Developing Intersectional Solidarities: A Plea for Queer

Intersectionality
BLOG October 18, 2011

Sirma Bilge, Université de Montréal

Guest Contributor This entry is part of the CFHSS’s VP Equity Issues series on
issues related to LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered,
questioning, intersex and Two-Spirited) peoples.

Contemporary progressive politics of protest frequently face a problem of

legitimacy, authority and representation. Since at least the late 1970s and
throughout the 1980s, anti-racist, anti-colonial feminists and queer activists
have taken issue with the politics of representation and the problem of
speaking for/about others. Scholars like Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Linda
Alcoff have urged us to acknowledge that systemic disparities in social location
between those who speak and those who are spoken for have significant
effects on the content of what is said.

Today, the elisions and exclusions that most contemporary progressive

movements prompt in their claims making receive almost immediate critique.
Innovative new information and communications technological platforms enable
both the viral explosion of these movements as well as their (internal) critiques
from those who are marginalized, excluded, misrepresented, tokenized or
erased in political struggles.

Consider the following examples of the SlutWalk, the It Gets Better Project, and
Occupy Wall Street. Although there is growing sympathy for these movements,
in all three cases voices have been raised to deplore how well-intentioned
movements inadvertently (re)produce oppression along one or several axes of
power – even while attempting to combat it along other axes. In their attempts
to contest domination and redress injustice, all three of these movements have
been criticized for their failure to take into account the multiple and co-
constitutive makeup of power/privilege complex, with its interlocking structural
and ideological underpinnings.

Put simply, these social movements – SlutWalk, the It Gets Better Project and
Occupy Wall Street – were criticized for their lack of intersectional political
awareness, and very rightly so. In one of the worst-case scenarios, this lack of
awareness was illustrated this past October 1st by white marchers at the
SlutWalk NYC. They were brandishing a placard that said, “Woman is the
n*gger of the world.” Although the slogan was a reference to the 1972 Lennon/
Ono song, it soon became apparent that social movements still could provide a
platform for making much decried parallels between gender and race that black
feminists deftly deconstructed some decades ago. Hazel Carby, for example,
offered a perceptive critique of such analogies over two decades ago:

The experience of black women does not enter the parameters of

parallelism. The fact that black women are subject to
simultaneous oppression of patriarchy, class and ‘race’ is the
prime reason for not employing parallels that render their
position and experience not only marginal but also invisible.

Three decades later, there is still a lack of intersectional analysis evident among
some white protesters: There were N-word signs carried by at least two white
protesters at the SlutWalk NY rally. The signs seem to make claims in the name
of a (universal) woman, by mobilizing the N-word in the fight against sexism
and violence against women. Such developments disturbingly remind us that
the “white solipsism” decried by Adrienne Rich in her 1979 piece, “Disloyal to
Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia,” persists in contemporary
feminisms.It still leads to single issue politics and as Kimberl Crenshaw has
argued in her 1993 article,“Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2
Live Crew”,“political strategies that challenge only certain subordinating
practices while maintaining existing hierarchies [which] not only marginalize
those who are subject to multiple systems of subordination but also often result
in oppositionalizing race and gender discourses.”

The unspoken racial habitus of SlutWalk, white privilege, has been powerfully
unravelled from black feminist and black queer/lesbian perspectives, which
explain, once again, why women of colour cannot re-appropriate the term “slut”
the way white women in the movement seem to do. The interlocking social
challenges faced by Black women are not reducible to a question of dress.

In an “Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk,” issued by the

Blackwomen’s Blueprint on the 23 September 2011, the organization noted:

The way in which we are perceived and what happens to us

before, during and after sexual assault crosses the boundaries of
our mode of dress. Much of this is tied to our particular history. In
the United States, where slavery constructed Black female
sexualities, Jim Crow kidnappings, rape and lynchings, gender
misrepresentations, and more recently, where the Black female
immigrant struggle combine, “slut” has different associations for
Black women. We do not recognize ourselves nor do we see our
lived experiences reflected within SlutWalk and especially not in
its brand and its label.
As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call
ourselves “slut” without validating the already historically
entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and
who the Black woman is. We don’t have the privilege to play on
destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on
our bodies and souls for generations.

In another critique, “SlutWalk a Stroll Through White Supremacy,” Aura

Blogando points out that, “We do not come from communities in which it feels
at all harmless to call ourselves ‘sluts.’ Aside from that, our skin color, not our
style of dress, often signifies slut-hood to the white gaze.”

The ‘It Gets Better Project’ (IGB) has generated similar critiques about the
racial and class habitus shaping the movement and its single-issue politics
against homophobia. The project seems to be predicated on the assumption
that there is a universal experience of being bullied because of one’s non-
heteronormative sexuality.
In an incisive commentary, “In the wake of It Gets Better,” Jasbir Puar notes that
projects like IGB “risk producing such narrow versions of what it means to be
gay, and what it means to be bullied, that for those who cannot identify with it
but are nevertheless still targeted for ‘being different’, It Gets Better might
actually contribute to Making Things Worse.”

The IGB project is chided for its lack of attention to difference and even for
irresponsibility because it has ignored the effects of racism on how bullying and
homophobia takes shape in the lives of those who are bullied. The need for an
intersectional analysis has been powerfully argued by Latoya Peterson, the
Editor of Racialicious, in “Where is the Proof that It Gets Better?: Queer POC
and the Solidarity Gap.” As well, IGB’s shortcomings in intersectional political
analyses have led to the emergence of alternative projects, such as the video
campaign launched by Canadian qpocs (queer people of color) and explicitly
named the Embracing Intersectional Diversity Project.

Similarly, as inspiring as it may seem for many, the Occupy Wall Street
movement has engendered well-founded critiques from an anti-colonialist and
Indigenous perspective. In particular, the movement has been called to account
for its propensity to further the cause of “ending capitalism” by inadvertently
trampling on the rights of others, including corroding the rights of Indigenous
peoples. As Jessica Yee observes in “Occupy Wall Street: The game of
colonialism and further nationalism to be decolonized from the ‘Left’,” the
“occupy” metaphor resonates differently for those activists, such as Indigenous
peoples, whose land is already occupied. This difference is especially
pronounced when the fact of occupation is conveniently forgotten or even
denied within progressive movements claiming trans-solidarities.
The paucity of intersectional political consciousness is evident in the still
influential single-oppression framework, despite loud declarations of
commitment to diversity and solidarity. Stephanie Gilmore in, “Am I Troy Davis?
A Slut?; or, What’s Troubling Me about the Absence of Reflexivity in Movements
that Proclaim Solidarity,” contends that the tendency to subordinate multiply-
minoritized groups and the various forms of marginalization and silencing they
face – through denial, displacement, misidentification, cooptation or tokenism
within progressive political struggles – can be addressed by a radical
engagement in critical dialogues between queer theory and intersectionality.

Let me elaborate further how intersectionality and queer theory can

complement and challenge each other and, further, why it is crucial to uphold
and extend a dialogue between them in order to firm up a critical ethos and
ethics of non-oppressive politics of coalition. Following Stacey Douglas,
Suhraiya Jivraj and Sarah Lamble’s “Liabilities of Queer antiracist critique” we
may call this approach “queer intersectionality” or “queer anti-racist critique.”
What is foundational, they insist, is the refusal to separate “questions of
gender, sexuality and queerness, from questions of raciality and racialisation.
This form of intersectional critique serves as a tool for building spaces and
movements that are committed to interrogating gender and sexuality norms,
whilst simultaneously identifying, challenging, and countering the overt and
embedded forms of racism that shape them.”

If intersectionality can help ground queer theory into lived experiences and
struggles where categories such as sexuality, class or race are contested as
well as redress the evacuation of the social, then queer scholarship has a
definite potential to counteract the dilution of intersectionality within neoliberal
diversity mainstreaming. This is true as long as what is understood as queer is
not built upon an exclusive focus on, or privileging of, sexuality within identity/
diversity politics. Instead, queer must be understood as a political metaphor
without a predetermined referent that serves to challenge institutional forces
normalizing and commodifying difference.
The kind of queer intersectionality I plea for builds on the remarkable
pioneering work accomplished by queer scholars of color (such as Roderick
Ferguson, David Eng, José Munoz, Jasbir Puar, Jin Haritaworn, Fatima El-Tayeb,
and Gayatri Gopinath). It can be seen as the outgrowth of reciprocal challenges
and productive tensions between an intersectionalized queer and a queered
intersectionality. Such a theoretical and political project requires that we
analyse what is “queer about queer studies” and that “queer epistemologies not
only rethink the relationship between intersectionality and normalization from
multiple points of view, but also, and equally important, consider how gay and
lesbian rights are being reconstituted as a type of reactionary (identity) politics
of national and global consequence.”

As persuasively argued by Douglas, Jivraj and Lamble, “[s]exuality, in the form

of gay rights, is increasingly taken up by both liberal and conservative forces as
a dominant marker of ‘western values,’ which then serves as a key trope in the
global war against terror and a pawn in the demise of even the most
assimilationist notions of state multiculturalism.” In the contemporary cultural
and political climate, the need for a critical project – for a queer
intersectionality and solidarities – is as important as ever.

Sirma Bilge est professeure agrégée au département de sociologie de

l'Université de Montréal / is an associate professor in the Department of
Sociology at the Université de Montréal. Email: sirma [dot] bilge [at] umontreal
[dot] ca