Another debate about “intersectionality” has just broken out among a group of progressive feminists. A successful Latina writer of the generation generally called “third wave” lamented that there was no mention of Earth Day on the big U.S. feminist organizations’ websites. A famous white, progressive feminist writer one generation older exasperatedly responded that we can’t expect feminism to do everything; social movements and organizations are limited and do best when they each focus on their own narrow missions.
The details don’t really matter; this conversation happens over and over again in liberal/progressive feminist circles. Someone asks, “Are ‘intersectional feminists’ spreading feminism too thin by advocating a diffuse focus, asking ‘feminism’ to address ‘all issues’?” (Or, as some people put it, “everyone else’s issues”—this is usually followed by a comment about how “they”—”the environmentalists” or whomever—don’t focus on “women,” so why should “we” focus on “their issues.”) And someone responds saying something to the effect of, “For some women (which is usually code for ‘women of color’ or ‘poor women’ or another marginalized group of women, described in a lumpy-indistinct demographic mass), all of these issues affect daily lives, and so not addressing them means feminism isn’t ‘inclusive’ in the sense of addressing the lived realities of ‘all women.'” And someone else will say something about how “young feminists” really believe in “intersectionality,” so failing to have an intersectional approach makes feminism less appealing to young women. This argument usually gets read as an important piece of market data by big, bulky, white-professional-led liberal-feminist organizations that then decide they need to pay a consultant or two to help them make their web content, or their event series, or something, more “intersectional,” to better appeal to those “young feminists” or “women of color” to whom they need to appeal to make “feminism” more “inclusive.”
All of this, in its form and structures, could be a conversation about any product or service in any typical U.S. corporation. There’s some market analysis (what makes our product—feminism—appealing to “women of color” or “young feminists”), and then there’s some strategic action taken to improve the organization’s standing with said group, or market. The voices who resist this sort of “progressive” change, the ones insisting on feminism’s limited resources and inability to be and do everything, are simply expressing another of capitalism’s foundational narratives: scarcity, or the sense that movements and organizations and individuals are in competition for scarce resources, that there’s never enough, and so we have to hoard and fight for our piece of the pie. And the insistence that feminist organizations “focus”—on women, on gender, not on “all these other issues”—sounds suspiciously like theories on specialized labor.
