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’’ intersec tional 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

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

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?

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?

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.