Intersectionality

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

Cis moves to innocence are rhetorical moves by which cisgender feminists falsely position their failure to engage with structures of transmisogyny as epistemically and morally virtuous. The notion derives from Tuck and Yang’s (2012) concept of settler moves to innocence and Mawhinney’s (1998) concept of white moves to innocence. This piece considers the case study of Manne’s (2017) work, in which she purports to offer a unified account of misogyny while explicitly refusing to consider transmisogyny. The justification she provides is (...) that she lacks the “requisite authority to do so.” I identify three functions of Manne’s cis move to innocence: i) to allow her to appear to be in solidarity with trans women and transfeminine people without taking on any of the obligations that requires, ii) to structurally reproduce the epistemic exploitation of trans women and transfeminine people, and iii) to reduce the obligations of allies to affect rather than action. (shrink)

We often reason about what our lives would have been like if we had belonged to different social groups— for example, ‘If I had been Black, being pulled over by police would have been more frightening’, or ‘If I had not been a woman, I would have had an easier time in that meeting’. This paper makes sense of such countersocial counterfactuals, conditionals whose antecedents run contrary to social facts, and in many cases, contrary to identity facts and essentiality facts. (...) It is suggested that many countersocials are counterpossibles. Based on the non-trivial truth of some countersocials, it is argued that social categories are literally causal: they are causes and effects, both of other general phenomena and some particular events in our lives. These threads are then brought together in order to examine intersectional oppression. Intersectional oppression can be illuminated by appeal to proportionate causation, or causation containing the appropriate level of causal detail. (shrink)

Intersectionality broadly refers to the idea that gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, migration, disability, and other axes of oppression and social identity are not separate but intersect and operate together. Rooted in Black feminism and popularized by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw since 1989, intersectionality has become a cornerstone of feminist scholarship. Despite its wide use across disciplines, however, the term has also sparked debate, and its definition and implications remain far from agreed upon. Debates about intersectionality have raised questions such (...) as: What does it mean to say that oppressions “intersect”? Does this imply that we cannot speak of sexism apart from racism, class exploitation, or other forms of oppression? Can we theorize “women’s” oppression when Black, Latina, Asian, and white women experience different realities? And how can we build solidarity across these intersectional differences? This annotated bibliography introduces key resources for understanding how the notion of intersectionality originated, evolved, and continues to be debated. General Overviews lists resources that provide a general understanding of intersectionality for students, educators, and researchers. Early Roots includes both recent works tracing intersectionality to earlier Black feminist thought and those foundational texts themselves. Critical Engagements surveys major critiques and responses to intersectionality, and Conceptualization and Application features works that refine or employ the concept in theory and practice. As many scholars note, intersectionality is a work in progress—an evolving framework continually reshaped as feminists practice intersectionality in their scholarship and activism. This article is likewise a living document, expanding alongside ongoing feminist and anti-oppression projects. (shrink)

This exploratory essay proposes a simple process model for adaptive power that can be used as a mental shortcut in women of color emergent-strategist feminist organizing in the US. Adaptive power describes the adjustive mechanisms and political technologies in effect during long cycles of liberation struggles and their causal influence on social inequality. The essay frames the current moment in American politics as both a predictable result of the adaptive powers of white supremacist structures and as a leverage point for (...) feminist social change. Its purpose is to affirm the varied strategies of democratic and feminist organizing happening across movements in a way that holds the line against despair, facilitates long-term change, and challenges the proliferation of single-axis narratives about authoritarianism that exclude gender-based violence or downplay the confluence bewteen rape culture and white supremacy. As a practice-based essay, it draws from experience in grassroots organizing and from a theoretical blend of ideas like dynamical systems theory, political epistemology, and women of color feminism. (shrink)

In 1834 Havana, an enslaved woman’s alleged misconduct turned her sale into a legal battle over the boundaries of property, punishment, and personhood. This article reconstructs the life and legal dispute of Maria-Felipa Criolla to examine how Spanish colonial law translated judgments of moral character into determinations of human value. Centered on a redhibitory lawsuit between enslavers Martín Granacías and Pedro Pérez y Pita, the case offers a microhistorical view of how accusations of theft and immorality transformed Maria-Felipa from a (...) domestic laborer into criminalized property, precluding avenues of emancipation through coartación. The proceedings under the legal framework of the Siete Partidas and the authoritarian governance of Captain-General Miguel Tacón exposed how colonial law operated through deliberate ambiguity. Limited forms of enslaved agency, what historian Alejandro de la Fuente terms “normative cracks,” existed. By focusing on the lived experience of one enslaved creole woman, this microhistory explores how coartación, a fragile legal pathway toward freedom, collapsed into systemic criminalization for the enslaved and competitive dispossession for the enslaver. (shrink)

Algorithmic systems are increasingly woven into healthcare, from triage applications to AI-enabled decision support tools. While such systems promise efficiency and diagnostic accuracy, they also perform a normative function: shaping whose knowledge is treated as credible, which symptoms matter, and how patient testimony is interpreted. This article introduces algorithmic gaslighting to name the patterned dynamic through which testimonial and hermeneutical injustices become recursively stabilized and internalized as patient self-doubt in algorithmically mediated clinical encounters. Building on feminist and disability bioethics accounts (...) of medical gaslighting—where clinicians dismiss or reinterpret patient reports, often in gendered or racialized ways—I extend the analysis to algorithmic contexts. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, I show how interlocking sociotechnical mechanisms—data violence, opacity, automated authority, and feedback loops—can displace patient credibility, constrain interpretive resources, and destabilize patient self-trust. These dynamics recalibrate epistemic agency, rendering patients as data objects rather than recognized knowers. To counter such harms, I propose a normative framework aimed at interrupting gaslighting dynamics in algorithmically mediated care, emphasizing rights to contestation, participatory design, critical audits, and shared responsibility. Recognizing algorithmic gaslighting helps safeguard trust, dialogue, and agency in the digital transformation of healthcare. (shrink)

To create an inclusive environment means thinking about, or rethinking, its structure so as to make it as inclusive as possible for individuals who use it. Recent advances in extended reality (XR) technologies have shown tremendous promise in this respect. Blended environments, those that include physical and digital elements, are especially promising because they allow developers and users to co-create social spaces that empower users to represent themselves and others with an eye toward inclusivity. This is a paper about how (...) not to create such spaces. I will argue that the psychology of XR, especially the psychology of XR embodiment, should help us understand the limits of these technologies for enabling environments. First I will explain what XR technologies and how they enable a form of embodiment, XR embodiment. I’ll then explain the psychology of XR embodiment. XR embodiment should be taken seriously as a new possibility for the creation of selves but it has limitations. Virtual reality (VR) is often praised for its power to enhance empathy and thus to be a powerful tool for enabling environments. I argue that these claims are mistaken. While XR embodiment can be a transformative tool for identity formation, it cannot enhance empathic understanding of others. I then explore the social and legal implications of XR embodiment. If XR bodies are rightfully a component of a person’s self then if we want to create more inclusive and enabling environments we need to revisit the legal and social norms around bodies. Current laws (e.g., sexual harassment law) fail to take XR embodiment into account and thus fail to enable inclusive environments. I end the paper by suggesting that XR embodiment poses fundamental metaphysical questions about the relationship of the self to the physical body. These questions need to be addressed before enabling environments are possible. (shrink)

Accounts of structural violence characterize the institutional and bureaucratic production of systematic population-level harms as violence while also construing these harms as inadvertent and unintentional. We argue that such conceptions are poorly suited to capture the relationship between administrative systems and the production of violence under settler colonialism. We offer an account of administrative violence as an organizing feature of settler colonial institutions that produces population-level harms for some and benefits for others, by design, as a rule rather than an (...) exception. We theorize three epistemic mechanisms of administrative violence: simplification, containment, and epistemic apartheid. We demonstrate how settler administrative systems use such mechanisms to automate the production of harm for targeted populations. (shrink)

This chapter provides a historical reconstruction of how Alfred Schutz’s American writings were critically engaged by the feminist sociologists Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Schutz’s articulation of a phenomenological sociology in relation to, among others, the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the philosophies of science of Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel proved fruitful to Smith in the development of her feminist standpoint theory in her 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Collins likewise draws on (...) Schutz’s writing in the development of her own standpoint theory in her 1986 paper “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” but in a way that addresses some of her own concerns with Smith’s feminist sociology. As I hope to show with the recovery of this underappreciated history, the critical insights of Smith and Collins with regard to the possible uses and limits of phenomenology for feminist theorizing, are still valuable today. (shrink)

This paper proposes a formalized framework for leftist political theory grounded in recursive coherence, mutual aid, and structural viability. Rather than offering a new ideology, it presents a design substrate capable of sustaining liberatory systems under recursive stress, entropy, and contradiction. Building on prior work in recursive coherence theory, liberation philosophy, intersectionality, and institutional design, I argue that viable leftist futures require not only ethical clarity but structurally adaptive architectures. I define a set of minimal viability axioms (persistence, trajectory, information (...) value, arbitration, and pruning) and apply them to the construction of federated mutual aid networks, curvature-constrained governance, and coherence-aware institutional scaffolds. Through case studies in cooperative housing, self-managed labor, and radical municipalism, I demonstrate how these principles enable systems that evolve without drifting, scale without centralizing, and resist collapse through coherence amplification. This approach shifts the focus from symbolic critique to recursive construction, bridging normative values with technical systems design. By uniting recursive systems logic with liberation politics, I offer a rigorously structured path from theory to transformative infrastructure. (shrink)

What can philosophy learn from social movements? In this volume, authors from various philosophical paradigms and disciplines (sociology, history) highlight the unique theoretical and political importance of social movements, bridging the abstract realm of philosophy with the concrete realm of social reality. Among the movements explored are the Climate Justice movement, the Disabled People’s Movement, and the Chinese antilockdown protests.

This paper has two aims: first, to introduce a philosophical audience to research on implicit and explicit biases related to age; and second, to identify and explain ageist biases within social-scientific research. In the first case, evidence drawn from massive datasets, including both large language corpora and online tests with millions of participants, shows that implicit ageism has stayed remarkably persistent across time and space. This persistence stands in contrast to explicit ageism and other implicit biases, many of which have (...) declined dramatically in the 21st century. In the second case, however, researchers have been preoccupied with a small fraction of biases related to age: for example, against the old rather than the young, and against ‘old people’ in general rather than specific oppressed older subgroups. Claims about the all-around intransigence of ageism are thus oversimplified overgeneralizations, which fail to heed lessons from contextual, embodied, critical, and intersectional perspectives on the social mind and world. Stubbornly flawed assumptions and methods have prevented the social sciences from addressing core questions for intergenerational justice, including the systematic disempowerment of the young. Fortunately, there is nothing inevitable leading to these oversights; empirical developments in the 2020s suggest that these limitations can—and have begun to be—overcome. (shrink)

In their literary works, African diasporic women articulate how the lived experience and subjugated status of women of African descent within local and global contexts are shaped by colonial and patriarchal networks of power. Using Black feminism as the overarching theory, »Woman, African, Other« unpacks how interlocking (lethal) structures of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, cultural patriarchy, misogynoir, as well as modified structures of neocolonialism, neoliberalism, racialized capitalism, Western humanitarianism, and postcolonial nation-state laws and narratives, impact the gendered experiences of women (...) of African heritage and permit our continued humiliation in the global sphere. (shrink)

In this essay I identify a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions are descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (1) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism, (2) their application is counterfactually unstable across dominant and subordinate social groups, and (3) they encode stereotypes. After giving several different kinds of examples of biased evaluative (...) descriptions, I distinguish them from similar linguistic concepts, including backhanded compliments, slurs, insults, epithets, pejoratives, and dog whistles. I suggest that the traditional framework of Gricean implicature cannot account for biased evaluative descriptions. I discuss some challenges to the distinctiveness and evaluability of biased evaluative descriptions, including intersectional social identities. I conclude by discussing their social significance and moral status. Identifying biased evaluative descriptions is important for a variety of social contexts, from the very general and broad (political speeches) to the very particular and small (bias in academic hiring). (shrink)

For the past thirty years, Critical Discourse Studies has been consolidating as a form of linguistically-oriented, critical social research which is characterized by a deep interest in actual social issues and forms of inequality, such as racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and sexism, both in terms of the asymmetries between participants in discourse events and their unequal capacity to control how texts are produced, distributed and consumed. In parallel, since its coinage in Kimberlé Crenshaw's African American feminist critique of race and sex (...) discrimination, intersectionality has been increasingly taken up on a global scale by scholars and practitioners alike, becoming a major feminist way of conceptualizing the relation between several forms of discrimination and oppression, to be analysed as simultaneous and multiplicative experiences. This Special Issue aims to enquire into the potential convergence between the critical discursive and intersectional approaches as theory, method and practice for the exploration of the crossroads of inequalities and oppression. This may contribute to the development of a critical research framework that enables the acknowledgment of the profound ways in which discursively, institutionally and/or structurally constructed sociocultural categorizations interact and produce different kinds of societal inequalities and unjust social relations. These, in turn, can be analysed in terms of the mutual and intertwined processes of resistance and transformation that arise out of them. Bringing together diverse contributions with a shared critical discursive and intersectional outlook, this Special Issue hopes to offer new theoretical and methodological insights for thinking through diversity in the light of present and future dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and inequality. The six contributions operationalize the intersectional approach as theory, method and/or practice and incorporate it with a CDS perspective, providing a flavour of what a critical and intersectional discursive engagement with different and dynamic identity and power configurations on a global scale can achieve. (shrink)

Bioethics increasingly recognizes the impact of discriminatory practices based on social categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation or ability on clinical practice. Accordingly, major bioethics associations have stressed that identifying and countering structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations is a professional obligation of clinical ethics consultants. Yet, it is still unclear how clinical ethics consultants can fulfill this obligation. More specifically, clinical ethics needs both theoretical tools to analyze and practical strategies to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations. (...) Intersectionality, a concept developed in Black feminist scholarship, is increasingly considered in bioethical theory. It stresses how social structures and practices determine social positions of privilege and disadvantage in multiple, mutually co-constitutive systems of oppression. This article aims to investigate how intersectionality can contribute to addressing structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations with a particular focus on mental healthcare. To this end, we critically review existing approaches for clinical ethics consultants to address structural racism in clinical ethics consultations and extend them by intersectional considerations. We argue that intersectionality is a suitable tool to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations and show that it can be practically implemented in two complementary ways: 1) as an analytic approach and 2) as a critical practice. (shrink)

Feminist reflections on the sexual division of labour have given rise to a body of knowledge on the ethics of care from different disciplines, including philosophy, in which outstanding contributions to the topic have been formulated. This approach is applicable to the analysis of any phenomenon and particularly that of disasters. As various investigations have highlighted, the consequences on the population throughout all of a disaster’s phases (prevention, emergency, and reconstruction) require an analysis of differentiated vulnerabilities based on gender and (...) other identity categories, such as social class, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual identity, etc. The interrelation between all these variables gives rise to differentiated impacts that cannot be ignored in catastrophic contexts, where survival and sustaining life are at stake, so care becomes a central issue. Research on the topic has also identified that, along with the analysis of social vulnerability, we must consider the capacity for agency, both individual and collective, where care is once again of vital importance. Considering the gender approach and its multiple intersections is thus a fundamental theoretical-practical proposal for the study of disasters from philosophy, as it implies an unavoidable epistemic, ontological, and ethical reflection in the face of risk reduction. (shrink)

This paper considers two conceptual expansions of Du Boisian double consciousness—white double consciousness (Alcoff 2015) and kaleidoscopic consciousness (Medina 2013)—both of which aim to articulate the moral-epistemic potential of cultivating double consciousness from racially dominant or other socially privileged positions. We analyze these concepts and challenge them on the grounds that they lack continuity with their Du Boisian predecessor and face problems of practical feasibility. As we show, these expansions obscure structural barriers that make white double consciousness and kaleidoscopic consciousness (...) unlikely antidotes to the kind of racial domination that double consciousness was introduced to illuminate. We conclude that while more intersectional and pluralistic accounts of double consciousness may be desirable, the project of expansion has moral limits. Identifying these limitations, we outline ways in which double consciousness—as a tool for conceptualizing the genealogy of structural anti-Blackness—remains valuable in the absence of ever-expanding revision. (shrink)

Intersectionality is the notion that concerns the complexity of the experiences of individuals in virtue of their belonging to multiple socially significant categories. One of its main insights is that the way society is structured around categories such as gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., produces distinctive and specific forms of discrimination and privilege for groups in the intersections. In this paper, we suggest conceiving intersectionality as a general metaphysical framework wherein specific claims to the effect that the experiences of discrimination (...) of Black women, among others, can be fruitfully formulated and examined. The main claim is that intersectional experiences emerge from the conjunction of social categories when social structures make them relevant vis-à-vis discrimination and privilege. We then argue that our view has three main virtues: metaphysical neutrality, explanatory flexibility and methodological openness. Explaining these virtues will allow us to contrast our proposal with alternatives from the recent literature. (shrink)

After three decades of intensive debate in academic and activist circles, intersectionality has progressively been adopted in public policies. Yet, the challenges of its application are still largely unexplored. This article adopts a discursive approach to study the process of policy implementation of an intersectionality-informed plan in Madrid City Council, Spain. The analysis of materials retrieved through interviews, a focus group, and participant observation enables us to explore how the technical staff interpret intersectionality and links it with other established approaches (...) in equality and antidiscrimination law and policy, namely gender and diversity. We argue that preconceptions and positionality within the institutional structure deeply affect the interpretation of intersectionality and the subsequent action or non-action taken by implementing actors. Our study shows the challenges and opportunities to implement intersectionality in public policies that result from its discursive construction through the frames of gender and diversity. (shrink)

International criminal law (ICL) has traditionally overlooked sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and struggles to understand it. Prosecutions have been largely inefficient and not reflective of gender harms. The Rome Statute requires interpreting SGBV as a social construction (article 7(3)), in consistency with international human rights law (IHRL) and without discrimination (article 21(3)). There is, however, little guidance to implement these approaches. This article argues that intersectionality, an IHRL-based approach that reveals compounded discrimination, is an efficient tool to interpret SGBV (...) and, therefore, should be integrated in ICL. The article traces the origins of intersectionality in feminism and its recognition by IHRL dealing with violence against women. It establishes the applicability of intersectionality in ICL that it demonstrates with a comparative analysis of the Lubanga and Ntaganda cases. The findings show that intersectionality suits ICL’s specific needs which allows labelling and explaining some of those contributions throughout the judicial process. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have long worried that intersectionality undermines the viability of the concept and category of woman, thereby undermining feminist theory and politics. Some have responded to this problem by abandoning intersectionality; others have attempted to find some suitably inclusive way of reconceptualizing woman. I provide a novel solution that focuses on conceptualizing oppression in light of intersectionality, rather than trying to provide an account of what it is to be a woman. By enabling us to understand feminism as responding (...) to gender oppression, this account shows that intersectionality does not conceptually undermine and fragment feminism. Feminism should be intersectional. (shrink)

Lucius Outlaw and Shannon Sullivan have argued for the preservation of racial distinctiveness and the necessity of racial separatism. This paper articulates and challenges this push for racial separatism and the particular conception of race evoked therein. The author points out that the multiplicity, the multiculturalism, the intersectionality within these communities of resistance is typically belittled, fragmented, or erased. Recognizing the practical use of racial coalitions to combat racism, the author articulates an alternative conception of coalitional agency, one that allows (...) for multiplicitous identities, opening avenues to intercultural communication and impure coalitions of resistance. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers increasingly make reference to the concept of ideology to think about how representational structures can lead to oppression, and argue that the distinctively pernicious functioning of things like propaganda and generic generalizations need to be explained in terms of ideology. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to serve as an introduction to (some of) the best contemporary work on ideology in the analytic tradition. Second, it proposes a novel challenge for any such theory. The (...) challenge turns on the nature of intersectionality: it is hard to see how to render consistent the claims that ideology creates or sustains oppression with the claim that oppression is intersectional, without making substantial modifications to extant theories. The conclusion will be that certain projects in contemporary philosophy of language need to further develop their theories of ideology. (shrink)

Elvira Basevich, Martin Sticker, and Helga Varden offered generative criticism of my monograph, Kant’s Theory of Labour. In this response, I explore how the resources they offer for thinking about gender, labour, and the state’s responsibility to ensure the material conditions of freedom can deepen both our attentiveness to patterns of systemic injustice in Kant’s political philosophy, and the resources Kant offers for addressing contemporary patterns of intersectional and material injustice.

The case for reparations for grievous acts of historical injustice has been getting a lot of attention lately. But I aim to broaden the discussion in two ways. First, I am not only going to talk about reparations as a means of rectifying the injuries inflicted by slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of their land, and the ongoing ripple effects of these historic wrongs. I am also going to talk about reparations for a wider variety of (...) historical injustices, including, most importantly, the long-term economic oppression of women, and the historical exploitation of labor. Second, I am not going to base my argument on the principle of equality, as most people currently do, but on the principle of liberty, as it is understood by libertarians on both the right and the left, at least as long as they believe what they say they believe. Not because I think that egalitarian demands for reparations are wrong. Rather, my point is that the principle of liberty, which is often raised as a defense to claims based on the principle of equality, actually leads to exactly the same place. Finally, I will discuss one possible form of reparations that has largely been ignored, but which has a special connection to libertarian principles, and I will show how it can provide some real relief without provoking the opposition that society-wide redistributive remedies usually face. (shrink)

Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistemic forces tied to profit and wealth accumulation for beneficiary groups often go untracked. The account offered here argues (...) that these epistemic forces play a central role in producing and maintaining massive health inequalities and the maldistribution of disease burdens―including those associated with sexual violence―for marginalized populations. It upends the widespread view that structural racism can be dismantled without addressing gendered violence. It also advocates for a theory of change rooted in reparative action and models of structural competency that respond to the built-in design of structural violence and the ecosystems of impunity that allow it to thrive. (shrink)

Kimberlé Crenshaw arrived at her famous phrase “intersectionality” by carefully thinking through speeches and writings given to us by early Black feminists, such as like Sojourner Truth and Anna J. Cooper. In this paper, I expand on this groundbreaking work in two somewhat surprising ways. First, I bring the ideas of these early Black feminists together with important, related proposals from W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir. Second, I relate these works to central ideas in (...) Kant’s practical philosophy in an effort to develop a Kantian theory of intersectionality. In addition to grasping the distinctive, destructive directions of oppressive forces aimed at women, the poor, and minorities, I seek to understand better the new, violently destructive elements found in European modernity, as evidenced both in European colonialization as well as the Holocaust. -/- This book is published under the OA CC-BY 4.0 license. (shrink)

In 2019 I designed and taught two iterations of “Plato and Black Feminist Thought”, a special topics version of a course on Plato. It combined a reading of the Republic with texts from the Black feminist tradition with thematic connections to Plato's dialogue. The course seemed to be highly successful both in promoting student engagement generally and as an approach to teaching Platonic philosophy in particular. In this paper I describe the course in detail and offer an account of my (...) experience teaching it, as well as some student perspectives. (shrink)

Throughout bell hooks's body of work, beginning with Ain't I a Woman (1981), there are two dominant, epistemological strands interwoven into the trajectory of hooks's thought: firstly, the oppositional gaze and, secondly, critical pedagogy. Ultimately, what ties these two strands together are two substantive acts of resistance, which make both the oppositional gaze and critical pedagogy possible: hearing/listening and speaking/voicing. These substantive acts of resistance arise through sonic pedagogies, insofar as what occurs through hearing/listening and speaking/voicing acts are substantively grounded (...) in sound studies. In turn, for hooks, the very notion of sound—that which informs sonic pedagogies—itself becomes integral to the meaning and meaningfulness of the oppositional gaze as it is first evoked in Black Looks (1992), through the meaning and meaningfulness of hearing/listening and speaking/voicing. In the same regard, hooks's approach to sound becomes important for critical pedagogy—that which provides the scope of sonic pedagogies—especially as it is advanced mainly across three works: Teaching to Transgress (1994), Teaching Community (2003), and Teaching Critical Thinking (2010). (shrink)

Criticism can sometimes provoke defensive reactions, particularly when it implicates identities people hold dear. For instance, feminists told they are upholding rape culture might become angry or upset, since the criticism conflicts with an identity that is important to them. These kinds of defensive reactions are a primary focus of this paper. What is it to be defensive in this way, and why do some kinds of criticism, or implied criticism, tend to provoke this kind of response? What are the (...) connections between defensiveness, identity, and active ignorance? What are the social, political, and epistemic consequences of the tendency to defensiveness? Are there ways to improve the situation? (shrink)

Medical ethics educators have a responsibility to assess the dominant ped­agogical methods and textbooks we utilize to advance our students’ knowledge about cultural differences and health disparities. In this essay, I argue that intersectional theory functions as an effective tool for the assessment and correction of diversity, equity, and inclusion training models for medical students. I critique, in particular, the additive conceptions of identity and diversity that dominate the literature. Intersectional theorists also provide helpful directives for how to train students (...) to be suspicious of social categories and their relations to power structures. Their ideas can be used to create parameters for case-based learning so as not to undertheorize the culture of medicine and to add depth to core concepts like autonomy and privacy through much-needed investigations of identity formation and expression. Ultimately, intersectional theory pushes medical ethicists to educate their students to understand difference, diversity, and inequity within a wider moral frame. (shrink)

Liberalism is often claimed to be at odds with feminism and critical race theory (CRT). This article argues, to the contrary, that Rawlsian liberalism supports the central commitments of both. Section 1 argues that Rawlsian liberalism supports intersectional feminism. Section 2 argues that the same is true of CRT. Section 3 then uses Young’s ‘Five Faces of Oppression’—a classic work widely utilized in feminism and CRT to understand and contest many varieties of oppression—to illustrate how Rawlsian liberalism supports diverse feminist (...) and CRT projects, and why it may be critical to achieve solidarity between feminism, CRT, and Rawlsian liberalism. Finally, Section 4 responds to five objections. (shrink)

Various philosophers and thinkers have discussed the importance of thinking and philosophising about the concept of ‘place’. A necessary structure of human experience, place is vital to the very foundation of human experience. More than the geography or arrangement of places, place is a concept that moulds human experience and contributes to understanding oneself and the world. Place has also been used to explain political motivations and issues such as citizenship, diaspora and migration. Despite its importance, place has not been (...) problematised enough and has been neglected in studies of intersectionality. For instance, the role and influence of place in a person's diversity wheel and the interlocking web of oppressive structures have been reduced to either racial, class or gender categories. As a result, current critical theories fall short in drawing up the effects of place on intersectionality. This chapter, therefore, proposes the need to develop a critical place theory. It highlights the role that place-aspects play in the oppression and marginalisation of individuals. Moreover, it also examines the relatively new concept of placism as an analytical framework that can be used to explain varying oppressive placial structures. (shrink)

It is clear that philosophy has a “woman problem”. Despite the recent acceptance of this fact, it is less clear what ought to be done about it. In this paper, we argue that philosophy as a discipline is uniquely well-positioned to think through the marginalisation suffered by women and other minorities. We therefore interrogate two values that already undergird conversations about inclusion— representation and intersectionality—in order to think about the path ahead. We argue that, once we have done so, it (...) becomes clear that the slow pace of improvement over the last few decades is unacceptable and more radical steps need to be taken. First, we outline the current state of women in philosophy focusing on three areas: levels of employment, publishing, and sexual harassment. Then we turn to representation and intersectionality respectively. We conclude by arguing that many women and people of colour have been arguing for a more radically diverse philosophy for many years. What we are facing is a lack of ambition on the one hand and problem of attention on the other. (shrink)

This article considers how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. Butler offers us a strategy to think through — albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancy — how white women may find an ‘insurrectionary’ form of speech that is both (...) embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. The article considers how white women’s ‘critical freedoms’ have helped shape the discursive preclusions faced by Black women. It analyses the conditions by which white women may assert their freedom of speech without this being to the detriment of women of colour. (shrink)

In the chapter “Emancipatory Engagement with Oppression: The Perils of Identity in Feminist and Anti-Racist Politics” Oda Davanger argues against basing emancipatory struggles on identity categories. According to Davanger, conceptualizing oppression in terms of different axes, i.e. identity categories, can be harmful to feminist philosophy and ideology since it contri- butes to upholding whiteness and maleness as norms and there- fore fails to “dismantle the system of domination”. In opposition to different versions of identity politics and the analytical and political (...) concept of intersectionality, Davanger complements bell hooks’ notion of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy with a post-structuralist perspective. Davanger’s answer to feminist and anti-racist struggles based on identity categories is a politics that is built around an “abstract and alienated desire” that makes possible engaging in the struggle for a world without oppression based on identity, regardless of individuals’ own experience of oppression. (shrink)

When one takes an intersectional perspective on patterns of oppression and domination, it becomes clear that familiar forms of systemic injustice, such as misogyny and anti-Black racism, are inseparable. Some feminist theorists conclude, from this, that the systems behind these injustices cannot be individuated—for example, that there isn’t patriarchy and white supremacy, but instead only white supremacist patriarchy. This chapter offers a different perspective. Philosophers have long observed that a statue and a lump of clay can be individuated although inseparable, (...) and that statues and lumps of clay do different explanatory and predictive work for the same causal outcomes. This chapter suggests that the same is true of systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy. These systems, like the injustices they produce, are inseparable. But they can be individuated, and when they are individuated, they do different explanatory and predictive work. (shrink)

Namita Goswami’s book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory, challenges its reader not only to attend to how one philosophizes about difference but also how one might philosophize differently. It is concerned with how we, now, practice philosophy as well as what we philosophize about. In this response, I raise a series of questions meant to challenge and expand Goswami’s work from the standpoint of someone rooted in the dominant framework of the Anglo-European academic discourse on difference. In (...) raising these questions, I take myself to be attempting the very twisting free of conventional philosophizing that Subjects That Matter invites. Some of the most powerful discussions in Goswami’s book concern the issues of metaphysics, dialectics, and history. The questions raised here predominantly concern whether specifically “dialectical” non-identity is faithful to Goswami’s conception of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Relatedly, does the past-facing metaphysical concept of the Whole insinuate itself in philosophy in such a way as to preclude thinking in ways that go against the grain of the Eurocentric tradition? From this concern for the conceptual commitments of dialectics and its associated metaphysics arises the further concern of whether even a negative dialectics allows for sufficiently differential genealogies. (shrink)

Inequities shape the everyday experiences and life chances of individuals at the margins of societies and are often associated with lower health and particular challenges in accessing quality treatment and support. This fact is even more dramatic for those individuals who live at the nexus of different marginalized groups and thus may face multiple discrimination, stigma, and oppression. To address these multiple social and structural disadvantages, intersectional approaches have recently gained a foothold, especially in the public health field. This study (...) makes an empirically informed argument for the merits of increasing the use of intersectional frameworks in the mental health field. In the mental health field, the potential for greater attention to multiple unjustified disadvantages appears to be of particular importance, as many mental health service users already face stigma and discrimination because of their mental health issues and thus may benefit particularly frequently and far-reachingly from effective problem awareness about multiple disadvantages. Intersectional approaches may help address the complexity, interdependence, and mutual constitution of social inequalities better than previous approaches that examined only one category of sociostructural stratification. By helping to identify the needs of those at the greatest risk of poor health, intersectional frameworks and tools can contribute not only to better address the needs of multiple disadvantaged individuals with mental health issues but also to the promotion of equity in the field of mental health, contributing to the reduction of health disparities. (shrink)

Health systems are integrating medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) into clinical care and increasingly center “complex care” patients. These patients have intersecting medical and social needs and often face systemic inequities that exacerbate their chronic health conditions. This paper describes a role for MLPs in hospital quality initiatives; examines the ethics of MLPs assisting with guardianship and institutionalization of hospital patients including marginalized groups; and advocates for MLP interventions designed to address intersectional and ethical concerns.

Recent empirical work attempts to investigate how implicit biases target those facing intersectional oppression. This is welcome, since early work on implicit biases focused on single axes of discrimination, such as race, gender, or age. However, the success of such empirical work on how biases target those facing intersectional oppressions depends on adequate conceptualizations of intersectionality and empirical measures that are responsive to these conceptualizations. Surveying prominent recent empirical work, we identify failures in conceptualizations of intersectionality that inform the design (...) of empirical measures. These failures generate unsupported conclusions about the kinds of biases that those experiencing multiple oppressions face, and render proposed interventions to combat biases useless at best, harmful at worst. We also diagnose unwarranted assumptions about how stereotypes combine in complex concepts: first, that when “simple” social concepts combine the complex concepts inherit the associated stereotypes of their simpler constituent concepts; second that studies which focus on cognition about single social categories are investigating “simple” social concepts (cf. Goff and Khan 2013). We tease out recommendations to guide future investigations into biases that target those who experience multiple oppressions. (shrink)