Bernstein (2020) The metaphysics of intersectionality

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

 

1. Introduction

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. [321]

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. [321-322]

 

2. Intersectionality: the basics

2.1 The Basic Idea

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. 

Analyzing oppression stemming from black womanhood, for example, is not just a matter of analyzing blackness and analyzing womanhood. Similarly with other finer-grained categories like ‘‘gay Hispanic male’’, ‘‘disabled Jewish woman’’, and so on. [322]

2.2 The Veriety of Intersectionality [322]

In the literature, ‘‘intersectionality’’ refers to a few different phenomena.

① Sometimes it refers to members of intersectional social categories, like black women.

② Sometimes it refers to forms of oppression faced by members of such categories, for example, those forms of discrimination faced by black women that are faced neither by women alone nor by black people alone.

③ Intersectionality sometimes refers to a type or token of experience faced by members of such categories, as in experiences had by black women that are not entirely explicable by appeal to being black or to being a woman.

④ There is a causal theory of intersectionality, according to which intersecting systems of power produce effects on groups or individuals that would not be produced if the dimensions did not intersect.

⑤ And intersectionality sometimes refers to a method of theorizing from or about a specific viewpoint, as when one is theorizing from the perspective of a disabled Jewish woman.

2.3 Four Assumptions [322-323]

① I will assume that all of the above phenomena are worthy bearers of the label, but I will largely focus on intersectional identity categories as the target explanandum. [322]

② I will assume for the sake of this paper that they are metaphysically substantive in the sense that they are more than mere collections of social classifications: they are the metaphysical umbrella under which oppressed groups fall, whether singly or multiply. [322]

③ Though there is significant controversy over both the usefulness of intersectionality and who is permitted to adopt it as a theoretical construct, I will assume that it is useful as a theoretical tool and that it is widely available to be discussed by those who wish to understand any system of interlocking social oppression. [323]

④ Philosophical interest in intersectionality as a tool, therefore, is not restricted to those seeking to understand minority identities. On one way of thinking about it, we are all intersectional to some degree or other. I will, however, restrict my focus to intersectional categories as they relate to forms of interlocking systemic oppression, rather than intersectional categories full stop. [323]

2.4 Several Attempts to Understand Intersectionality [323-324]

① Crenshaw’s metaphor evokes a Venn diagram-like picture of social categories, according to which causal results of membership in multiple social categories can stem from one category, the other category, or both categories combined. [323]

② In order to incorporate the inseparability of identity categories, Garry’s (2011) preferred metaphor for intersectionality attempts to capture the complex ways in which dimensions of oppression mix, rather than simply being added together 

[We] can replace vehicles with liquids to show the ways in which some oppressions or privileges seem to blend or fuse with others. Different liquids—milk, coffee, nail polish, olive oil, beet borscht, paint in several colors—run down from different places at different altitudes into roundabouts. Some of the liquids run together, some are marbled with others, and some stay more separate unless whipped together. For me, this image captures intersectionality better than many others, but it still cannot capture agency well.

[324]

③ Haslanger writes that "the intersection of race and gender has an effect similar to overlapping different colored gels on a theater light"

There are many who have argued that the experience of being a woman (or being White, or affluent) cannot be separated from the experience of the other social positions, because experience is not ‘‘additive’’ in the way that would be required (e.g., Spelman 1988).

Haslanger’s comparison suggests a complex, non-additive, intermingling metaphysical relationship between different aspects of social identity [324]

2.5 Several Questions [325]

Let us call multidimensional identity categories like ‘‘black woman’’ intersectional categories. And call their constituents like ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘woman’’ identity constituents.

Several questions arise.

① What, precisely, is the relationship of inseparability between identity constituents?

② What is the relationship between intersectional categories and their identity constituents?

③ What are the persistence and modal conditions of intersectional categories? 

 

3. The Metaphysics of Intersectionality 

3.1 Determinable/Determinate Relationship [325]

Social categories can be fruitfully understand in terms of determinables and their determinates. The determinable/determinate relationship is a special hierarchical relationship of descending specificity that holds between general categories and their more specific instances. Scarlet is a determinate of the determinable red, and circular is a determinate of the determinable shaped.

Some determinables are inseparable while their determinates are separable: it is impossible to have a color without having a shape, but it is possible to be red without being circular. Similarly, it is impossible to have a gender without having a race, and impossible to have a race without having a social class. But it is possible to be a woman without being black. Thus social determinables such as gender, race, and class are inseparable while their social determinates such as womanhood, blackness, and middle-class membership are not. 

 

3.2 Explaining the Inseparability of Social Determinates [325]

As a concept, however, intersectionality is a claim about the inseparability of social determinates, not social determinables. Intersectionality is not just about belonging to any gender and any race; it is about belonging to a specific gender (for example, womanhood) and belonging to a specific race (for example, being black), and the way those determinate identity constituents interact with each other. But what, exactly, is this relationship of inseparability?

3.2.1 Conceptual Inseparability? [325]

First, what inseparability is not. It is not conceptual inseparability, since one can certainly conceive of one identity constituent without the other. Conceptually coherent reasoning about swapping gender, biological sex, and race identity is common and unmysterious. Such reasoning often replaces one identity constituent with another while holding other constituents fixed. One might think ‘‘If I hadn’t been a woman…’’ or ‘‘If I hadn’t been black…’’ even if one is a black woman. Identity categories are conceptually separable, in principle and in practice.

3.2.2 Modal Inseparability? [325-326]

The sort of inseparability at stake in intersectionality is not modal inseparability, since clearly it is possible for one to be a woman without being black, and vice versa. Further, people can acquire and lose some identity constituents: they can change gender identity, religion, and socioeconomic class over the course of a lifetime in ways that effect dimensions of oppression and privilege

Another reason to deny modal inseparability of social categories is that existing metaphysical models of gender and race take the features of each to be modally contingent. Social race realists, for example, hold that the existence and nature of race depends on a network of social attitudes and relations. If social relations and attitudes determine what it is to be black, it follows that such a nature could have been very different than it is, since networks of social attitudes and relations could have been very different than they are. Race-defining social attitudes and relations shift across time and across geography. (‘‘I became black in America’’, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie memorably claimed.11) If the features of race and gender are contingent, they cannot be modally inseparable, since presumably the modal connection would depend on their natures.

3.2.3 Mereological inseparability?

Mereological inseparability is also unhelpful: being black and being a woman don’t overlap in the way that a bicycle overlaps its physical parts. Identity categories are not physical parts, like Legos or construction beams. Nor is the relationship between identity categories appropriately described as physical contact between social categories.

To make progress on the nature of inseparability, we can fruitfully draw on results from debates about the nature of diachronic composition. Diachronic composition is the relationship that a group of parts bears to a particular whole that it composes across time. Consider a pile of beams and parts in January that are gradually put together in such a way that they form a house in May. This relationship is one of composition, but not the type according to which parts compose a particular thing at a particular time. Rather, the house is composed across time, gradually built out of its parts.

Bennett (2011) draws a distinction between diachronic composition in which ingredients are destroyed or annihilated in the making of the object, and diachronic composition in which the ingredients are left intact. For example, in baking a cake, eggs are destroyed, but are considered constituents of the ultimate product. We can ask a similar question of identity constituents: to what extent are the categories black and woman left intact when combined into an intersectional identity like black woman? [326]

Here the intersectionality theorist must clarify her claim. There are two ways to go. [326]

① One way is to hold that the categories black and woman do not survive the combination into the intersectional category, comparable to eggs being destroyed in service of baking the cake. Call this the destruction conception of inseparability. [326-327]

② The other way is to hold that both categories stay intact, like the beams that eventually compose a house. Call this the intact category conception of inseparability. Both approaches have their challenges. [327]

①-1) The first and biggest problem with the destruction conception is that we do not want to say that black women are neither black nor women. Indeed, a commitment to the intactness and integrity of individual identity constituents seems essential to the spirit of intersectional theorizing and feminist theorizing more generally. Both types of theorizing seek to quantitatively and qualitatively expand rather than contract explanations of oppression and privilege. Maintaining the conceptual and metaphysical integrity of the identity constituents is a desideratum [원하는 것, 필요한 것] of a theory of intersectionality. [327]

①-2) A second, related problem with the destruction conception is that the category black woman is not so distinctive as to retain no components of blackness or womanhood. Sorts of oppression faced by black women sometimes are explicable in terms of womanhood and in terms of blackness, at least partially. It’s not as if the individual constituents never have anything to do with it at all. Intersectional categories clearly share many properties and causal powers of their constituents. For example, writing of being stopped and interrogated on her way into a fancy hotel in her hometown, Adichie writes: …the automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. Because a Nigerian female alone cannot possibly be a guest paying for her own room. A man who walks into the same hotel is not harassed. The assumption is that he is there for something legitimate. (2014, 19) [327]

The destruction conception does not allow for such causal roles, since the individual categories are destroyed by belonging to the intersectional category. [327]

①-3) We seek to determine the sorts of obstacles that all women face in virtue of determining the sorts of obstacles that black women face and Jewish women face, not only the obstacles that are specific to Jewish women and black women. Maintaining intact identity categories best respects the letter and spirit of intersectional theorizing. For methodological and first-order philosophical reasons, then, the destruction conception is a non-starter. [328]

②-1) First, the friend of the intact approach must accept widespread explanatory and causal overdetermination of intersectional categories by their identity constituents. In the above example, Adichie’s harassment at the hotel entrance is caused not only by her being a Nigerian woman, but also by her being Nigerian and being a woman. Every causal outcropping of membership in an intersectional category will have multiple multi-level causes and explanations. Some causes and explanations will overlap and some will not, but in many cases, there will be causal and explanatory redundancy. [328]

As in the traditional setup of the causal exclusion problem, the alternatives to accepting widespread overdetermination are unappealing. One does not want to eliminate the causal and explanatory power of the identity constituents, for blackness and womanhood still have unique causal and explanatory roles. Eliminating the causal and explanatory role of the intersectional category goes against the very spirit of intersectional theorizing: the entire point is that the finer grained category has special, distinctive causal and explanatory powers. Widespread overdetermination need not be considered problematic,16 but it does multiply ontological posits of the theory. [328]

②-2) Another way the intact category theorist multiplies entities is that she must accept a profusion of descending identity categories. On some analyses, ‘‘woman’’ is not a metaphysically fundamental category. It is divisible into further parts such as performative and relational aspects of womanhood, each of which themselves contain more specific aspects. This ontological extravagance isn’t intrinsically problematic, but it does add an extra layer of causal and explanatory overdetermination. [328]

②-3) The primary burden of the intact category approach is to explain how the intersectional category is metaphysically different than the combination of its constituents. Here the intersectional theorist must strike a difficult balance. As discussed above, she must not erase or degrade the individual identity constituents that make up a complex, multi-dimensional identity. [328] Muslim women, for example, are not to be seen as non-Muslim or non-women because they belong to the intersectional category [328-329]. On the other hand, the friend of intersectionality must give an account of intersectional categories according to which the categories contribute something extra to the world, ontologically speaking. If talking about intersectional categories is just another way of talking about the constituents added together, intersectionality theory is vulnerable to a charge of triviality. [329]

 

3.3 Weak Inseparability

The first option weakens inseparability so that it is mere interaction between identity categories. Often, the type of interplay between different identity constituents under discussion in the literature requires only this sort of minimal relationship. What the intersectionality theorist would posit, then, is that properties of identity constituents causally and metaphysically interact but that they are separable in principle and in practice. When being black intersects with being Muslim, for example, these two identity features causally interact in order to form a distinctive intersectional identity, but they do not inextricably interconnect. Inseparability-as-interaction also explains the Adichie example above: she is harassed at the hotel entrance because her blackness and her womanhood interact, but not because they are inextricably and irreducibly linked. Inseparability as interaction respects the spirit of intersectionality without a stronger metaphysical commitment than necessary. [329]

Given that many intersectional views are committed to cross-constitution of social categories, however, the mere interaction view is weaker than many intersectionality theorists would accept. Some theories posit that social categories literally build each other. Characterizing Lugones’ position, for example, Garry writes:

Systems of oppression, namely, colonial/modern power and the colonial/mod ern gender system (along with heterosexualism, racial classification/oppres sion, and capitalism), literally constitute each other and cannot be understood apart from each other. (2011) (Emphasis added)

Of her own view, Garry writes:

I say that gender oppression works through and is shaped by racism, classism, or heterosexualism. Mutual construction seems to be a good way to state their relations in many circumstances. (ibid, emphasis added)

[329]

The weak formulation of inseparability as mere interaction would exclude many intersectional theories from the label. For obvious reasons, this is not a desirable result. [329]

 

3.4 Strong Inseparability

A second, stronger option is to view inseparability as a kind of explanatory unity of the intersectional category. Explanatory unity, roughly, is the explanatory inextricability of one category from another within an intersectional category. [330]

On this view, not only is a unified entity more explanatorily powerful than its constituents, but the unity is required to garner the correct explanations. Explanatory unity captures the central thrust of intersectionality—that social categories intermingle in meaningful, important ways—while avoiding the problems of conceptual inseparability, modal inseparability, and social category interaction. To some extent, the literature already treats intersectional categories as internally explanatorily unified. The best explanation of norms governing hair on black women, for example, stems from norms governing the behavior and appearance of black women as a single, unified category. This also holds true for social phenomena such as black toxic masculinity, Jewish womanhood, and white cisgenderhood, all of which are more suited to explanation-backing as unities than their individual constituents stuck together. As I will argue shortly, explanatory unity also comports with a systematic metaphysics of intersectionality. [330]

 

3.5 Summary

Before turning to this topic in detail, a recap will be helpful. I began by examining the nature of the inseparability of social categories, the claim at the heart of intersectionality. This sort of inseparability, I claimed, cannot be modal or conceptual. I proposed two competing pictures of the relationship between social categories: a destruction conception, according to which constituent social categories do not survive their subsumption into intersectional categories; and the intact category conception, according to which social categories remain intact while subsumed into intersectional categories. I further proposed two different ways to understand inseparability under the intact category conception. One way weakens inseparability to mere interaction. The other way views inseparability as a kind of explanatory unity. The latter, I will now claim, meshes well with a more general view of intersectionality as explanatory priority. [330]

 

4. Intersectionality as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the whole over the parts