Counseling the Contemporary Woman. Suzanne Degges-White
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demonstrating respect and value for each person on a human level. From this point, counselors build knowledge and understanding of cultural and individual identity. The challenge for counselors is attending to all domains of identity and recognizing that each is influenced by regional, national, and global contexts that socially locate identity and experience. In this chapter, the cultural domain will be emphasized, specifically examining cultural complexity, identity salience, identity convergence, and sociopolitical context in counseling women.
Multicultural and Social Justice
Counseling Foundations
Historically, the mental health professions emphasized an individual or universal approach to understanding personal development and mental health issues, prevention, and treatment, largely ignoring culture and context. In the 1960s and 1970s, the mental health professions experienced a radical shift led by counselors and psychologists of color from focusing solely on individual and universal approaches to multicultural counseling approaches that encompassed individual, cultural, and universal factors (Jackson, 1995). Their critical examination identified culturally laden, Eurocentric assumptions in the “neutral” universal-and-individual-focused counseling approaches (Katz, 1985; Sue & Sue, 1977). The multicultural approach specifically focused on racial cultural values and norms in counseling as well as the impact of privilege and oppression with four racially minoritized populations in the United States, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx populations.
Within-group diversity and other identities, such as gender and affectional/sexual orientation, were nominally addressed, but the emphasis was predominantly racial (Ratts, Singh, Nassar-McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2016). This was in large part due to the noticeable absence of race and culture in counseling theory and practice. While a narrow focus was necessary at the time, continued development in multicultural and social justice indicated a need to more fully examine cultural complexity, both to understand individual experience and the interconnected nature of oppressive systems. In the 1990s and 2000s, the multicultural movement expanded to cultural identities outside of race, commonly including gender and sexual orientation. However, there were still considerable limitations in the practice of multicultural counseling. Identifying salient cultural factors easily allowed for between-group comparisons (e.g., white people and people of color); however, client experiences in counseling indicated that counselors often overlook the sociopolitical realities of their experiences, multiple identities, and within-group variation (Hunt, Matthews, Milsom, & Lammel, 2006; McCullough et al., 2017). Solely addressing dichotomous categories of identity can result in cultural stereotyping, rather than multicultural counseling, ignoring the caution of early scholars (Sue & Sue, 1977) against overgeneralization and oversimplification.
To address these issues, the Multicultural Counseling Competencies (Arredondo et al., 1996; Sue, Arredondo, & McDavis, 1992) were revised in 2015. The Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC; Ratts, Singh, Nassar-McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2015) shifted the counseling profession toward a more comprehensive framework of multicultural counseling, operationalizing the definition set forth by the American Counseling Association (ACA) (2014) as “counseling that recognizes diversity and embraces approaches that support the worth, dignity, potential, and uniqueness of individuals within their historical, cultural, economic, political, and psychosocial contexts” (p. 20). The MSJCC embraced the complexity of cultural identity and multilayered sociopolitical contexts, emphasizing intersectionality as a meaningful framework for counselors because of its complexity and flexibility.
Intersectionality: A Critical Lens for Women’s Issues
Intersectionality is rooted in a critical black feminist tradition that can be traced back to freedwoman and activist Sojourner Truth, whose 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman” radically challenged homogenous images of women’s experience. In illuminating racialized gender experiences, Truth called for women’s rights leaders to address the marginalization of all women and acknowledge the erasure of black women in women’s rights political movements. Even Truth’s speech can only be understood through two drastically different versions that were provided as transcriptions by two white women (Siebler, 2010). In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group in Boston, Massachusetts, issued a powerful positionality statement addressing racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism from their unique experiences as black women. In opposition to the narrow, culturally laden, and oppressive gender molds promulgated by white women and black men, they stated, “We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human is enough” (Combahee River Collective, 1977, p. 4). Their statement gave voice to many women of color, often sidelined by the single-issue politics of the black liberation and women’s rights movements. Women existing outside of the white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual Christian feminine ideal were frequently othered, relegated to the status of outsider. It is from this “outsider within” social location that Collins’s (2000) black feminist thought and intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2016) emerge.
Women of color have actively deconstructed white, Western ideals of womanhood and shaped critical discourse on gender through an intersectionality lens that addresses race, gender, and other cultural identities as multifaceted, interactive, and sociopolitically situated. From this philosophical grounding, Crenshaw (1988, 1989, 1991) coined the term “intersectionality” as a conceptual tool through which to examine the ways multiple systems of oppression interact and influence one another. Intersectionality theorists (Collins, 2000; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) challenge dominant views of social inequality along a single axis (e.g., gender) that only conceptualize between-group issues (e.g., men and women). Instead, intersectionality is used to examine social issues via the interactions within categories (e.g., race and gender) across multiple systems (e.g., individual and institutional racism and sexism). Collins and Bilge (2016) state, “Rather than seeing people as a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, intersectionality provides a framework for explaining how social divisions of race, gender, age, and citizenship status, among others, positions people differently in the world, especially in relation to global inequality” (p. 15).
Intersectionality adopts a multidimensional perspective to interwoven cultural identities through a prism of systemic privilege and oppression (Bowleg, 2008, 2013; Watts-Jones, 2010). The six core features of intersectionality include social inequality, power, relationality, social context, complexity, and social justice, which are typically present in application of an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Intersectionality has been used to interrogate problems of social inequality through recognition of multifaceted domains of power, which can include structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal domains. Relationality refers to the interconnectedness of different forms of oppression; that is, understanding how multiple oppressive systems relate to one another in different and interactive ways (e.g., racism, genderism, and sexism as complementary) in shaping experience. Thus, instead of focusing on how race and gender may differ, intersectionality emphasizes their commonalities and the implications of these intersections (Bowleg, 2012; Bowleg, Huang, Brooks, Black, & Burkholder, 2003). Further, contributing factors, interactions, and consequences of interrelated systems of social inequality must be understood within a given social context to have meaning. Therefore, it is important to contextualize power, relationality, and inequality in a social context (e.g., counseling practice in the United States). These interconnections result in a complexity that exceeds the reach of single-issue (e.g., race or gender) perspectives. Lastly, social justice speaks to the purpose of intersectionality; Collins and Bilge (2016) maintain that social justice is not a requirement of intersectionality but recognize that social justice action is often the purpose of its use. Thus, intersectionality serves as a practical lens through which to examine privilege and oppression as experienced by women from their different social locations.
Addressing the Complexity of Women’s Diversity
Hays (1996, 2016) developed the ADDRESSING model to outline several dimensions of cultural diversity for conceptualizing client issues and experiences. The ADDRESSING model includes age and generational influences, developmental