It's blooming season!

In Mapping the Margins, Kimberlé Crenshaw asks readers to view violence towards women through an intersectional lens, incorporating specifically race along with gender, which sets up a helpful frame for reading Helen Clarkson’s War Crimes and Dorothy Allison’s Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure.

Clarkson’s article was extremely disturbing and sad, but there’s no way I can say what I’d like to say about it in 500 words or less, so I’ll skip to Allison…

Just because Dorothy Allison’s story is not about the struggles of a woman of color does not mean that the intersectional approach needs to be abandoned – as we have discussed in class, race is just one aspect of intersectionality that applies to the concept of being a woman. In Dorothy’s case, class and sexuality play a huge role in the violence perpetrated against her throughout her life. In terms of gender roles, she was not what others expected her to be as a little girl: she was “mean and stubborn,” among other things, qualities which irritated her stepfather into wanting to exercise control over her. When it comes to class, she characterizes her family as “peasants.” I would never assert that child rape does not happen in middle-class households, but I believe her living situation aggravated the abuse – she had no option but to keep returning home to her abusive stepfather.

“Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both” (Crenshaw, IWS 201)
I have always recognized that antiracist groups and feminist groups existed to attempt to address the problems of racism and sexism, but I never thought that instead of women of color benefiting from both movements, they would actually be marginalized by both of them. I think the Crenshaw article makes a very clear point that is not often (almost never?) made in our society: overlap into more than one category does not mean that you benefit from the movements that benefit those specific categories. It seems to me that people who don’t take the time to educate themselves and listen to other possibilities end up perpetuating the myth that everyone is being taken care of by some movement or another. This perpetuation can be completely accidental, too – take me, for example. Before I read the Crenshaw article and before I was introduced to the idea of intersectionality and life in the “interstices” (discussed in Alsultany’s article), I probably would have assumed that a woman of color benefits from both the feminist movement and antiracist movements. Was my ignorance an act of hate? I would certainly like to hope that it was not at all. But the point is, marginalized voices are not heard unless people go looking for them – people like Crenshaw, or students of women’s studies. Not everyone is a student of women’s studies, which means the voices need outlets through more people. The ones who are already hearing just need to keep listening and keep passing on the story.