Intersectionality today

The endless debates on intersectionality over the last few decades, since Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw proposed this perspective in 1989 (although the question of the “convergence of struggles” was already raised in the struggles of the 60s and 70s), have no doubt exhausted the concept, making it difficult to use it without caution.

Today, militant demands against discrimination of all kinds seem to be trapped in an inescapable fragmentation: each movement focuses first on its own struggle, and it’s only later that the question of the link with other struggles arises. Demands are focused on sexism, validism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, islamophobia, class inequalities, etc… each of which may or may not obtain a small piece of the rights granted to it by those in power (or, more broadly, by the city) (admittedly, in today’s powerfully reactionary atmosphere, these rights are threatened with regression just about everywhere).

But as soon as we try to put in place a broader perspective, capable of embracing these different struggles in a common platform, conflicts arise, as if everyone is trying to looking after number one. There’s a kind of identity-based tension that unfortunately seems to me to be very symptomatic of the contemporary world, and could even be considered as a production of hyper-individualistic neoliberal ideology.

As soon as we try to propose broader perspectives – ecomarxism, ecofeminism – or timidly slip in a word like capitalism, many activists turn their heads away in embarrassment. It’s as if this solidarity had to be built, painstakingly won, on incompatible or conflicting starting positions.

Now, more than ever, I believe we should all, as a matter of urgency, whatever our motivating causes, adopt a common platform. If we fail to do so, if we are content to defend our own territory while ignoring those of our neighbors, we are playing into the hands of those in power and capitalists who love nothing more than “divide and conquer”.