Intersectionality has become something of a buzzword, both revered and ridiculed. The phrase itself was coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It was used to fill in a particular lacuna which Crenshaw had pinpointed in the legal system – that is, people whose social identity was constituted by multiple categories of oppression would often pass through the system fundamentally underrepresented. So, if you are a black, working class lesbian you would be triply oppressed and yet the movements and forms of political organisation which militate against repression are often woefully unequipped to deal with the threefold nature of such an identity. Perhaps you might join an organisation or institution which could recognise the racial prejudice you experience as a black person, but said institution would nearly always overlook the prejudice you experience as a woman. Or if you join a feminist organisation, chances are that said organisation will represent your gender while at the same time remaining oblivious to the oppression you endure as a person of colour. And so on. In other words, radical and revolutionary institutions and movements are often unable to come to terms with the way in which multiple oppressions ‘intersect’ at the point of a given individual; and because oppressions are not considered in sum, the individual forms of repression are able to persevere in all sorts of ways, untreated. Those who are most oppressed, are for the same reason, most invisible in ideological terms.
But the concept of intersectionality has older roots. The Combahee River Collective was a black feminist lesbian organisation formed in the 1970s which sought to create an ‘integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking’. Furthermore the same collective argued that these oppressions interlocked at the point of individual identity; therefore: ‘We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.’ Such a theoretical formation came out of a social world where labour was increasingly ghettoised; black, Italian, Irish, Latino workers in the big inner cities tended to live in segregated neighbourhoods demarcated by their individual ethnicities. Black labour, in particular had been ‘ghettoised’ in as much as a racialized hierarchy of labour had been enforced with the blacks receiving markedly less money for the same jobs, and often being corralled into the position of doing the very worst jobs. The sense, therefore, that some identities, even those of oppressed groups, were being given more scope and leeway perhaps at the expense of others which remained invisible and more fundamentally exploited, is what was carried across into intersectional theory.
The Communist Party of the USA was compelled to respond to these developments in the political landscape by reconfiguring its tactics. For example, in pursing the Popular Front strategy in the mid-70s it would acknowledge official black community leaders and women’s organisation leaders as ‘legitimate representatives’ of group interests which were distinct and separate from the workers, and based on this, it evolved the concept of the ‘trinity’ – that is ‘class, gender and race’ should be elaborated as an intersecting unity. Though they were coming from very different places, and had very different histories, the methodological conclusions drawn by both the Communist Party USA and the Combahee River Collective had, in this period, certain ‘intersectional’ affinities which had been shaped as a result of the way in which the movements against capitalism and exploitation had been categorised by a constellation of autonomous struggles each seeking to push its own set of interests.
