Intersectionality

Relevant authors

Stephen Best
Carol J. Adams

Key Points in Relation to Design/Creativity

Consider humanness, blackness, femininity, animality, etc. as processes, not given qualities. As such they are actively created and can/should be actively resisted. Thus, these attributes are distributed and creative, connecting to design and impacted by #design (Private) and should be taken as interspecies/ecocentric design.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

All forms of privilege or oppression should be considered together. They are intrinsically connected as oppression. A process that actuates a particular type or modality of relationships.

From Connecting feminist, anti-racist and animal politics: a bridge too far?

, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The need for colonisers to portray the colonised as sub-human and inferior. This applies equally to animals and racial minorities, for example, or women.

"There are notable exceptions that help us to imagine a feminist, antiracist and animal political praxis that connects not only the domination of women, racialised people and animals but also their liberation."

"The dominant understanding of the discursive relation between race and animals too is one of inferiorisation through association with, or being placed in close proximity too, animals (Césaire, 1950/2000; Fanon, 1952/2008; Gordon, 1995; Hondius, 2017; Memmi, 1957/2016; Wynter, 1984). History (and the present-day) is abound with animalistic metaphors used to suggest and underline the inferiority and dangerous character of the peoples concerned, such as referring to Jews as rats, Tutsi’s as cockroaches and Muslims as wolfs in sheep’s clothing. ‘The animalistic metaphor is not just an “observational racist category” but a declaration of intent’ writes Ghassan Hage (2017, p. 11). It functions to signal what is ‘desirable, possible and preferable to do with them [the animalised]’ (idem). Consequently, many scholarly and activist interpretations of the concept and practice of racialisation is one of dehumanisation (Garner, 2010). Following Franz Fanon’s (1952/2008) famous critique of the necessity for colonisation to dehumanise the colonised so as to legitimise their enslavement, expropriation and extermination, the logic of racialisation is generally interpreted as one of radical dehumanisation (Agathangelou, 2016). Fanon grounds his theory of racialisation as dehumanisation in a detailed analysis of the ways in which a specific interpretation of the idea of “the human” in Western colonial thought was central to the project of imperial colonialism, and the subsequent development of racial taxonomies and hierarchies. Portrayed as non- or sub-humans because of their lack of having a soul or rational capabilities, there was no need for the European colonisers to give the colonised any moral consideration as the reigning theological, political and moral frameworks of that time (and arguably still) only saw humans as holding intrinsic moral value. Western secular sciences such as biology in the 19th century consequently made these phantastic racial hierarchies seem factual and natural. Science thus produced a powerful discourse in which black people, indigenous peoples and colonised people were defined by their lack of soul and reason as sub- or non-humans and as such, closer to or like animals (Saini, 2019)."

Another quote:

"As Sylvia Wynter (2003) importantly notes, the characteristics of this ideal type of “the human” were biased towards the characteristics of the ruling classes of the day, namely European, Christian, white, affluent, and educated men. The idea of the human is thus, contrary to what it proclaims, not a universal category but an ethno-centric interpretation that nevertheless installs itself as the centre of the world (Jung and Withaeckx, 2021). In so doing, argues Wynter, other ways of being – and I would add, other beings too – have not only been discarded or inferiorised, but also negated and violently obliterated. Consequently, some black studies scholars maintain that “the human” inevitably necessitates the notion of blackness and the inferiorisation, disposability and killability of black people (Warren, 2018; Weheliye, 2014). Being human, means to be not-black. White ontology, thus, necessitates blackness while at the same time presents that blackness as peripheral. This places black people and people of colour at perpetual risk of dehumanisation, as their existence serves only to secure the ontological stability of the ethno-centric human."

Saini, Angela. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles M. Markmann. New. 1952. Reprint, London: Pluto-Press, 2008.

Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2 12/13 (1984): 19–70. https://doi.org/10/b4x7gc.

Disability and Animals

Taylor, Sunaura. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press, 2017.

Race and Animals

The main idea is that the dominant legal orders, including that of personhood, have imperial/colonial roots. As such, they seek to only put into the abstract shell of a 'person', someone who has rights, power, can take decisions, can deliberate, can be elected, etc. only a small portion of the population: rich, noble, locally born, white, non-slaves, men and not women, cognitively capable, literate/educated, etc. This used to exclude and still underprivileges slaves, certain human races, wrong sexes, other minorities, non-neurotypical humans and - of course nonhumans. Thus, there is no boundary between different forms of oppression.

"The book shows how the feminist critique of dominant forms of rationality can be extended to integrate theories of gender, race and class oppression with that of the domination of nature. Val Plumwood illuminates the relationship between women and nature, and between ecological feminism and other feminist theories."

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. 1993. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2003.

Plumwood, Val. “Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression.” In Ecology, edited by Carolyn Merchant, 2nd ed. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2008.

Also link to Subjectivity

Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Implications for Design

Considerations for the Intersectionality in application to Mississippi article.

Principles

Consider all forms of life together, as a community, however thriving or impoverished.
Consider that the objectives of all lives is to live good lives: thrive or have wellbeing.
Consider resilience as a property to retain meaningful history of such interspecies communities.
Consider some forms of relationships as forms of oppression. Acknowledge that it is impossible to consider some forms of oppression without the others.

Consequences

It is impossible to have Apolitical Ecology
All beings and even all historically accrued self-organising patterns or all Earth deserve a place in politics
The need to support voices/experiences/subjectivities of nonhuman stakeholders.

Challenges

Humans and human systems change their mind to quickly (pigeons, seagulls, etc.); humans have an obligation to provide persistence and to support change for all if/when it is needed
How to compensate for the past wrongs?
- Reparations
- Rebuilding
- Other means

Use Forms of Resistance from the Human Domains and Extend to Nonhumans

An approach can be to take the critiques and analyses that researchers and activists proposed in feminist, anarchist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist discourses and apply them to animals, plants, etc.

Schell, Christopher J., Karen Dyson, Tracy L. Fuentes, Simone Des Roches, Nyeema C. Harris, Danica Sterud Miller, Cleo A. Woelfle-Erskine, and Max R. Lambert. “The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Systemic Racism in Urban Environments.” Science 369, no. 6510 (2020): eaay4497. https://doi.org/10/gg8r7q.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. 1981. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Intersectionality and Participatory Design

Participation is not inherently ethical

“Why People Do Not Rebel: Issues of Self-Marginalization in Design for Mental Health,” Paola Pierri challenged the assumption of participatory design as inherently ethical. She pointed to research on the paradoxical nature of participation, since it starts from a power imbalance. She referred to the more internal forms of domination (as opposed to external forces alone) that make participation less egalitarian than is often imagined. Her work indicates that participation is not enough for allies. Struggles with participation are particularly evident in spaces where the power imbalances are more apparent such as spaces relating to mental health. From a few cases, Pierri drew some heuristics for dealing with issues of intersectionality pertaining to working alongside those with mental health issues.

Intersectionality and Decolonising Design

Intersectionality and Ecology

Many early environmentalists had exclusionary views towards human minorities and towards 'despoiled' human-modified landscapes. Such view separate 'nature' from 'humanity', 'civilisation' from 'savagery' etc. with detrimental effects.

Examples:

See the discussion on the geographies of attraction and fear in the chapter Part 3 in:

Haskell, David George. The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. New York: Viking, 2017.

Muir praised brave and clean mountaineers whom he saw as superior to the people in towns. He also thought white men could outwork "Sambos and Sallies" and described Indians as living dirty and irregular lives in clean wilderness.
Gifford Pinchot, founder of the national forests, was a supporter of the eugenics movement. He compared human races to species of trees and argued that both were limited by their places.
Aldo Leopold did not react to racial injustices of his day and argued that wilderness should be segregated and preserved. He wrote that the supply of wilderness was unlimited when Pilgrims landed.

The result is that cities and human-modified environments are seen as separate, less worthy, and - therefore - are afforded less care and protection.

References

On relationship with Interspecies issues:

Alexis, Nekeisha Alayna. ‘Beyond Compare: Intersectionality and Interspeciesism for Co-Liberation with Other Animals’. In The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Bob Fischer, 502. New York: Routledge, 2020.

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