Cracked Ivory
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Episode 1: Whose Intersectionality Is It Anyway? Crenshaw's Theory of Intersectionality
🕑 Added 2025-05-12 14:57:48 +0000 UTCFor the first episode of Cracked Ivory, Talia and Emma are joined by legal historian and queer feminist of color Kay (who can be found at dihya-bint-neyth.bsky.social on Bluesky) to discuss Kimberlé Crenshaw’s oft-cited yet sparsely-read theory of intersectionality, along with its implications for masculinity studies, critics of feminism, and Ben Shapiro’s fear of bottoming.
Sources:
Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
Intersectionality Wars: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination
Intersectionality and Masculinity Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/18902138.2024.2376445#d1e115
Crenshaw on police violence against Black women: https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/kimberle-crenshaw-who-coined-term-intersectionality-police-violence-against-black-women
Close Encounters of Three Kinds (Crenshaw 2010): https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2865/
Comments
Ashley Finch
Great first ep! If I wanted to condense intersectionality to its core, after listening to this, it's that: 1) you can me marginalised for more than one thing at a time 2) when this happens, people will justify it with *sameness*: "Well, you're a woman same as other women and we don't discriminate against (white) women, and you're black same as other black people and we don't discriminate against black (male) people, so we're actually not touching you right now" 3) if you try to seek solidarity along the individual axes of oppression, you'll be pushed away for being *different*: "you're a trans woman, you can't be a representative for women as a class because you're too different from most women" In a sense, I feel like intersectionality is best thought of as something used *against* you, it describes a set of counterinsurgency tools which systems of domination use to preserve their weapons by lasering in on the most marginalised targets and recruiting compradors from the slightly-more-defensible populations.
