Fokus Intersektionalität: Bewegungen und Verortungen eines vielschichtigen Konzeptes (Geschlecht und

Fokus Intersektionalität Bewegungen und Verortungen eines vielschichtigen…

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It was also argued that there was a need for a constant reflection on and deconstruction of power, knowledge, and self positioning, which was seen to imply 4. Germany is also a latecomer to the debate, 4 and - as in many other countries - it were the academically marginalized scholars and activists, investigating the effects of racism, ethnicism and nationalism in combination with gender who embraced the concept in the first place; although over the last 15 years intersectionality received more and more attention, the debate was fraught with difficulties from the very beginning.

Conditions of acceptance Intersectionality addresses the most central theoretical and normative concern within feminist scholarship: This is because it touches on the most pressing problem facing contemporary feminism the long and painful legacy of its exclusions Davis According to Kathy Davis, by the end of the 19 th millennium, there was finally room in feminist theory and research to address differences between women.

During the s difference and the multiplicity of feminisms had been the object of heated debates see Uma Narayan ; Sara Ahmed ; Patricia Hill Collins and Seyla Benhabib et al. By and by, the ubiquitous and universal feminist imagination as a We was losing ground because critics like the Black Women s or the Third World Women s movements scholars could demonstrate its partiality. This fragmentation was often dreaded.

Gudrun Axeli Knapp writes: The presupposed generalized We functions like a regulative idea: Contrary to many Black and postcolonial feminists who embrace the multiplicity of feminisms, Knapp is of the opinion that the indeterminatedness of the we is a useful expression of an aporia: The aporia lies in the simultaneous indispensability and impossibility of a foundational reference to an epistemic or political subject ibid.

In her analysis of intersectionality s successful career Kathy Davis shows that intersectionality has been well and broadly received in women s and gender studies, not despite but because of its vagueness and ambiguity which can be taken up in connection with so many issues.

This, she argues, is what makes the approach a good feminist theory. On the basis of this assessment, Davis emphasizes the theoretical, methodological, and political advantages of the concept for the further development of feminist theory and practice. In an effort to explain the eager adoption of the term in various regions of the world, Davis explains: But I would say that despite all of the mentioned advantages, there is and was a danger of seperating intersectionality from its history as a political project.

The concept is developing in many and different directions; a plethora of research fields and works bear witness of this.

In spite or maybe because of so many endorsements, a number of controversies have dominated the debate see also Davis The plea for the recognition of differences like religion, citizenship status different belongings , sedentariness vs. This search for an inclusive conceptualization of multidimensional inequalities open to further amendments argues for the embedded consideration of more than one category Leiprecht and Lutz by emphasizing the analysis of the categories contradictory and conflicting relations to each other, instead of focusing on distinct and isolated realms of experience see McClintock The amendment protagonists have been accused of arbitrariness the etc.

Second, an ongoing dispute concerns the meaning of the categories race and class and the different conceptualizations in the US and in Europe Ferree ; Knapp Many European researchers regard ethnicity as a more appropriate category than race because, after the Holocaust, race is first and foremost connected with Nazi racial ideology and is considered historical baggage that cannot be used in a positive way. In German mainstream sociology, this has resulted in not only avoiding the term but dismissing racism as an analytical category altogether. However, a growing number of researchers inspired by anti-racist and postcolonial theory claim that ethnicity carries a similar baggage of hierarchization and - in connection with culture has become a powerful tool of symbolic, political and social exclusion Lutz et al.

The question of whether the answer should be a reintroduction of race into the European debate is the subject of heated discussions see Crenshaw ; Lewis Likewise, researchers have warned against equating the meaning of class in the US context with the European meaning of the term Ferree All in all, these debates mirror a genuine effort to deal with the traveling of theory and its adaptation in multiple geo-political societies and settings.

What exactly is intersectionality? An analytical tool for textual analysis? I will restrict myself to mentioning a few contributions to these debates. Kathy Davis, for example , , regards intersectionality as a theory that goes far beyond its appearance as buzzword, as it offers new potential and perspectives for the connectivity of a broad range of social science scholars approaches.

Katharina Walgenbach goes even further by considering intersectionality as a new paradigm for the scientific community in that it offers a set of terms, theoretical interventions, premises, problem definitions and suggested solutions. Klinger and Knapp embrace intersectionality s potential for the building of grand theory, but argue that on the structural level the term is unable to identify how and by what means race, class and gender as separate categories are constituted as social categories.

Moreover, they are concerned with intersectionalists tendency to let go of gender as a master category by declaring that no category is sacrosanct because they fear a political backlash in academia: Others, like myself, consider the concept as a heuristic device that is particularly helpful in detecting the overlapping and co-construction of visible and at first sight invisible strands of inequality Lutz Recently, some intersectionalists Cho et al.

Insisting that intersectionality is first and foremost a tool for making visible various strands of discrimination, these authors together with many others - reject the now popular use of intersectionality in a managerial context where it is purely considered as an addition to gender mainstreaming. At the same time, Crenshaw herself dropped class a category that she originally considered a key category in her recent articles and visualizations of intersectionality see her website. Others, like Gudrun Axeli Knapp, utter their concern that the popularity of intersectionality seems to function as a Mantra in a doxographic discourse, as a shorthand for the latest news in feminist theory ibid: If this is more than a cynic remark it seems high 8.

In my view intersectional analysis is indeed not only a challenge but really hard to do. According to my own assessment I have noticed that many of its users forget, in the words of Donna Haraway, to count to four: And, again, what happened to class? Otherwise, threes will always reduce to twos, which quickly become lonely ones in the vanguard.

And no one learns to count to four. It is a truism that the intermediation of the categories is difficult to analyse, and that not only conceptualising them as interdependent, but as mutually constitutive and as relations is even more complicated. Following Edward Said s four stages of the travelling of theory, it seems that the appropriation of intersectionality is met by lots of criticism and objection from various sides and standpoints: Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker give a very suitable summary of this situation: Some have relied on multiplication, seeming to calculate the effect of the whole from the combination of different parts.

And others have employed geometry, drawing on images of interlocking or intersecting planes and axes. Those of us who were able to forget race and class in our analyses of gender relations may be more likely to add these at a later point. By contrast, those of us who could never forget these dimensions of social life may be more likely to draw on complex geometrical imagery all along.

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Nonetheless, the existence of so many different approaches to the topic seems indicative of the difficulties all of us have experienced in coming to term with it. West and Fenstermaker However, is it really sufficient to acknowledge the often heard line, that in science you get what you see which means that even theoretical sensitivity or the informed gaze -analysis does not protect reflexive and critical feminist researchers against blindness in certain fields and spots?

If this were the case, then all self-declared intersectionalists could go back to business as usual. In my own work, as a micro-sociologist, I take issue with this position. Intersectionality as methodology and method A hotly debated subject among intersectionalists is the question of the level on which intersectionality considered as a methodology - does its work, i.

Floya Anthias has suggested a multi-level analysis that works on four levels: In an effort to make use of intersectionality s potential as a method Kathy Davis forthcoming makes some suggestions how researches can learn to do their analysis. She recommends to start with intersectionality s premise that gender as the theoretical mainstay of feminist research needs to be complicated, that it should never be treated as a standalone category, but is always and everywhere related to other differences and mutually constituted by these differences.

She then proposes to test this assumption by identifying a text, a photograph or a TV program which seems to be about gender, then read, describe and explain it and in a second step ask Mary Matsuda s famous other question. The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call ask the other question. When I see something that looks racist, I ask Where is the patriarchy in this?

When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, Where is the heterosexism in this? When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, Where are the class interests in this? Matsuda s question means that one needs to avoid the narrow focus on one category as much as the mentioning of multiple differences without taking them into account. Instead one needs to start with cross questioning the categories that come to the fore at first sight.

For qualitative researchers, like me, working with biographical interviews and applying the hermeneutical case study analysis, the other question functions as a directive to focus on various levels of the analysis: The identity category that is used in the first place or most of all, is not necessarily the most important. Rather it may be the identity aspect that is repeatedly attacked and therefore defended. In our case analysis of the life story of Mamphela Ramphele, an antiapartheids-fighter and icon of the Black Consciousness Movement, a famous and influential intellectual-academic in South Africa and a former managing director of the World Bank, we have identified conflicts of belonging; in her interview and her biography, Ramphele highlights those forms of belonging which were not conceded to her in the first place, those she was not entitled to occupy see Lutz and Davis Third, intersectionality on the level of power relations is a crucial subject of analysis.

As a narrator, however, Ramphele denies that there is nothing more to be said. Instead she shows that in such a society positions are never determined or fixed and unchangeable, but that the respective form of belonging depending on context, locality and point in time can result in gains or losses of power ibid.

Her story is that of a fighter and an exceptional woman; against all attempts to push her aside into the role of a victim, she reclaims the competences of an independent actor, organizing her own life and thereby contributing to the creation of a collective history.

By distinguishing these three levels of intersectional analysis we identify the opportunities to operationalize the categories of intersectionality in a case study analysis. We shift attention from how structures of racism, class discrimination and sexism determine individuals identities and practices to how individuals ongoingly and flexibly negotiate their multiple and converging identities in the context of everyday life. Introducing the term doing intersectionality we explore how individuals creatively and often in surprising ways draw upon various aspects of their multiple identities as a resource to gain control over their lives.

We show how gender or race are invariably linked to structures of domination, can also mobilize or deconstruct disempowering discourses, even undermine and transform oppressive practices. We thereby show that individuals are not always and in every situation multiply vulnerable, but they develop strategies of resistance by drawing on multiple identities.

Nancy Fraser gives a good summary of this approach: Rather, individuals are nodes of convergence for multiple, cross-cutting axes of subordination. Frequently disadvantaged along some axes and simultaneously advantaged along others, they wage for recognition in modern regimes.

This conceptualisation of intersectionality is also used in the construction of the European Union s anti-discrimination law see the picture gallery from Tackling multiple discrimination. Practices, policies and laws The European Commission This is an illustration of an understanding of identities as simultaneously merging advantaged and disadvantaged social positioning.

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A myriad of divisions among intersectionalists have already been mentioned. In this final part I want to expand on other fields of application. Agreeing with those critics who want to see intersectionality embedded in the broader theoretical frame of inequality research, I argue for the use of theoretical tools that go beyond a pure assessment of the overlap and co-construction of categories of difference. But, not all categories of difference are equally salient; moreover, their impact on social positioning can be extremely dissimilar.

It is, therefore, important to investigate diversity in the context of power relations and analyze in detail which of all possible differential facets makes the difference, creates unequal identities. The sociological theory of social stratification may be helpful here. Social stratification relates to the differential hierarchical locations of individuals and groupings of people on society s grids of power Yuval-Davis The reduction of most social stratification theories being configured within the container of the nation state needs to be overcome by consideration of the continually shifting orders of stratification on the global and the regional as well as on the national and the local level, and we should likewise reject the naturalisation of any constructions of social divisions, and challenge the prioritisation of any of them, such as class and gender ibid: In her exemplification of such an approach Nira Yuval-Davis writes: I find it problematic, for instance, that the construction of black woman is automatically assumed, unless otherwise specified, to be that of a minority black woman living in white Western societies.

The majority of black women in today s world are black women in black societies. This has major implications for a global intersectional stratification analysis ibid: Implicit in this statement is the conviction that debates about intersectionality and social inequalities can no longer reduce the analysis of gender, class and race to oppression and discrimination but need to consider the privileged positionings within and between them a position that is deeply contested, as many intersectionality scholars implicit and explicitly cherish a master category of oppression see above.

Another debate that is being conducted is the search for a more adequate metaphor. Many criticize intersection as a too rigid visualization, one that ignores the fact that stratification is better depicted as a matter of relations rather than categories. Whether this can be Nina Een beschouwing over collectieve identiteit en sociale ongelijkheid, Tijdschrift voor vrouwenstudies 15 1: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.

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Das Demokratiedefizit der Europäischen Integration in - download pdf or read online

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