CentreLGS Conference: Theorising Intersectionality
Saturday 21 - Sunday 22 May 2005 @ Keele University
Abstracts:
To view participants abstracts, please click on the alphabetical
links below (abstracts are listed by surname), or download
the full list of abstracts in Microsoft Word format.
A - B
| C - D
| E - G
| H - J
| K | L
- P | Q
- R | S
| T - V
| W - Z
Ruth Quiney
Paper Title: Pathologies of Mothering: intersections
of class and race in the creation of the ‘Bad Mother’
Abstract: This paper will examine the
intersectionality of class and race-based cultural paradigms
of the ‘bad mother’- an important category
not only for the reification of gender, class and racial
hierarchies, but also for the categorisation of families
marked by poverty or racial difference as inadequate and
abnormal. Examining representations of the poor, working
class or ‘ethnic-minority’ mother in legal,
journalistic and literary materials, this paper argues
that the creation and punishment of ‘bad mothers’
serves a disciplinary function for women generally, constructing
reproduction and nurturance as determinant of female identity,
and validating a privatised, pedagogic form of child-rearing
as the only acceptable norm. It also suggests that the
‘bad mother’ paradigm intersects with the
social and economic phenomenon of 'feminisation' (the
lowering status and security of the 'flexible/global’
labour force) and reflects mass cultural fears of increasing
commodification and the erosion of traditional gendered
categories by developing technologies (including reproductive
technologies) and globalisation.
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Momin Rahman
University of Strathclyde, UK
Paper Title: Theorising intersectionality: understanding
equality, identities and ontology
Abstract: A focus on intersectionality
necessarily assumes separate dimensions of signification
and oppression. In this paper I use recent comparative
work on asylum/immigration and sexuality to explore whether
separate analytics of social relationships are useful
in understanding ‘intersections’.
As the object of law and social policy, signification
and oppression can be understood as a concern with the
hierarchical social construction of identities and the
resultant exploitation and inequalities. However, identities
are not indicative of an essential authenticity, but rather
they are a circuit of self and public representations
which combine appeals to ‘universal’ notions
of humanity and equality with particularistic claims for
policy remedies, relating to both ‘recognition’
and ‘redistribution’. Similarly, equality
cannot therefore be understood only as a universal condition
to which oppressed identities aspire, but it must also
be understood as a discursive political resource which
is used to articulate and promote versions of lived experience.
Therefore, I argue that a focus on the ontology of lived
experience is necessary to a more astute understanding
of how social identities and inequalities become the objects
of law and social policy.
In understanding the ontology of lived experience in
dimensions of sexuality and ethnicity, I explore whether
the common dynamics which effect identities and inequalities
suggests a focus on intersections as the defining site
of signification and oppression - with different or ‘separate’
consequences - rather than theorising intersectionality
as the crossover site of pre-existing dimensions of equalities.
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Sherene Razack (Plenary Speaker)
University of Toronto, Canada
Paper Title: Muslim Women's Bodies in the New
World Order: Intersectionality or Interlocking Systems
of Oppression?
Abstract: Gender oppression, when understood
as what men do to women requires an erasure of histories
of colonialism, class exploitation, heterosexism and ableism.
The power of this simplified explanation is nowhere more
evident than in feminist narratives of violence against
women. Since all groups of women encounter sexualized
violence (rape, domestic violence, prostitution), it has
been relatively easy to rely on an analytical framework
of what men do to women, leaving unexamined what women
do to other women. Struggling to transcend the limitations
of a universalist framework, feminists turned to theories
of intersectionality, seeking to complicate women’s
experiences of oppression by examining how one experience
of oppression combines with another one to structure women’s
lives. Combining the effects of oppression this way, however,
is often unsatisfactory. That women with disabilities
experience a higher rate of sexual violence than other
women doesn’t shed light on how and why this occurs.
Significantly, complicating the effects of oppression
often leaves unexamined how one system relies on another
system to give it meaning. When we focus on the mutually
constitutive aspects of systems of oppression, we come
to an understanding of the specific ways in which women
participate in oppressing other women.
To develop the theme of interlocking oppression and
to focus on the complicity of women in oppressing each
other, I want to turn my attention to feminist explanations
for the oppression of Muslim women. Muslim women’s
bodies have gained considerable saliency in contemporary
geopolitics and have attracted a great deal of legal as
well as political attention. Muslim women’s bodies
have been constituted as a marker of a community’s
place in modernity. We know Muslim communities are barbaric
and outside modernity because of the way in which Muslim
women are treated. Conversely, Western women are positioned
as more emancipated than their Muslim sisters and positioned
to assist them into modernity. Such explanations have
relied on an understanding of gender as an experience
that can be isolated from histories of race, class/community
or social group. The paper addresses what might be an
alternative understanding of Muslim women’s oppression,
and it specifically focuses on the problem of how to confront
what men do to women in Muslim communities (both in the
law and elsewhere) without reinstalling the notion of
the West as a place of universal values and the non-West
as a place of culture and danger for women. Three sites
will be examined: European countries attention to forced
marriages and to the wearing of the head scarf, and the
acceptance of Sharia law in Canada.
*******************
Eilish Rooney
University of Ulster
Paper Title: Intersectionality in theory and
practice: the Northern Ireland Equality Commission and
"different women".
Abstract: In a recent submission to
the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination
Against Women (UNCEDAW) the Northern Ireland Equality
Commission (NIEC) referred to, and made additions to,
the categories of persons cited in section 75 of the statutory
duty (Northern Ireland Act, 1998). The NIEC submission
made forty-four recommendations in which it recognised
the importance of the concept of multiple discrimination
experienced by women. However, two categories identified
in the statutory duty are not named in the NIEC submission.
These are, ‘persons of different religious belief’
and persons of different ‘political opinion’.
The NIEC is a key institution set up as a result of the
Agreement (1998) between the British and Irish governments
towards a resolution of the conflict. This paper critiques
the NIEC omission in the context of women’s equality
matters in the constituency of West Belfast.
The paper addresses the workshop issues related to building
interdisciplinary conceptualisations of the relationship
between various forms of equality - in particular material
and discursive questions of women’s equality in
the context of a ‘divided’ society in transition.
It draws on narratives of women’s lives and on concepts
and insights from intersections of critical race theory,
and feminist and postcolonial theory in order to critique
the politics of women’s equality in this conflict
resolution and hopeful transitional phase of the British-Irish
conflict.
*******************
Gabi Rosenstreich
University of Bielefeld, Germany
Paper Title: Diversity Training: Theorized Intersectionality
in Anti-discrimination Practice
Abstract: The generic non-discrimination
clause of the Treaty of Amsterdam (§13) provided
the framework not only for legislation but also for an
action programme. New for most member-states, is the associated
discursive linking of anti- or non-discrimination with
diversity (“for diversity-against discrimination”).
The diversity approach regards individuals as always being
members of many social groups simultaneously and accordingly
as embedded in complex societal and organisational power
relations. It addresses various forms of intersecting
or multiple discrimination/oppression (eg sexism, racism,
heterosexism, ableism, agism). A plethora of programmes
have appeared on the educational ‘market’
offering ‘diversity training’ (albeit under
a wide variety of labels). The presentation will critically
reflect on some of the ideas found in the practice of
diversity training programmes in relation to premises
that can be derived from theoretical and other discourse
on intersectionality.
