer’s concept offers an innovative indictment in the wake of the post-1960s movements for gender and sexual equality from the unprecedented demand for changes around how to live one’s personal and private life and its significance in political, public, and cultural discourses. These requests have impacted established gender regimes that are taken for granted, offering a new normative and institutional impetus around intimate lifestyles. Lauren Berlant demonstrates that “since ’68, the sphere of discipline and definition for proper citizenship has become progressively more private, more sexual and concerned with personal morality” (1997, 177). The tensions between the new horizons that emerge through grassroots struggles for social justice, on the one hand, and the political efforts of framing these new realities and related rights through a process of category building and street-level implementation, on the other hand, display once more that “there is nothing more public than privacy” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 547). More recently, queer and trans scholarship has attempted to theorize intimacy and citizenship beyond the public/private divide by revealing how state regulations and moral social codes that define “good authentic intimacies” tend to (re)produce a vision of societal cohesion and national belonging along racialized, gendered and class-based axes (Duggan 2003; Luibhéid 2008; Manalansan 2018; Warner 1993). Institutions and public opinion are invested in intimacy, which is also at the core of individual and collective choices, actions, grievances, and claims that can be taking shape as forms of inclusive performative citizenship. What this means is that citizenship is both a “practice: it is more what individuals do than what individuals have” (Odasso 2021, 76), and a “relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices, and a sense of belonging” (Yuval Davis and Werbner 1999, 4). This web of relationships and practices can be further explored by employing an intersectional lens as both a methodological and analytical tool that helps to further clarify intimate citizenship, which Plummer himself considered a “loose term” (1995, 151). Here I argue that an intersectional intimate citizenship project should disentangle the contrasting, yet somehow conflicting, social mechanisms that coalesce around identity positioning, power relations, and “domains of powers – structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal” (Collins and Bilge 2016, 200). To empirically explore what an array of intersectional projects and related methods concerning intimate citizenship consist of this chapter proposes a reflexion at the crossroads of migration, politics of belonging, and regimes1 of intersection. Firstly, I identify important transversal issues and methodologies that marked scholarship on intimate citizenship and lay the groundwork for remaking an intersectional intimate citizenship’s project. Secondly, yet little explored through the prism of intimate citizenship, I posit that migration is an illuminating domain for understanding the manifold intersections of domains of powers drawn by the interplay of borders and social boundaries. Public discourse around the migration apparatus and the subsequent social representations outline the specific matrix of inequalities and domination that impact, expose, and reshape (some) the geography of intimacies on the way to gain full national membership and belongingness. Thanks to empirical case studies concerning binational heterosexual unions2 and the manifold discourses surrounding them, I propose empirical scenes that help to capture the micro, meso, and macro levels of an “intersectional regime perspective” (i.e., securitization, economization, humanitarianism of migration) along with more investigated lines of oppression (Amelina and Horvath 2020),
Heterosexual marriage-related regimes 259 which concern the public intimate life of “Others” and their beloved ones in every day. The conclusion suggests avenues for future research and advocates for reinforcing the dialogue with civil society.
LONGING FOR INTIMATE CITIZENSHIP: AN INTERSECTIONAL FIELD PER SE? Until recently, intimate citizenship scholarship did not adopt a clear stance for an intersectional critical inquiry but rather mobilized categories – mainly race, gender, and class – as descriptive tools. Although an attentive review of the literature shows that the study of intimate citizenship is grounded on some constitutive dimensions that bridge the gap to intersectional thinking and can overcome the controversies over categories that reposition the focus on domains of power and related resistances. As an analytical concept, intimate citizenship has been mostly exploited in the field of gender studies under the prism of a feminized (i.e., women more than men) or a LGBTQ perspective at the crossroad of social spaces, public policies, individual narratives, and social movements (e.g., Halsaa et al. 2012; Kulpa and Mizieliñska 2011; Moreira 2020; Roseneil 2010). Indeed, these social groups have driven the ongoing political, legal, and cultural transformations demands in the treatment of body autonomy, organization of private life, gender identities, and sexual practices. They argue in favor of considering complexity and combatting inequalities to achieve more social justice. These claims made through grassroots actions create a contextual frame that influences individuals’ experiences and narratives. Intimate citizenship was mainly explored in North American and North-Western Europe using this explicit concept, before studies appeared in other regions, such as Eastern and Southern Europe, Mexico, India, etc. (Donner and Santos 2016; Halsaa et al. 2012; Willis 2014). It is evident that intimate “choices are not equally [globally] distributed” (Plummer 2004, 82) and the socio-political context contributes to shaping feelings about citizenship and its related rights. Such understandings of rights also concern the use of social public spaces. These spaces are structured both by implemented and oriented public policies and by the capability of individuals who occupy them, while remaining mediated by social divisions, such as ethnicity, class, race, etc. (see Smyth, 2008 about Northern Ireland politics to promote breastfeeding). Taking place in public spaces is an exercise of everyday lived citizenship marked by intersubjectivity, performativity, and affects (Kallio et al. 2020). Social contexts and public spaces resonate with individual usages and demands, as well as with collective organized actions. Who has the right to raise their voice, and who can be heard and be listened to in public and decisional public spheres? These questions matter in enhancing a more inclusive conception of citizenship. As Lister (2002) reminds us, “intimate citizenship has not to be confused with intimacy itself: it concerns public talks and action about the intimate” (Lister 2002, 199). Understanding the move from the private to the public sphere, and how the transformation of a personal experience into the voicing a claim takes place, is fundamental to signifying intimacy as a valuable dimension of citizenship. The dynamics governing the transition from individual to collective action are not smooth, they are imbued by mechanisms of power and lines of differentiation that change over time. We can simply point to the interactions between organizations made up by migrant or immigrant background women and those constituted by white women. Studies have shown how the first felt “on the margins” of the wider women’s movement in Europe. In its struggle
260 Research handbook on intersectionality for equality and justice, this movement neglected the racist and discriminatory experiences women faced for a long time. These women were, consequently, searching for “safe” spaces to speak freely and to set their own agenda (Ellerbe Dueck 2011; kennedy-macfoy 2012). In the era of economic and migratory crisis, feminist, but also queer, civil society actions have attempted to more carefully take into consideration the diverse nature of women’s skills and claims, and to work on issues of mutual prejudices and representations to encourage a convergence of racial, gendered, and classed-based fights (Arruzza et al. 2019). An excellent example of this relationality is the mobilization Toutes au frontières (All at the borders) made in June 2021, to call for “a European feminist action for a Europe without walls.” This organization signaled that there was a place for exiled women in feminist and anti-racist movements and a place for feminists in movements for the defense of exiled people. Alongside these experiences in the flesh, virtual spaces offer a particular platform where internet users and digital activists speak out about their intimate claims. They are building interesting bridges among scattered realities. “Intimate citizenship 3.0 defies out-of-date digital dualisms like ‘real life’ and ‘online’” (Vivienne 2016, 148) and draws new power relations and alliances of cooperation within networked publics – those imagined communities created by the technological practices of people that share their intimate and common concerns, interests, and requests. Dominant, competing, and subaltern counter publics may congruently cohabit but not without clashes or conflict. This plurality of opinions represents a “world of subpolitics emerging wherein political issue become part of everyday talk” (Plummer 2003, 74), and weaves a complex social framework in which law, policies, civil society actions, and individual choices are embedded. This overview isn’t meant to be an exhaustive state of the art, but rather a selected perspective on the scholarship to explain some characteristic issues that frame the longing for intimate citizenship. These issues (such as socio-political, public spaces, interactions, relationalities, etc.) rely on the same dimensions stressed by those authors that invite us to re-think intersectionality, namely, social context, temporality, and relationality (Choo and Ferree 2010; Nash 2008; Romero 2018), but also power, complexity, social inequalities, and social justice (Collins and Bilge 2016). Another commonality invites to adopt intersectionality for investigating intimate citizenship: it is the social movements nexus. Intersectional thinking born and grown through social movements’ struggles for social justice, as well as intimate citizenship performances account for a cluster of intimate demands for recognition that are embedded in social movements’ claims. Yet, this does not mean that intimate citizenship is intersectional per se but rather that there are fertile convergences when we approach intimate citizenship through an intersectional perspective. To say it differently, I deem that a suitable choice of intersectional methods can boost the heuristic potential of intimate citizenship. Scholarship on intimate citizenship mainly draws on individual self-narrations, public policy analysis, and media studies. An affirmed alliance of critical inquiry, conceptualization and praxis is particularly timely to thwart the critics that consider the concept of intimate citizenship the fruit of modern consumerism elaborated in high-income societies by and for wealthy social groups, and to tackle head on the contradiction emerging from “the simultaneous growth of ‘choice’ and the prevalence of restrictions in intimate lives” (Plummer 2004, 94). De facto “a politics of inequalities and a politics of choice” (2004, 88) still coexist and operate a divide among deserving and non-deserving subjects along the lines of their intimate choices. The persistence of certain moral or normalized assessments of the “correct” way to
Heterosexual marriage-related regimes 261 live one’s intimacy addresses the thorny question of the “universals” on which a society should agree (Plummer 2003). Beside acknowledging that “everybody belongs simultaneously to multiple categories that are historically and geographically located and that shift over time” (Phoenix 2006, 28), an intersectional intimate citizenship project should understand how political, cultural, interpersonal, and economic regimes affect intimate life and citizenship entitlements, including their interplay of actors, discourses, and institutions that are often approached separately. Migration management, in particular marriage-related migration, is a crucial field to explore this potential. Migration governmentality is a boundary work based on assumed shared “national” values and norms that imbue political rationalities used daily to select who deserves the right to enter the nation and the citizenry.
MARRIAGE-RELATED MIGRATION AND REGIMES OF INTERSECTION There is a growing research field on “marriage-related migration,”3 which stems from socio-historical lessons on the colonial edifice of citizenship and the sexual and emotional turn in migration studies. It offers insight into the frictions generated by the migration apparatus and the multilayered symbolic boundary work related to migrants’ personal choices on their paths towards citizenship. For decades, research has overlooked that migrants too are “allowed to love, express their sexualities, have emotions, be intimate” (Mai and King 2009, 297). Intimate and sexual desires underpin, enable, and shape international (and social) mobility (Groes and Fernandez 2018), which are “acceptable”’ personal and affective relationships that are allowed to enter the nation, and enjoyed during residence and applying for citizenship. Indeed, in the new geography of mobility, “key aspects of social reproduction – marriage and childbirth, parenthood and the socialisation of children, intergenerational care throughout the life course – are increasingly being questioned as (more or less) legitimate entry points for claiming or contesting the membership of outsiders” (Bonizzoni 2018, 225). Anxious to preserve the outline of the national community and to ensure the reproduction of “good” citizenry, the state is deeply concerned with intimate ties. Migration management is an enterprise of constructing exclusion/inclusion by legal means and administrative practices established to control bodies and affective relations based on civic ideologies and moral presuppositions. Migration politics are politics of belonging (Yuval Davis 2006) that define who is the deserving future citizens, through racialized, gendered, class-based, national, and religious intersecting lines of desirability, as well as through political rationalities. Structures, law, world economy, and international relations partake in the individual and collective identities of those on the move and their beloved ones. Acknowledging the relevance of intimacy for both migrants and the host society, there have been three main domains of study on this question that compensate for how relatively little attention migratory issues have received in the field of intimate citizenship, such as migrants’ and refugees’ affective and sexual choices in relation to community and family traditions/ injunctions and the new norms and opportunities in the residence country (Cherubini 2011; Muchoki 2017), children adoption and the inclusion/exclusion of the adopter (de Graeve 2010; Schrover 2020), and the screening of mixed-immigration status unions made by migrants and nationals (Bonjour and de Hart 2021; Nehring and Sealey 2020). In the following, I address
262 Research handbook on intersectionality this third topic to argue that intimate life is a particular site where the conformity of foreigners to national expectations is tested, and the extent migration rationalities jeopardize the position of national citizens. Public discourses, legal restrictions on marriage-related migration, and corresponding administrative implementation designed to select the newcomers create a more sophisticated apparatus that burdens national partners who choose to live with a foreigner. National partners discover that their freedom in intimate choices has limits, and so does their status as citizens (Odasso 2016). This field provides a valuable perspective into both migrant and non-migrant intersectional agency deployed in legal-bureaucratic experiences and socialization. It also participates in deconstructing taken-for-granted categories, summarized by the polarized “we” and “us” that shape migration regimes by showing how a certain heterosexuality partakes in the nation building4 (Luibhéid 2008). To better understand this point, I will draw on vignettes from my fieldworks. Located in different social public spaces (immigration office, parliament, the web) and socio-political contexts (France and Belgium), they capture specific interactions and individual and collective “acts of intimate citizenship.” Those logic and acts “through which citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens emerge not as being already defined but as beings acting and reacting with others” (Isin 2008, 39). Based on a long-term multi-sited ethnography involving the collection of life stories and the mapping of heterogeneous actors pivotal in couples’ administrative formalities and drawing on the relevant dimensions common to both intersectionality and intimate citizenship mentioned above, these empirical scenes enact migration rationalities and condense micro, meso, and macro realms of intersectional intimate discourses and representations. None of these situations can be understood per se, rather they require a complex contextualization and a combination of methodologies that highlight the rationalities and power relations embedded in the experiences of migration management, as I will explain in the next section after presenting the vignettes and commenting on them below. Vignette 1: A Moral Economy of Suspicion in Administrative Spaces After a three-year long-distance relationship, in 2013, Sandrine, a 50-year-old white French woman, and Mor, a Senegalese man a few years younger, got married with the intention of living together in France. The couple were interviewed by migration administrations to verify the veracity of their relationship: Mor, who was still in Senegal, was received at the French consulate in Dakar and Sandrine, at the town hall of her village in France. The results of these hearings will allow Mor to obtain the visa to enter France. The man reported he had experienced a half-hour interview with factual questions about his life and plans in France, while Sandrine says: I was in there for two hours. At the same time, there was something of a friendly confidence and unsettling questions. You can feel both well protected and harshly accused … The older woman civil servant spoke to me as she was understanding me, but then, suddenly she moved on to another question and before listening to my answer said: “Madam, you know, we know everything, there is no need to lie.” She was on the relational and human side, while attempting to destabilize me and perhaps to spill the beans about an arranged marriage for residence papers. She even asked me if I had received any money, and I reacted curtly by saying, “I am a woman who has never been paid for anything!”
Heterosexual marriage-related regimes 263 Sandrine – who now lives happily with Mor – has joined the activities of an organization defending binational couples’ rights. She explained: after that event, I felt guilty, already with my heavy background as a white middle-aged woman brought up in a time of prohibitions. The clerks took me back to my mother’s time. They succeed, for a moment, as I had doubts about Mor’s intentions. But I was supported by a friend who, married to a Kurdish man, must have had it worse than us and said to me: “No one can oppose a marriage” and another one working as a lawyer: “Don’t forget that it’s your love story” … Now, I repeat the same to the couples who come to the association’s legal clinics to search for help, but I also tell them that “legality: is something relative. Doing things legally does ensure almost nothing.”
Sandrine’s intimate decisions, like those of other thousands of French citizens, have been exposed to invasive administrative scrutiny since the 2000s. Civil servants are requested to screen affective motivations to contain migratory risk, and to deter and reduce the entrances of certain foreigners for marriage. This means that clerks evaluate the intimate story presented by partners, often employing Eurocentric references of true love, daily supposed romantic interactions and plans to sustain an “acceptable” heteronormative relation. Due to the new political attention to target “abusive foreigners” from entering the country only to enjoy its benefits, the street-level migration bureaucrats have become “specialists of the intersection between legality and intimacy” (Lavanchy 2013, 680) and contribute to a moral economy of suspicion that pervades public immigration offices. The type of relationship, its public performances, as well as the materiality of the relationship’s history (i.e., application documentation) fuel never-ending administrative procedures. An intersectional analysis of the interactions reported by Sandrine deepen this factual reality of marriage-related management. In this fragment of fieldwork, three French white women from three generations interact from their own cultural and economic capital. If their gender, origin, age, and social class would not seem to put them in an unequal positionality, their roles in this specific configuration, as nation gatekeepers and as a spouse of a foreigner, point to unattended dimensions of power concretized by the contrasting tone of the exchanges. These oscillate between “rescuing” national women who might be under the influence of foreign men and accusing these women of opening the nation’s door to non-desirable foreigners. Policing the intimate border of the nation is emotional work rooted in a complex web of paternalistic and securitizing regimes of control deployed not only over foreign partners but rather over national partners, even more often if they are women. Considered as weak actors by the state agents and some politicians, women that choose to marry a certain category of foreign men are seen as putting the national community at risk. The dangerous masculinity that characterizes these men is not new in representations of otherness in society and the family. Black, Arab, and Muslim men embody a supposed incommensurable alterity. Apprehended too often as homogeneous categories, they are perceived as incapable of adhering to the majoritarian culture regarding men-women roles and equality, and gender issues at large. Orientalist stereotypes persist and lead to an underestimation of the emotional and affective life of migrant men. Whereas in the past, French women were supposed to be the “vehicle of French civilization” in mixed marriages recognized in specific colonial settings (Marchand 1954, 210–11), nowadays, on the contrary, they are to be supervised, since their marital freedom may be the vehicle for the entry on national territory of unwanted individuals. After this outrageous encounter with her own state’s agent, Sandrine realized that being a white French well-off citizen was not enough to protect her relationship against discrimina-
264 Research handbook on intersectionality tion, patriarchy, and racism that structured the French migration dispositive. Only an intersectional approach allows us to grasp to what extent she felt treated as a second-class citizen but able to give voice to these feelings of injustice. Like Sandrine, some national partners organize campaigns to denounce their own state’s regime of securitization based on invasive practices surrounding binational intimacy. In an opposing move, other citizens who feel they have been the victims of marriage scams ask for more state intervention to better sanction the “cheating” foreigners. Nevertheless, their claims do not all seem to be equally valuable in the eyes of the state. This is the counterintuitive case of Mounir, presented in the next vignette. Vignette 2: The Limits for Performing Intimate Citizenship in Political Public Space Mounir, a 35-year-old Belgian taxi driver born to Moroccan parents, recounts his unhappy experience with Samia, a 24-year-old Moroccan woman, in front of politicians, community workers and lawyers gathered at a public event dedicated to the fight against “grey marriages” in the Brussels Francophone Parliament in 2015. Grey marriage is the expression imported by Belgian political and public language from France to signify marriages entered by migrants seeking to take advantage of unsuspecting citizens in order to secure their residency and other social benefits. Such marriages are punished by law, and the contractors may ask to annul the marriage. Mounir has undertaken this hard process under advice of the association Coeurs Piegés (Trapped Hearts), of which he is nowadays a member. Founded in Belgium in 2012 to support the victims of fraudulent unions, the association campaigns to increase awareness about these “risky” phenomena (to use the expression of the association) among citizens and requests accelerated legal procedures as well as harsher sanctions for the fraudulent “spouse.” Mounir married Samia in Morocco a few months after their first encounter. She obtained the visa to move to Belgium, and then a resident permit. Soon afterward, the situation at home shifted because Samia was pregnant. Once she had given birth, she left her home and started working in a nightclub while accusing Mounir of violence. At the end of Mounir’s emotional speech concerning the difficulties he encountered to defend himself, the audience applauded supportively. Nevertheless, when the time came for questions, a politician in the audience asked: “but you knew that you would have run this risk by marrying a Moroccan woman met during your summer holiday …” A moment of heavy silence blocks the room. No such comment had been addressed to the previous speakers, two white Belgian women telling similar unfortunate stories. The interaction presented and the politician’s statement are charged with manifold meanings in the specific Euro-Belgian context of wider migration restrictions, administrative inquiry into sham, forced, or arranged marriage, and animated debates about the failed models of integration of the 2000s. With his speech, Mounir performs both his personal and intimate grievances, and plays the role of the “good” citizen that denounces fraud in marriage migration. Positioning himself as a Belgian man with a migration background, he presents himself as being at the service of a cause that is often thought of as a female cause (as women are supposed to be those duped by male migrants), reversing the expected social dynamics of power. This was at least the desired aim of the organization that asked him to testify about his emblematic story in front of such class-, gender-, and race-mixed audience. But the question of the politician cancels his efforts and reduces the facts, as well as Mounir’s emotions, to traditional practices and ethno-cultural modalities that new restrictive laws should break. The
Heterosexual marriage-related regimes 265 interaction captured by this vignette is not simply a question of intersecting categories (such as race, gender, class, and so forth) and relations (such as racism). It is rather the coalescence of dynamic forces and regimes of power that filled the management of migration and diversity in Belgium. Thus, Mounir, even if he is a Belgian-born citizen, is not regarded as a “victim” of grey marriage in the same way as others, namely, the Belgian citizens without visible migrant origins. In the national imaginary, he remains a descendant of Arab and Muslim immigrants not completely able to adhere to the majority culture, as his choice of marriage confirms. Beyond the marriage migration dispositive here, there is the political rationale concerning the integration and separatism of certain migrant communities and, beyond, another facet of the supposed “correct” heteronormativity that reproduces the Belgian national community. In a similar vein, some online dynamics that appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic suggest how some couples are considered as “superfluous” (Marks 2011) by the state. It is the law itself that produces this superfluity when it justifies and normalizes the exclusions of certain groups from the enactment of a right, or when it considers that granting them rights will be a major risk for the homogeneity of the nation. Vignette 3: Online Activism for Separated Binational Couples during the Pandemic Flore, a 46-year-old French teacher, has been in a relationship for years with Aziz, a 38-year-old Algerian teacher. They met in France, where Aziz came for an academic exchange program with a regular visa. After a five-year relationship, they decided to leave each other because it was difficult to spend time together. Flore has children from a previous marriage who were minors then, and her ex-husband did not allow her to take them out of France. Aziz for his part had had several refusals for his visa requests. But Aziz and Flore never really left each other, they kept in touch, and restarted a romantic relationship during the summer of 2019. Flore was due to visit Algeria in March 2020 when her daughter had reached the age of majority. But when the pandemic broke out, Algeria closed its borders. Flore and Aziz were not eligible for the laissez passer implemented by the French government to permit some couples to temporarily meet during the pandemic. The attribution of such a document was submitted to restrictive criteria: the couple needed to prove that their relationship began more than six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, demonstrate that they had already met in France at least once, and that the foreign partner was able to travel back after the visit period. The laissez passer did not replace the visa. Due to the extremely low rate of visas issued by the French consulate in Algeria in normal times and the closure of Algerian borders even to Algerian nationals, these criteria were impossible to fulfill by Franco-Algerian couples. Aware of the uncertainty of her situation, Flore approached the online group #LoveIsNotTourism-France created to defend the right of non-married and