AT: INTERSECTIONALITY
Their call for intersectionality is just a strategy of erasing the root of the 1AC harms
Darder Prof of Education at Claremont, & Torres, Prof of Public Policy and Comp Latino Studies at CSU-Long Beach, 1999 Antonia and Rodolfo, Shattering the Race Lens, from Critical Ethnicity pages 176-177
The failure of scholars to confront this dimension in their analysis of contemporary society as a racialized phenomenon and their tendency to continue treating class as merely one of a multiplicity of (equally valid) perspectives, which may or may not "intersect" with the process of racialization, are serious shortcomings. In addressing this issue, we must recognize that identity politics, which generally gloss over class differences and/or ignore class contradictions, have often been used by radical scholars and activists within African American, Latino, and other subordinate cultural communities in an effort to build a political base. Here, fabricated constructions of "race" are objectified and mediated as truth to ignite political support, divorced from the realities of class struggle. By so doing, they have unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion that the political and economic are separate spheres of society which can function independently-a view that firmly anchors and sustains prevailing class relations of power in society.
Ramon Grosfoguel and Chloe S. Georas posit that "social identities are constructed and reproduced in complex and entangled political, economic, and symbolic hierarchy."14 Given this complex entanglement, what is needed is a more dynamic and fluid notion of how we think about different cultural identities within the context of contemporary capitalist social formations. Such a perspective of identity would support our efforts to shatter static and frozen notions that perpetuate ahistorical, apolitical, and classless views of culturally pluralistic societies. How we analytically accomplish this is no easy matter. But however this task is approached, we must keep in mind Wood's concern:
We should not confuse respect for the plurality of human experience and social struggles with a complete dissolution of historical causality, where there is nothing but diversity, difference and contingency, no unifying structures, no logic of process, no capitalism and therefore no negation of it, no universal project of human emancipation.15
Hence, if we are to effectively challenge the horrendous economic impacts of globalization on racialized communities, we must recognize that a politics of identity is grossly inept and unsuited for building and sustaining collective political movements for social justice and economic democracy. Instead, what we need is to fundamentally reframe the very terrain that gives life to our political understanding of what it means to live, work, and struggle in a society with widening class differentiation and ever-increasing racialized inequality. Through such an analytical process of reframing, we can expand the terms by which identities are considered, examined, and defined, recognizing racialized relations of power are fundamentally shaped by the profound organizational and spatial transformations of the capitalist economy.
The analysis of intersectionality that the 1AC engages in is impossible - we can’t account for every infinite possibilities of intersection.
Cunningham 1998 [E. Christi, Connecticut Law Review , Winter, 30 Conn. L. Rev. 441]
A third limitation of intersectionality is that it makes little room for forms of discrimination that are not formally recognized. Beyond considerations of discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, religion, age, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, color, and class, discrimination on other bases is not commonly addressed. Yet who would doubt the existence of discrimination based on accent, n284 beauty, [*500] weight, n285 hairstyle, height, ethnicity, n286 and "others." n287 At its core, intersectionality as a theory is limited by its groupcentered focus. Group definition or group confinement is the essence of discrimination and the antithesis of the human process of self-invention. This Article is the first in a series that will attempt to imagine a paradigm of wholism beyond intersectionality. Wholism, in many respects a theory of radical individualism, asserts that there are no intersections. Wholism differs from intersectionality carried to its furthest extreme in that wholism's individual is self-defined while the individual at an exponential permutation of intersectionality is defined by the intersections of oppressive societal constructions. An intersection occurs where one thing and a separate thing connect. Wholism argues that separation is a social construction, that elements of identity have meaning in the context of a specific individual. Identity, however it exists and on whatever terms, n288 exists as it does within individuals so that no definition has power to impose meaning upon another individual. So, to the extent that race, for example, has meaning, it has meaning in individual terms. Black means what it does in the context of an individual person (the culmination of that individual's experiences and ancestral inheritance), and that meaning may not and probably does not and probably will not exist anywhere else. Another person therefore is not the intersection of meaning taken from the first or the "more" privileged. That person is a self-defined whole.
The intersectional approach in the status quo is too passive and responsive, and merely relies upon a rhetoric of “wait your turn and we might get there” – a new, radicalized interpretation of intersectionality in which identities are always inexplicably interconnected as opposed just having the potential to intersect is necessary.
Kocięda 13 [Aphrodite Kocięda is a graduate student in Communication at the University of South Florida and a contributor to the Vegan Feminist Network. Her current graduate research focuses on feminist activism in a postfeminist rape culture climate. 9/26/13 http://feministcurrent.com/8065/marginalization-is-messy-beyond-intersectionality/]
1) First of all, the actual framework that intersectionality operates from is problematic. I would argue that intersectionality operates from a white supremacist patriarchal foundation. Therefore, all populations excluded from the mainstream normative space, focus on how they’re excluded, not why the space is inherently exclusionary. Bitch magazine ran an article on intersectionality wherein the writer states: “’intersectionality’ becomes code for ‘wait your turn.’ Rather than being a reflection of a highly inclusive movement that integrates different lived experiences and priorities, it is used to say ‘just as soon as we get our needs taken care of, we’ll turn to yours.’” Through intersectionality, we are caught up in a discussion over who is “left out” of the current model because the actual model itself is exclusionary. On top of that, intersectionality is very reactionary. As such, I don’t believe it was ever meant to be transformative or radical. Intersectionality functions like the notion of “diversity.” Think about “diversity” programs in academic institutions, wherein diversity is understood as “non-white” skin. With this logic, programs recruit people of colour to their white classrooms, even though the knowledge’s still remain white. One could then argue that diversity, in this instance, reinforces whiteness, just with a “progressive” face. Diversity is born out of this white framework and in embracing this superficial idea of “diversity”, we are inevitably embracing whiteness. Diversity was merely a reaction to white supremacy. It was never meant to be critical. If you just Google “diversity”, you can see how superficial it is. It basically means “adding brown people into the white framework,” and in this way, whiteness is strengthened. Intersectionality is the same. It is merely a response, not a solution; born out of a frustration with whiteness, sexism, etc.2) Intersectionality is incomplete. It is only interested in charting how groups are currently oppressed, but doesn’t offer possibilities for systemic transformation. It must be radicalized. In fact, it naturalizes oppressed identities, stating that oftentimes these oppressed identities can intersect (race, gender, etc.), but does not problematize how these identities are created. Intersectionality relies on the static, fixed oppressed identity. That’s the problem. 3) I think it’s problematic that we view race, gender and class as independent systems that have the “potential” to collide and intersect as intersectional scholars purport, rather than systems that simultaneously and fluidly operate in conjunction with one another. In fact, I would argue that they constitute one another in a given social order. We’re supposed to act as though certain identities are fixed and can then intersect. I think we need to “radicalize” intersectionality so that we no longer view these systems of organization as separate entities, but as dynamic interpenetrating realities that exist within one another simultaneously. In an article titled: “I am a woman and a human: a Marxist Feminist critique of intersectionality theory,” the author, Eve Mitchell states: theories of an ‘interlocking matrix of oppressions,’ simply create a list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and historical context…Simply reducing this struggle to mere quantity, equality of distribution, or ‘representation,’ reinforces identity as a static, naturalized category. Since intersectionality doesn’t challenge these “fixed” identities but operates off of them, we unquestionably cite the grand trio: race, gender, and class, as though they each have their own roads that are neatly paved, where we can easily walk on them and understand how they operate. For some of us, the embodiment of this trio places us in a unique position where the roads do not merge into one, but are one from the beginning, and the research should reflect that. According to anthropologist Wesley Garrett, “Perhaps a better analogy would be that they are different lanes on the same highway, rather than separate roads that sporadically intersect.”
The emphasis on difference that is foundational to intersectionality is the same thing that causes its stagnation – people and groups are too busy playing “Oppression Olympics” to ever get anything done.
Rectenwald 13 [December 12, 2013; Michael Rectenwald is an author and a member of the editorial committee for The North Star; http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11411 What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics)]
Fisher never explicitly refers to intersectionality theory, but it lurks just beneath surface of his contempt in “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” Developed in the 1970s and ‘80s within feminism, intersectionality seeks to understand how power intersects identities along various axes, including those of race, gender, sexuality, or sexual preference, etc. It aims to locate the articulations of power as it traverses various subordinated peoples in different, multiple ways. Suggestive of a radical critique of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy and other forms of domination, it complicates any sense of gender, sex, class, or race as homogenous wholes. And it problematizes any hierarchy of one categorical determination over others. As such, it appears to serve as a method of analysis for opposing oppressions of all kinds. Intersectionality should, it seems, work to deepen our understanding of the composition of class society, and to add to the means for overcoming it. But operating under the same schema as a more simplified identity politics, intersectionality theory serves to isolate multiple and seemingly endless identity standpoints, without sufficiently articulating them with each other, or the forms of domination. The upshot in political practice is a static pluralism of reified social categories, each vying for more-subaltern-than-thou status on a field of one-downsmanship. While it may be useful for sociologists attempting to describe groups and their struggles with power, as a political theory, it is useless, or worse. This is because, by ending with the identification and isolation of its various constituencies, it in fact serves to sever the connections that it supposedly sought to understand and strengthen. The practical upshot of intersectionality theory is the perpetual articulation of difference, resulting in fragmentation and the stagnation of political activity that Fisher bemoans.
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