Bernstein (2020) The metaphysics of intersectionality

Bernstein, S. The metaphysics of intersectionality. Philos Stud 177, 321–335 (2020). 

 

Viewing social identities as intersectional has become central to understanding how various dimensions of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, and class interact to yield more complex forms of discrimination than those suffered by persons who fall under only one category. In this paper I develop a metaphysics of intersectionality, and thereby advance understanding of the concept beyond metaphor. As a descriptive rather than revisionary project, the aim is to reflect actual definitions of intersectionality on offer. The result will be a richer understanding of the interlevel and intralevel relationships involved in intersectionality.

Here is the plan. In Sect. 1, I lay out the conceptual basics of intersectionality and narrow the target explanandum. I survey commonly used metaphors deployed in service of defining intersectionality, and show why these metaphors are metaphysically significant. In Sect. 2, I draw on debates about diachronic composition to yield results for the metaphysics of intersectionality. I sketch multiple metaphysical formulations of its central tenet of inseparability of social categories, and show the advantages of one such conception over another. In Sect. 3, I propose and defend the idea that intersectionality is best understood as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the intersectional category over its constituents, on par with grounding claims in contemporary analytic metaphysics.

 

1 Intersectionality: the basics

 

The basic idea of intersectionality is that forms of oppression stemming from membership in multiple social categories such as ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘woman’’ intersect and thereby create new forms of oppression that are causally, modally, and relationally different from the constituent forms of oppression merely added together. [322]

상호 교차성의 기본 아이디어는 "흑인"이나 "여성"과 같은 다양한 사회적 범주의 신분으로부터 비롯된 억압의 형태들이 교차하고 그러함으로써 억압의 구성 요소들을 단순히 더해 놓은 것과는 인과적으로, 양상적으로, 그리고 관계적으로 차별화되는 새로운 억압의 형태를 만들어낸다는 것이다.