A full summary of the course Intersectionalities: Race, Gender, and Sexuality given to 2nd-year students of the Bachelor of Sociology at Uva. This summary contains all the reading material and all the lectures summarised in over 75 pages. The reading material includes several academic articles by b...
Articles.................................................................................................................................... 3
Being-in-the-room privilege: Elite capture and epistemic difference........................................3
Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate.......5
The Negro and the Warshaw Ghetto.......................................................................................7
Race, The Floating Signifier: What more is there to say about ‘Race’?...................................8
Everyday Racism: A New Approach to the Study of Racism.................................................11
More than prejudice: Restatement, reflections, and new directions in critical race theory.....15
A thousand oaks................................................................................................................... 20
Postcolonial Possibilities fort he Sociology of Race...............................................................22
Global White Ignorance.........................................................................................................24
Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological whiteness’: On the misrecognition of race and class.....27
The Fixe Sexes..................................................................................................................... 30
Introduction: Acting in Concert..............................................................................................31
Introduction........................................................................................................................... 32
,Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects..............................................36
Capitalism and Gay Identity..................................................................................................37
Sexual Scripts....................................................................................................................... 39
What’s Identity Got to Do With It?.........................................................................................42
Ethnicising Sexuality: An Analysis of research Practices in the Netherlands.........................44
Combahee River Collective Statement..................................................................................46
Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color........47
What is intersectionality?.......................................................................................................50
Re-Thinking Intersectionality.................................................................................................54
Lectures................................................................................................................................ 57
Lecture 1 + 2......................................................................................................................... 57
Lecture 3............................................................................................................................... 59
Lecture 4............................................................................................................................... 61
Lecture 5............................................................................................................................... 62
Lecture 6............................................................................................................................... 64
Lecture 7............................................................................................................................... 65
Lecture 8............................................................................................................................... 67
Lecture 9............................................................................................................................... 69
Lecture 10............................................................................................................................. 73
Lecture 11............................................................................................................................. 75
Lecture 12............................................................................................................................. 79
2
,Articles
Being-in-the-room privilege: Elite capture and
epistemic difference
Olúfemi Táíwò
A colleague offered to cede her position to the author; a black man. Behind the assumption
that I had an experiential insight that she did not, was the recognisable cultural stamp of a
much-discussed, polarising perspective on knowledge and politics: standpoint epistemology.
The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums it up in three innocent-sounding
theses:
1. Knowledge is socially situated
2. Marginalised people have some positional advantages in acquiring certain forms of
knowledge
3. Research programmes should reflect these facts.
Liam Kofi Bright argues convincingly that these propositions can be derived from a
combination of 1) basic empirical commitments, and 2) a minimally plausible explanation of
how the social world affects what knowledge groups of people are likely to seek and find.
So, if the basic idea is not the problem, what is?
In my experience, when people say to "listen to those most affected", it means giving
the authority of the conversation and attention to those who best fit into the social categories
associated with these ailments - regardless of what they actually know or do not know, or
what they have or have not personally experienced.
The pitfall was not that standpoint epistemology influenced the conversation, but how.
In general, the norms for putting standpoint epistemology into practice call for practices of
reverence: making offers, passing the mic, believing. But deferring in this way as a rule or
standard political orientation may actually work against the interests of marginalised groups,
especially in elite spaces.
From a social perspective, those who are "most affected" by the social injustices we
associate with politically important identities such as gender, class, race and nationality are
disproportionately likely to be trapped, underemployed or part of the 44 per cent of the
world's population who do not have access to the internet - and thus both kept out of the
chambers of power and largely ignored by those in them.
I suspected that Helen's offer was a trap. She was not the one setting the trap, but it
threatened to trap both of us anyway. Broader cultural norms - of the kind set in motion by
having statements preceded by "As a black man..." - triggered a series of position-respecting
practices that many of us know by heart, consciously or unconsciously.
To say what is wrong with the popular, reverent uses of standpoint epistemology, we
need to understand what makes it popular. Some do not really want to change and only want
the appearance of it. Another possibility is that the reverential application shows that the
deferrer has enough privileges "in the room" for his "lifting" of a perspective to matter.
However, many of the people who support and apply these norms are like Helen:
motivated by the right reasons. Returning to the first example with Helen, the problem was
not just that I had not grown up in the kind of low-income, red-town-line community she
imagined. If I had grown up in that kind of community, we probably wouldn't have been on
the phone together.
The selectivity of the immigration laws helps explain the level of education of the
Nigerian diaspora community that raised me, which in turn explains why I was admitted to
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, the exclusive Advanced Placement and Honours classes in high school, which in turn
explains why I had access to higher education, and so on and so on.
Doing better than the epistemic standards we inherited from a history of explicit global
apartheid is a very low bar to set. The facts that explain who ends up in which room shape
our world far more than the squabbling over comparative prestige between people who have
already ended up in the rooms.
The practices of deference that serve attention-seeking campaigns can fail on their
own highly dubious terms: attention to spokespeople for marginalised groups, for example,
can divert attention from the need to change the social system that marginalises them.
A fuller and fairer assessment of what is going on with deference and position
epistemology would go beyond technical arguments, and expose the emotional appeal of this
strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be "elites" relative to the larger group
they represent, but this guarantees nothing about how they are treated in the rooms they are
in. Deference epistemology responds to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down,
ignored, sidelined or silenced. It thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to members of
stigmatised or marginalised groups: it intervenes directly with morally consequential practices
of paying attention and giving respect.
The strength of standpoint epistemology - its recognition of the importance of
perspective - becomes its weakness when combined with reverent practical norms.
Emphasis on the ways we are marginalised often corresponds to the world as we have
experienced it. This fact about who is in the room, combined with the fact that speaking up
for others generates its own set of significant problems, removes the pressure that might
otherwise interfere with the centrality of our own suffering - and of the suffering of the
marginalised people who happen to join us in the room.
For those to whom deferral is granted, it may broaden the group's subversive norms.
For those who refuse, the custom may reinforce moral cowardice. The norms provide a
social cover for abdication of responsibility: the work we now have to do in the present is
shifted to individual heroes, a heroic class or a mythised past.
Defence rather than interdependence can soothe psychological wounds in the short
term. But it comes at a high price: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate the
project, and it anchors a politics that does not suit someone fighting for freedom rather than
privilege, for collective liberation rather than mere parochial advantage.
A constructive approach would focus on pursuing specific goals or end results rather
than on avoiding "complicity" in injustice or adherence to moral principles. It would be
primarily concerned with building institutions and cultivating practices of information
gathering rather than assistance. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It
would focus directly on the task of redistributing social resources and power rather than on
intermediary goals cashed in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and
rebuilding spaces, not on regulating movement within and between spaces.
Sandra Harding famously pointed out that standpoint epistemology, properly
understood, requires more rigour from science and knowledge production processes in
general, not less.
But one important issue remains unaddressed. The deferential approach to
standpoint epistemology is often accompanied by concern about and attention to the
importance of lived experiences. Traumatic experiences are given special prominence in this
regard.
Briana Toole clarifies that one's social position in itself only puts someone in a
position to know. "Epistemic privilege" or advantage is only achieved through deliberate,
concerted struggle from that position.
When it comes down to it, I believe most deeply in the epistemology of respectability
because it demands something from trauma that it cannot give. As demanding as the
constructive approach may be, the reverential approach is far more demanding and in a far
more unfair way: it asks the traumatised to bear only burdens that we should collectively
share. As Nick Estes explains in the context of indigenous politics, "It defines an entire
people primarily on the basis of their trauma and not their aspirations or pure humanity".
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