Mathematical Inqueery

Abstract

Rodriguez, N. M., Martino, W. J., Ingrey, J. C., & Brockenbrough, E. (2016). Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education. Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education, (January 2016), 161. The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression” was defined in a social movement context by the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in “A Black Feminist Statement” as the structural anchor of the experience of simultaneous oppressions and as the target of integrated political struggle (CRC 1977/1981/1983, p. 210). Nearly Sociologist Jean Ait Belkhir (an exponent of the “race, gender, and class” framework, which notably excludes sexuality as a category of analysis) emphasizes the generative role of Black feminism in the development of integrative approaches to conceptualizing oppressions as multiple, co-constitutive, and simultaneous: “until the emergence of black feminism in the United States, not a single social theorist took seriously the concept of the simultaneity of [race, gender and class] intersection in people’s lives. This concept is one of the greatest gifts of black women’s studies to social theory as a whole” (Belkhir 2009, p. 303). Although, at this point in time, the concept of “intersectionality” has become the predominant idiom for referencing multiple social identities produced by multiple systems of oppression and privilege, it is impor-tant to note that the now-popular “intersection” metaphor has numerous historical antecedents in US Black feminism which can be traced to the nineteenth century (Sheftall 1995; Gines 2014). But perhaps “interlocking systems of oppression” in the CRC’s account functions as what Crenshaw, speaking of intersectionality, termed a “provisional concept”: “in mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories” but its aim is to “disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable” The integrative analysis mitigates against the positing of “gender and racial essences” embodied in ostensibly “generic” normative group members (e.g., white heterosexual women), the result of which, as the Black feminist legal scholar Angela Harris argues, “is to reduce the lives of people who experience multiple forms of oppression to addition problems: […] ‘racism + sexism + homophobia = black lesbian experience’” (Harris 1990, p. 588 In other words, what lies largely before us, even as it is prefigured in the work of the CRC, is an integrative analysis of and struggle against the plural and sometimes contradictory manifestations of heteronormativity, heterosexism, and homophobia in and through the “multilayered texture” of our lives.