Intersectionality makes visible what is obscured by thinking in separate categories. In her 2007 essay Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System, philosopher María Lugones writes:
“Intersectionality reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each other. The move to intersect the categories has been motivated by the difficulties in making visible those who are dominated and victimized in terms of both categories… Kimberlé Crenshaw and other women of color feminists have argued that the categories have been understood as homogenous and as picking out the dominant in the group as the norm; thus women picks out white bourgeois women, men picks out white bourgeois men, black picks out black heterosexual men, and so on. It becomes logically clear then that the logic of categorial separation distorts what exists at the intersection, such as violence against women of color… So, once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the intersection so as to avoid separability. It is only when we perceive gender and race as intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color.”
María Lugones (2007, pp. 192-193)
By focusing on the experiences lived at the intersection of what is interpreted as distinct categories of meaning, intersectionality reveals a much more complex reality and challenges the logic of thinking in separate, homogenous categories. Importantly, it sheds light on the crucial normative element constituting these categories that can misleadingly appear purely descriptive and value-neutral.
Namely, in virtue of being understood as uniform, distinct concepts, they follow the dominant expression of meaning (within respective social-cultural contexts where these concepts take shape), taking that as the norm, which then becomes a seemingly universal homogenous category. Thus, those experiences that do not ‘fit’ into these categories (cannot find meaningful expression in them) are either perceived as untrue, unreal, abnormal or obscured from view altogether.
Lugones highlights that intersectionality challenges the oversimplified and covertly normative logic of uniform, separate categories, and brings our attention to the experiences excluded from this picture.
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