What Is Feminism Social Movement and Its Ideology Discussion Paper A Response paper: (1.5-2 pages) on the readings corresponding to the themes of your cho

What Is Feminism Social Movement and Its Ideology Discussion Paper A Response paper:

(1.5-2 pages) on the readings corresponding to the themes of your choice below. You will need to write on at least two readings (or reading/film combination).

the paper will include no more than a 40-word summary of the key point/argument of the essays, which shows that you haver read and understand the core ideas in the material. The rest of the paper, which is the most importantshould be an analysis of something YOU found interesting or disagreeable in the reading. You can also use an idea or two to connect it to real life scenarios you are familiar with but do deeper thinking/analysis of them. Remember, you might not understand the article in its entirety but there are enough strands you can focus on and explore. For instance, perhaps a reading on gender roles and labor will prompt you to think about your own home, which may or may not reflect the claims about gender and work in your home. So you can always think in depth about what the difference is in what the articles say and what you know. The goal of this exercise is to help you become a careful reader and to develop an independent voice. The best papers demonstrate not only that you read and comprehended the material, but you independently and creatively engage the content (not just summarizing or saying you agree/disagree or thanking the good lord that you don’t live like those other people or how evolved you are because you and your family do not adhere to some backwater logic etc etc. :)) Aim to think on paper instead and don’t be afraid to be controversial.

They also follow proper citation and include page numbers when using quotes .

A note on how to use quotes: Quotes should be used to help you make complex points and should thus not be basic ideas. Basic thoughts you can easily repeat (like facts and general statements) should be paraphrased using your own works. Even when you use good conceptual quotes, though, make sure you limit your quotes 3 lines. You should develop the habit of writing in your own voice as much as possible.

Since you have 9 chances to submit these papers, no late papers will be accepted.

Specification:

Font Type: Times New Roman
Font Size: 12 points
Margins: 1-inch all around
Page number: The pages requirement excludes any biographical information. I will subtract a full point from any paper that does not follow the guidelines. Canvas already tracks your identity so don’t waste paper space by providing biographical and course information. Just put your name and last and last name and write your essay and upload. Producing an extra sentence or two can make the world of difference for making your ideas compelling so no shortcuts.

Use Hooks, intersectionality, and Gaga for resources. to answer what is feminism. A primer on
Intersectionality
Table of Contents
Intersectionality:
Why a New Prism is Needed … 2
Capturing the New Mood in America … 2
Re-envisioning Group-Based Interventions … 3
1. Intersectional Analysis … 3
2. Intersectional Interventions …4
3. Intersectional Advocacy … 5
“What Kind of Ally are You?” … 7
Intersectionality: Why a New Prism is Needed
Social justice advocacy has entered a new era. Rising expectations brought about by the
remarkable shift in the national political arena have heightened the need to rethink standard
approaches to social justice advocacy. One of the most significant aspects of current social
justice practice that warrants rethinking, is the dominance of a particular orientation that
disaggregates social problems into discrete challenges facing specific groups. These groups
are often defined in mutually exclusive ways, generating artificial distinctions and sometimes conflicting agendas.
This approach—sometimes called the single-axis analysis—corresponds to the silo-oriented
structure of social justice mobilization and grant making. Interventions based on such
models can frequently be ineffective and sometimes even lead to unnecessary exclusion
and conflict within social justice movements. In cases where race, gender, sexual identity
and class work together to limit access to social goods such as employment, fair immigration, healthcare, child care, or education, it is essential that social justice interventions be
grounded in an understanding of how these factors operate together. Intersectionality can
provide that grounding.
Capturing the New Mood in America
Never in recent memory have so many Americans been so hopeful that significant social
transformation is possible. This new sense of possibility fuels the need for thought and action leaders to fashion new and effective strategies to deliver equitable opportunity, security and well-being to those who have been historically marginalized and underserved. At
this time of rising expectations, traditional civil rights issues such as violence against
women, pay equity, and affirmative action are meeting up with newer issues such as gay
marriage, immigration reform, mass incarceration, and environmental racism.
These new challenges have only heightened the need to find new modes to enable effective
cooperation and problem-solving across constituencies. One thing is clear: none of the
pressing social justice issues can be productively advanced through traditional frameworks
by explaining these problems as the product of one axis of exclusion. Equally important,
none of these social problems are exclusive to one set of people, separately defined. Contrary to the dominant framing of some of these issues, contemporary immigrants are not all
Latino; prisoners are not all men; affirmative action beneficiaries are not all African American; and LGBTs are not all white and middle class. Recognizing that these constituencies
are multiply-constituted means that interventions and programs designed to address group
interests can no longer be framed in exclusionary terms. There are constituencies within
constituencies that are not well-served by such categorical thinking.
2
Re-envisioning Group-Based Interventions
Intersectionality is a concept that enables us to recognize the fact that perceived group
membership can make people vulnerable to various forms of bias, yet because we are simultaneously members of many groups, our complex identities can shape the specific way
we each experience that bias. For example, men and women can often experience racism
differently, just as women of different races can experience sexism differently, and so on.
As a result, an intersectional approach goes beyond conventional analysis in order to focus
our attention on injuries that we otherwise might not recognize. The illustration below
represents what it means to move beyond conventional forms of group and issue-based intervention. It demonstrates that the groups in question are not mutually exclusive, but are in
fact multidimensional. Internally each group has multiple characteristics that must be considered in shaping advocacy and public policy. Whether those goals are equal opportunity,
fair immigration policies, equitable pay, a just criminal justice system, or more inclusive
visions of equal citizenship, the multidimensionality of these groups must be factored into
the equation. These goals can be advanced by using an intersectional prism to 1) analyze
social problems more fully; 2) shape more effective interventions; and 3) promote more
inclusive coalitional advocacy.
Intersectionality, a term coined by AAPF’s Kimberle
Crenshaw, has been offered as a prism from which to
view a range of social problems to better ensure inclusiveness of remedies, and to identify opportunities for
greater collaboration between and across social movements. Intersectionality has traveled globally, shaping
social justice awareness and actions in Europe as well as
in the Global South. Several national, regional and now
UN documents acknowledge the concept and encourage
the development of policies and practices to sustain more
productive approaches to equity, opportunity, and basic
human rights.
1. Intersectional Analysis
Intersectionality is thus a critical lens for bringing awareness and capacity to the social justice industry in order to expand and deepen its interventions. Intersectionality was initially conceived as
a way to present a simple reality that seemed to be hidden by conventional thinking about discrimination and exclusion. This simple reality is that disadvantage or exclusion can be based on
the interaction of multiple factors rather than just one. Yet conventional approaches to social
problems are often organized as though these risk factors are mutually exclusive and separable.
As a consequence, many interventions and policies fail to capture the interactive effects of race,
gender, sexuality, class, etc. and marginalize the needs of those who are multiply affected by
them.
The exclusionary consequences of this problematic thinking were starkly presented in a case in
which Black women challenged the exclusionary hiring practices of auto maker General Motors.
In this historically race and gender segregated auto industry, women were only permitted to work
in front office jobs and African Americans were limited to heavy industrial work.
3
The problem for African American women was even more acute: the front office jobs were
only available to women who were white, and the industrial jobs were appropriate only for
Blacks who were men. African American women argued that they had clearly been discriminated against on the basis of race and gender, but in Degraffenreid v. General Motors,
the court dismissed their case because neither white women nor African American men
were similarly excluded. In essence, the trial court was not convinced that the Black female plaintiffs could prove that GM had engaged
in gender discrimination since obviously not all
women were excluded, nor could they prove race
discrimination because not all African Americans were excluded. Clearly something had happened to these plaintiffs, but the existing understanding of discrimination blinded the court to
this kind of discrimination. Race and gender discrimination was seen as group based and exclusive, not overlapping and multiply-constituted.
As a consequence of this limited thinking, the
discrimination that happened to these plaintiffs
literally fell through the cracks.
It was in thinking about why such a “big miss” could have happened within a complex
structure of antidiscrimination law that intersectionality was born. The specific effort was
to locate and visualize this discrimination at a place where conventional thinking did not
go, that is, where various forms of discrimination overlapped rather than ran parallel. Thus,
one function of the intersectional prism is to draw attention to the overlap of various forms
of exclusion or disadvantage.
2. Intersectional Interventions
The second and important dimension of intersectionality was reflected in the DeGraffenreid
court’s inability to address the obvious injury suffered by the Black female plaintiffs. To
highlight the metaphor again, it was as if antidiscrimination law was called to the scene of
an accident, but because it was unclear whether the accident was caused exclusively by
race or by gender, each ambulance sped away, leaving these plaintiffs lying in the intersection. This second dimension of intersectionality directs attention to the ways that social
policy, advocacy and social movements are often ill-equipped to address the needs of constituents who struggle against more than one disadvantage or discrimination. When feminism focuses exclusively on gender, or antiracism on race, or LGBT on sexual identity,
they often fail to comprehend that countless numbers of their constituents confront circumstances and challenges that reflect more than one barrier or obstacle.
Social movements typically follow analyses similar to the discussion in DeGraffenreid.
They approach intersectional problems by claiming that the various issues should be taken
up separately, preferably by separate institutions or organizations. Separating out or disaggregating such dynamics into distinct social problems, frequently distorts certain experiences or renders them completely invisible.
4
The failure to analyze and approach social problems from an intersectional lens can cause
advocates and other actors to miss the boat on important issues. This sometimes leads to
unfortunate or even tragic consequences. One example involves the special vulnerability of
immigrant women whose lives are threatened by their abusive citizen spouses. Earlier immigration “reform” required spouses who immigrated to the US to marry American citizens
to remain “properly married” for two years before they
were eligible to receive permanent resident status. This
requirement provided no exceptions for battered women
who often faced the risk of serious injury and death on the
one hand, or deportation on the other. Yet, advocates
fighting for fairer immigration policies were generally uninformed about vulnerabilities relating to gender, while advocates for domestic violence survivors never considered
that members of their constituency included immigrant
women seeking permanent residence status.
Only the predictably tragic consequences of this double burden brought this problem into
the light, but even then the solutions did little to increase the safety of the most vulnerable
women.
Thinking and acting intersectionally from the start might have ensured that advocates for
fair immigration policy and advocates for domestic violence survivors would have envisioned their common cause and seen their shared constituencies more clearly.
Intersectionality thus informs not only a fuller understanding of the sometimes overlapping
forces that structure the lives of constituents, but also draws attention to the limited vision
that grounds advocacy and intervention on their behalf. Where problems are intersectional
Intersectionality not only provides a tool to render certain exclusions more visible, it
also points in the direction of a reframed approach to social justice politics. Intersectionality is thus a critical lens for bringing awareness and capacity to the social justice industry in order to expand and deepen its interventions.
3. Intersectional Advocacy
The movement-building insights of intersectionality implicate the structure and occasional
tensions between social justice movements. All too frequently, organizations and movements shape their rhetorical claims in ways that not only fail to address other dimensions of
disadvantage, but sometimes reinforce them as well. There are now several classic cases
where movements have been tragically pitted against one another in pursuing their legitimate ends. Historically, such examples include feminist anti-rape advocacy that sometimes
foregrounded the stereotype of the Black rapist in appealing for legal reform; domestic violence advocacy that linked protection of women to the growth of incarceration; affirmative
action advocacy that centralized gender over race; and gay marriage advocacy that linked
the right to marry to nuclear, economically viable, two-parent families. What these examples have in common are the various ways—sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit—
that key arguments or images used to advance one cause sometimes retard or work against
other social justice interests.
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These rhetorical problems exacerbate and are exacerbated by a host of
“isms” that circulate within these constituencies. For example, sexism, homophobia, racism, and xenophobia exist within communities of
color, immigrant communities, LGBT communities, and others. These
dynamics sometimes serve as the scaffolding for rhetoric that undermines efforts to build progressive social justice coalitions. The challenges grow more ominous when one recognizes that none of these
communities are exclusive. Like “friendly fire,” the rhetoric hurled
back and forth between communities often strike members within.
Thus, to use one unfortunate example, in the aftermath of Proposition 8
campaign in California, the recriminations and tensions between Blacks
and Latinos on one hand, and the LGBT community on the other were
sometimes premised on the assumption that these constituencies were utterly distinct warring camps and that neither was part of the other. This
disastrous outcome has been particularly tragic for those simultaneously
members of both communities. In the rallies, marches and civic debate following November elections in California, Black and Latino LGBTs suffered raced-based insults from other LGBTs and homophobic insults from
other people of color. There were casualties of communities at war with
themselves.
Clearly one significant factor that permits these destructive politics to prevail is the failure
to imagine, elevate and incorporate the sensibilities of LGBTs who are Black and Latino in
the agenda setting of both the LGBT and people of color communities.
At the most basic level, intersectional awareness encourages advocates and policy
makers to ask how their approaches address and engage constituent members who
are in fact constituents of other social groups as well. How do debates across constituencies sound different when it is recognized that each community contains
members of the other? What is the broadest articulation of a problem that would
embrace more than the interests of the most advantaged?
Movement politics and advocacy must be recalibrated to
more fully incorporate constituencies at the margins and
to move away from single issue organizing. These are
challenging questions and often there is no one right answer. But it is clear that ignoring these issues will no
longer do. Efforts must be expanded to make the practice of intersectional awareness routine so that the hard
work of creating and sustaining non-exclusive social justice initiatives becomes second-nature to everyone.
6
“What Kind of Ally are You?”
* Or, What is your Disaster Relief Kit?
Speech Delivered by Kimberle
Crenshaw
V-Day 10th Anniversary Celebration
The Superdome
New Orleans, LA
April 11, 2008
You know, whenever I meet people from other countries, there are two things they want to
talk about — and one is Hurricane Katrina. Citizens of the word were shocked that our friends,
our families, our fellow citizens and humans, would be called “refugees.” Can there be any doubt
that this slip of the tongue describes exactly who they were seen to be — you know, maybe they
are God’s children, but not exactly our responsibility.
And it’s not that the US was somehow exceptional in its miserable DISASTER RELIEF efforts.
When we look at disaster relief all over the world, this American experience was tragically universal. Whether it was the Tsunami that killed thousands in Asia and Africa, the earthquake that
wiped out 300,000 in Central Asia, Hurricane Mitch that devastated the lives of thousands in Central America, the DISASTER RELIEF failures were essentially the same: the poor, ethnically and
racially marginalized, the women, the children, the old, the disabled, were all hardest hit by the
disaster and least served by the relief. And why is this the case? Kofi Annan was asked during
one of the crises whether the relief efforts were going to be “gender sensitive”. He responded
that since all people were effected the same, then the disaster relief would be the same. Not true
of course.
We know that women in the midst of natural disasters or conflict are vulnerable to a whole range
of harms, including loss of life, harassment, violence, rape and other forms of sexual abuse. We
know they have different needs, they have different responsibilities, and the effect of disasters
often exacerbates their vulnerability to violence and harm. And we also know that it isn’t just ALL
WOMEN from region to region who are effected the most. It is SOME women, the women who
are also the ones who are socially marginal, who are isolated, who are already burdened or
viewed as less valued women. If you take just about any of these contexts and put a different
face on these women — a difference race, caste, or ethnicity — I believe that the response would
be different. Gender-neutral Disaster Relief efforts don’t work, because the effects of disaster
intersect with women’s status, role, and context so that the disaster has secondary and tertiary
effects.
In the same way that we know that disaster doesn’t effect men and women in the same way, it
also doesn’t always effect people the same way across race or social class either. Yet when we
run to the rescue and don’t pay attention to race or caste or ethnicity, all the preexisting dynamics
that marginalized some communities and made them vulnerable to receive the brunt of the disaster will render them less worthy of relief when the disaster strikes. In India for example, the
Dalits, those who are at the bottom of the caste structure, were often entirely excluded from disaster relief efforts after the Tsunami. Some Dalit villages destroyed by the Tsunami received no
rations or water because locals distributing the goods believed that Dalits didn’t need or deserve
relief. Some believed that the Dalits destitution pre-existed the disaster so there was no need to
lift the burdens that befell them along with everyone else. Others believed that Dalits should play
the same role in the relief camps that they play in the villages, that is, removing dead bodies, carrying baskets of human waste on their heads, doing the most degrading dehumanizing work for
7
mere rations or for no pay at all. The problem with disaster relief that is colorblind, caste-blind
or gender blind is that it reinforces all of the ills, the privileges, the silences, the oppressions that
preexisted the disaster, and often makes them worst.
Now believe it or not, I’m not here to talk about governments, or the UN, or any supernational
entities. I’m really here to talk about us, all of us RIGHT HERE. I’m here to ask us, “what kind
of Disaster Relief are we trying to build here?” Or to put it another way, we are all trying to
build a Global Movement to end a tragedy—something we call VIOLENCE. We want to intervene,
put our bodies, our minds, our resources between this particular man-made disaster and its effects. What kind of tools are in OUR disaster relief kits? Are we as a movement prepared to do
any better than our governments? We want to be allies in this effort, but exactly what kind of
ally are we prepared to be? Are we “just about me,” allies, or are we “taking it to the mat” allies? Well, maybe it really depends on whether we can see, hear and respond to those problems
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