Why Intersectionality Matters Today

Intersectionality is the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities.” Related to systems of oppression and discrimination, intersectionality views identity as a complex creature made up of various categories such as gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, and other classifications. Intersectionality claims that identity is fluid and defined by multiple classifications.  Intersectionality does more than just form the identity of a person. Among overlapping cultures, intersectionality can raise conflict between groups with seemingly parallel intentions from an outsider’s perspective. This conflict leads to infighting and apparent counter intuitive action which benefits neither.

For example, LGBTQ+ rights have become increasingly highlighted in the media in recent years. With the United States finally recognizing gay marriage as a human right, LGBTQ+ rights have made a great step forward on the path to equality. However, the community does not always get along. Transgender females (male to female transitioning) have recently been falling into some conflict with other sections of the community. Notably, transgender females often have a negative view of “drag queens.”

Drag queens are usually gay men, who do not identify as female, but assume an alternate drag identity in the form of an over the top, comedic persona. Many transgender females consider the drag queen’s dramatic makeup, sometimes purposefully masculine features, dramatic demeanor, and the monetization of their persona in comedy skits to be offensive. Transgender women feel personally attacked by the drag queen, considering their existence to be an insult to “actual trans people.” This is a unique combination of transphobia vs homophobia/sexism. Trans people have the perspective that the drag queen’s actions display transphobia, and drag queens feel discriminated against because their identity as men, according to trans females, should prevent them from acting like females. The complexity of this conflict creates a unique dialogue among the LGBTQ+ community, especially with increasing popularity of drag queens through programs like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Youtubers like Jefree Star, whose over the top personality often rubs other members of the LGBTQ+ community the wrong way.

Intersectionality also allows us to view the identity of marginalized groups more specifically. A biracial female does not only deal with being involved in current women’s rights issues, like fighting for abortion, but is also classified by their race- viewed as both one and the other. If half black, this means that they feel particularly involved in current racial issues such as police brutality and continued stereotyping. However, their identity is also twofold; a lightskinned black is often viewed as outside of the group as inside, as seen recently when Jesse Williams spoke out at the BET Awards, and was met with more negative reaction than positive. Suddenly, the world was listening to Jesse where they hadn’t listened to dark skinned black men before- his light-skinned privilege set him apart from truly oppressed blacks, who do not see him as one of them  because of his complexion and blue eyes. Some viewers went so far to say that because he is light skinned, and his wife is also light skinned, Jesse Williams only feeds into the stereotype that light-skinned blacks are attractive, and those who are past a certain shade are the bad ones.

As we can see, Intersectionality is a complex form of identification. Conflict among identity groups is always evolving and changing. Because people belong to multiple groups, the interests of one group can sometimes run seemingly against their interests in another group.

Kenneth Burke’s “Identification”and Facebook.

Source Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqxNtEc4rzc
Charlie Rose Interviews Facebook Leaders Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, COO.

In Kenneth Burke’s Identification theory, as I touched on last week, individuals are identified by the skills, experiences, and relationships they have with others. Identifying with or against something is important for assigning morality, responsibility, and even predicting contingency.

In Charlie Rose’s interview of the ‘bergs (That’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg), he continuously tries to pit the two against other companies by implying that Facebook may, in the future, buy other companies or infringe upon their niches by developing ways to be in competition with them. Zuckerberg and Sandberg again insist that there is no conflict to be found. Instead, their goal is to expand Facebook to work alongside other companies, like Google, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix- not to make Facebook the “web within a web” Rose suggests, but to make it a place for people to link to other websites, existing symbiotically. (We now know that this isn’t entirely honest, because since 2005, Facebook has bought out more than 50 companies, including such big names as Instagram and WhatsApp… but I digress).

Along the same lines of my last blog post about cooperation and exploitation, and on a business standpoint instead of a personal one, Zuckerberg and Sandberg are certainly thinking along the lines of cooperation. Facebook’s goal is to encourage the cooperation of companies so that all may benefit from a larger network. However, does this work? Will it continue to work in the future?

With all companies with overlapping niches wanting to command the largest percentage of consumers, Facebook isn’t only an outlet for communication, but an outlet for trash-talking and working against others as well. Using Facebook, companies are easily able to track the posts of companies within their niche and make posts that counter them. Two local boutiques can easily get into a sales battle to draw in the most customers, or use past posts from the other boutique against them by creating or reviving drama. Paying reviewers to post negative reviews on company pages isn’t unheard of in the communication era, and slander runs rampant as easily as company collaboration.
It all comes down to the identification of the companies and how they intend to use Facebook. Facebook can be the positive communication outlet and method for ompanies to reach out to consumers, as intended, OR Facebook can be a weapon of mass destruction and promote slander and the infighting of niche businesses.

Cooperation and Exploitation – Kenneth Burke

“When two men collaborate in an enterprise to which they contribute different kinds of services and from which they derive different amounts and kinds of profit, who is to say once and for all, just where “cooperation” ends and one partner’s “exploitation” of the other begins?”

This quote from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives calls into question the precarious balance of power between collaborative partners. People are often assigned value by the skills and experience they possess, however, individuals all collect different experiences and different skills in varying degrees and immeasurable amounts.

For example, if two men are working together to build a house, they bring their separate skills with them. One is a master at woodworking- he constructs the frame of the house, its base structure, but he knows nothing about plaster and insulation. The second man uses his skills to construct the walls of the house. The two of them fall into an altercation over who has truly contributed the most to the house. However, it is indeterminable. Without the woodworker, the house would have no shape, no frame, and would collapse. Without the plasterer, the house would be nothing but a frame, and would not serve its functional purpose of providing shelter. The two men, with their vastly different skills, have collaborated to create something that they both benefit from. Unless one takes the house entirely for himself, neither is exploiting the other.

However, it is not always so easy to determine that both parties have profited equally from an exchange. It can sometimes be difficult to determine if a relationship is entirely symbiotic, and draw the line for when things have gotten out of hand. For example, the relationship between doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and the public should be a relatively simple institution. The doctor writes a prescription for a drug approved by the pharmaceutical institution, which provides it to the consumer to cure or lessen an ailment. However, recently we have seen an increase in skepticism concerning the morality of pharmaceutical companies. Instead, the relationship is more parasitic than symbiotic. What we see is a relationship where the pharmaceutical company encourages the doctor to prescribe specific medication with a higher price tag, additional side effects, or isn’t at top efficiency. The public, conditioned to trust a doctor’s authority, is manipulated into the consumption of drugs that are not the highest quality, creating a cycle of reliance wherein the consumer must consistently return to treat symptoms instead of illnesses, feeding money into the pocket of the beast.

Perhaps this seems a little conspiratorial, but it is certainly an example of how rhetoric can be used to nudge cooperation into the lands of exploitation. To further their own means, sometimes people take more than what is due to them, without putting in an equal share.

Contact Zones in Chapter Two of PBS’s “Sugar”

Mary Louise Pratt introduces “The Contact Zone” as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (34). In PBS’s short film series, “Sugar,” we meet Sugar the day she’s released from prison. As sugar tries to re-assimilate into the urban world she left after years away in prison, she finds that the world around her as changed, but the world’s expectations for her have not. Each chapter is written and directed by a new coordinator, and so each of the five chapters has something different to say about Sugar’s life.

In Chapter Two, we begin to learn a little bit about the dark path Sugar was traveling down which led to her incarceration, and how the phenomenon of contact zones keep her life devoid of upward mobility and personal recover. Sugar is confronted by a white man and his latino cohort on the way to “Chico’s,” but the white man decides to make a quick stop first, where his cohort exits the car to perform some exchange beside a graffitied wall. Although not explicitly stated, the audience can assume that what is happening here is an exchange of money for drugs, and that Chico’s is Sugar’s old criminal hangout. At this point, being rejected by her sister and the father of her child, Chico’s is the only home we know that Sugar has left.

Chapter Two confronts our expectations for minority groups. Knowing what we do about low income, urban areas, the audience can readily assume that Sugar was tangled up in the drug trade. The two criminal cohorts try to drag Sugar back into her old ways. In fact, where else does she have to turn? With no family or friends to give her aid and shelter, the criminal posse and the money they promise are the only people for Sugar to turn to.

We also see that Sugar and her friends are quite aware of their positions in the world. When a man is shot, the only thing they can do is gather their things and skedaddle. As a low income, minority woman just out of jail, Sugar seems to know that should she be discovered at the scene of a crime, it would be the end for her. She takes some of the money and flees. When it comes to contact zones, what we see here is an admission of the effect that the criminalization of minority groups has on low income areas. The white man has considerable power over Sugar, and her lack of a stable support group keeps her entrapped in a life of crime from which she cannot escape. Law enforcement is something to run from in fear, not a beacon of support and justice.

PBS’s “How Smart Can You Get”

A segment of PBS’s short documentary “How Smart Can You Get,” explores current advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology, showing examples of how robots are currently being developed.It’s extraordinary how past creative outlets have appealed to the minds of future scientists. Drawing inspiration from fictional medium, the modern engineer can begin to craft the things they wished they could have pulled out of their favorite childhood movies and possessed- Lace-Up Shoes, Hoverboards, and of course, highly sarcastic robotic assistants. In this way, it isn’t only scientists that change the technology of the future. The creative writers and the dreamers invent the impossible, and inventors and engineers tinker to make them possible. C3PO and R2-D2 (and other intelligent, semi-sentient science fiction robots throughout the years) have been the inspiration for countless technological advances. Over time, science fiction and technology have come closer together, slowly changing our perception of what reality is and convincing a growing audience of sci-fi fans that we are actually drawing closer to a “robot revolution.”

There’s always the question of how futuristic, and how realistic, do we want our technology to become. Devices like the helpful, bug-eyed, friendly household robots take cue from future tech like Rosie from The Jetsons. These clearly non-human beings may  show some amount of artificial intelligence and capability to reason, but there is no mistaking that their primary function is not companionship. Maid-type robots are made to look endearing, but clearly robotic. This ability to discern their function immediately helpful in giving comfort to the nearby humans.

However, Simon the robot as seen in the PBS documentary is a different sort of robot, verging on android. By being extremely attentive and sentimental, and replicating human speech mannerisms and facial patterns, Simon triggers intense empathy and is almost convincingly human. Humanizing machines is a big step in making robots we can live with. However, don’t we also risk stepping into uncanny valley- where the resemblance of an artificial being to a human only increases the amount of discomfort and natural unease? Our desire to make the best, most intelligent, advanced, and useful robot has to be balanced with our need for something like it. With humans being so easily tricked and persuaded by a convincing and endearing robot, artificial intelligence becomes dangerous. Our society still has quite a ways to go before we’re ready for that.