Check this one out. Another chill. Read it all if you have time and not just my excerpt.
INTERSECTIONALITY IS NOT OPTIONAL
Flavia Dzodan, one of my favourite ladies ever, wrote an excellent piece a few months ago about the role of intersectionality in feminism, the critical importance of acknowledging that oppression rarely occurs upon a single axis. Many of the points she raised in that piece resonated with why I left feminism, because it felt like a movement that was no longer safe and productive for me, but intersectionality is not just something feminism needs, which is why it is something I still care about, even though I don’t identify with the movement. Intersectionality should be a part of all anti-oppression work, because it is core to discussing, and combating, oppression.
These systems are all connected. There are connections between racism and ableism, for example. These things interact with and play off each other. Identities cannot be neatly segmented into little pieces that can be individually addressed, because they interlock with each other. People, living beings, cannot be chopped apart for a movement. And movements that refuse to acknowledge their own complicity with oppression will continue the same acts of oppression, will repeat the same crimes committed by those who went before.
Some of the roots of feminism lie, deeply, in ableism, classism, and racism. Access to birth control, a major cause for the early feminist movement, a cause women fought very, very hard for, was closely tied with eugenics. You cannot talk about the history of the reproductive rights movement without addressing eugenics, without acknowledging the role that racist and ableist rhetoric played in early conversations about reproductive rights. Arguments for birth control included the firm conviction that it would rid the world of poor people, people of colour, and cripples, that it would reduce reproduction by ‘animals’ and the ‘feebleminded.’ These arguments laid the groundwork for experiments on these communities, like women in Puerto Rico who suffered for the sake of the Pill, and disabled women who were sterilised in institutions.
This is history. It’s fact. This information is readily available. And it plays directly into ongoing issues in conversations about reproductive rights, like the idea of the ‘justified abortion’ for a ‘severely disabled’ fetus, like the fact that many conversations about the growing global population include ‘population control’ as a buzzword, a buzzword with serious racial implications, like the fact that numerous states still run programs that sponsor sterilisation for low income women. This isn’t history; these are things that are happening right now.
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http://meloukhia.net/2011/12/intersectionality_is_not_optional.html
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