Chapter Six Race, Gender, and Other Differences in Feminist Theory

       Deirdre Keenan,1 with Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner‐Hanks

      On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the president of the United States, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, gathered in Washington DC for a protest, and millions more came together at hundreds of protests on all seven continents, including Antarctica. Altogether there were more than 400 demonstrations across the US and nearly 200 in other countries, the largest single‐day protest in the history of the United States and, possibly, the world. Scores of protesters wore pink “pussyhats” they or other crafters had made, the name taken from the resemblance of the top corners of the hats to cat ears, and in reference to Trump’s widely reported 2005 remarks that because he was a “star,” women would let him “grab ’em by the pussy.” Marchers also carried a huge range of angry, witty, heartfelt, and thoughtful signs, among which were many that referred to intersectionality, the concept that the nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and that no one identity – race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities. In essence, one’s identity is always materialized in terms of, and by means of, all other identities.

The idea that multiple forms of oppression interact and combine was part of the thinking of feminist groups that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not surprising, as so many founders of women’s liberation had been active in the Civil Rights and anti‐Vietnam War movements, the latter both anti‐racist and anti‐imperialist. Socialist feminists expanded Marxist analysis of labor exploitation in production to examine paid and unpaid household labor, through which working‐class as well as wealthier men benefited from the unpaid work of their female family members. In addition, prosperous women benefited when they could hire poorer women – usually women of color and foreign born – for childcare and housecleaning. Even before the 1960s, black left feminists such as Louise Thompson Patterson wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class. Feminists of color analyzed what Fran Beal of the Third World Women’s Alliance termed the “double jeopardy” of being both black and female. In 1977, the black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective asserted in a statement mostly written by Barbara Smith: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” (1983: 264) In 1989, the critical race theorist and feminist legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw called this synthesis of oppression “intersectionality.” The concept and word slowly spread into other academic fields and, eventually, into public consciousness. From its roots in the women’s movement, intersectional feminism has always been activist, and now it has become a way that people describe themselves on their Facebook pages, Twitter or Tumblr posts, buttons, and T‐shirts. Many sport a quotation from Flavia Dzodan, a writer who lives and works in Amsterdam, taken from her 2011 blog post on Tiger Beatdown (tigerbeatdown.com): “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”

      The 2019 Women’s March, two years after the first, was significantly smaller, in part because of protest fatigue, poor weather, and energies being directed toward elections and local actions. Most notably, controversy erupted over the fact that several of the March co‐chairs had attended rallies organized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and had refused to denounce his virulently anti‐Semitic, homophobic, and transphobic remarks. A good number of participants commented that they attended despite, not because of, the organizers. Such divisions are common in fast‐growing social movements, but they point out the difficulties of putting intersectional analysis into practice. Systems of oppression reinforce one another, but they also cross‐cut one another. At women’s marches in cities and towns across the US in both 2017 and 2019 participants brandished posters for Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights; other signs read: “Don’t Forget: White Women Voted for Trump” or “Will We See You at the Next Black Lives Matter March?” There were posters and models of vaginas, vulvas, and birth canals, a reclamation of female anatomy in response to Trump’s pussy comment, but an exclusion of trans women from their depiction of who was a woman.

      Other recent social protest movements that focus on issues related to gender have been similarly challenged by disputes over the varied categories of difference and oppression. The MeToo movement, begun in 2006 by Black civil rights activist Tarana Burke, pointed to the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault; however, the slogan only caught on widely when it was picked up in 2017 by the (white) American actress Alyssa Milano. She posted a message on her Twitter account encouraging survivors of sexual harassment and assault, especially in the workplace, to post #metoo as a status update, in order to capture the extent of the problem. The movement spread virally across social media platforms, first in the US and then internationally, and led to a number of high‐profile firings and some changes in the entertainment, fashion, and other industries. Critics point out, however, that white feminists had not supported Burke’s original movement, and that minority women are more likely than white women to be the targets of sexual abuse, as they are overrepresented in workplaces such as hotels and healthcare where sexual harassment and assault charges are common. Burke and Milano have strongly supported each other and along with several other activists were named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2017 as “the silence breakers,” but the issue of whose voices are heard and whose are not remains.

Criticism of feminism for not being cognizant of other systems of oppression, or being complicit in these, is not new. When it was first published in 1984, Robyn Morgan identified her book, Sisterhood is Global, as an act of rebellion against the pervasive mentality of patriarchy worldwide, where “the standard for being human is being male – and female humans per se become invisible” (1). The book compiled a massive and valuable collection of quantitative and qualitative research on women’s lives in seventy countries contributed by women who were (but for one) natives of those countries. The research provided a cross‐cultural study of women’s experience in a multitude of categories including health, labor, law, marriage, economics, and religion. Its clear implication was that women everywhere suffer the effects of male‐dominated institutions, albeit to a wide‐ranging degree. Its conclusion, implied in the introductory question, “Are we really so very different?” was that women worldwide are united in a sisterhood in search of self,