day 8 meeting #1

-the extent to which the intersectional approach is a response and challenge to feminism as it achieved status within the academy

• limited jobs in academia
• how connected are academics to people outside of the privileged area that is academia?
• how can you avoid being condescending?
• white feminists aggressively defending their victories in the seventies
• individual and the collective?? what is the dynamic?

-the challenge of having a coherent discussion in which topics are grouped for the purposes of analysis, even while striving to individuate and differentiate individuals within categories

• this goes back to the discussion on the individual vs. the collective (up for further discussion and exploration!)

-the need to define some key terms: activism, oppression

• preliminary definition, from Merriam-Webster
• activism: a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue
• oppression: unjust or cruel/excessive exercise of authority or power

-race, class, gender, sexuality as "systems of oppression" (11). (How do we do justice to those conversations while staying rooted in the complexity of these concepts - and the other ways in which individuals experience these concepts?) Is the intersectional approach the best way to achieve "radical interconnectivity" among human beings? (11) Is that the point?

• another thing that came up today, related to this, is what does it mean to "be on top"? what does that mean for the people that get kicked out of the "top"? since everyone cannot "be on top", should that be the goal of intersectionality? is it? should intersectionalism's goal remain to remove the systems of oppression? how/why would that goal change?

-what is the role of the intersectional approach beyond the academy? How would you defend it from critics who view it as self-validating academia generating research approaches that individuals being discussed may not feel connected to?

• I have (finally, actually) made some progress in contacting a current historian in the vicinity of this field. I would be very interested to ask her these very questions.

-Looking forward to considering the global application (9). Is it an intersectional blindspot in the US to sideline ethnicity, nation, and age, (1) and leave those as a sort of sub-matrix, to the "race-class-gender-sexuality" matrix? Ethnicity, nation, and age are not "constructed" in the same way - does this explain why they are not in the main matrix? Does this limit the power of activism(s) globally, in the name of being able to have a certain kind of discussion about oppression within the academy?

• we discussed how I, personally, tend to forget about/gloss over the issue of class because it doesn't really have a direct effect on my current life. Mrs. Lawson spent a little bit telling me about her own childhood, and how class [struggles] was [were] more visibile/relevant in her schooling/upbringing. I am curious to see how class and age, two things I don't often think about, will factor into this independent study. 

-Structural intersectionality is the way that the experience of women of color, due to their position at the intersection of race and gender, is "qualitatively different than that of white women". Political intersectionality refers to the "manner in which feminist and antiracist politics have functioned in tandem to marginalize the issue of violence against women of color". Yuval-Davis also suggests that gender should be divorced from the body and the social differences between men and women, which I am very interested in. Why is that seen as detrimental to society? How can that problem be alleviated? This would tie nicely into our discussion of language and its limitations on social progress (alternatively, how is it aiding social progress?).

• we did not address this question specifically, but it does tie the book into our discussion, so I thought I would add it to this post/question list

I think I will focus on Mrs. Lawson's race paper, and maybe contact my friend to get another book on gender/race/class, this week. I will wait to continue reading The Intersectional Approach until this weekend or next week, because I think some distance from the text/dense material will bring [me] some clarity.