Intersectional Antifeminism, or: What is a White Feminist, Anyway?

Regarding the most famous social theory no one has actually read.

Introduction: White/Rad/Fem

There is a specter haunting feminism: insubstantial, ghostly pale, and—so goes the charge—one highly resistant to exorcism. Too long has this ruling-class pastime, borne of diabolically idle minds and idler spirits, threatened to undermine the solidarity of true, revolutionary movements, seeking to sow the seeds of separatism such that sexed solipsism supersedes syncretic struggle! Splitting sister from brother, wife from husband, and maiden from suitor, the forked-tongued feminist flits about in the garb of a noble liberator, pouring her racist, bourgeois, and essentialist poison into any unwitting, innocent ear she’s lent, corrupting the minds of young women with her preposterous ideas.

For the feminist is always white, affluent, and biologically-deterministic, an individual that does not truly suffer in any meaningful way, yet consistently and exuberantly cites her sex to obfuscate her privileges, exaggerate her marginalization, and deny her capacity to harm. In doing so she aims to engender a false consciousness, concocting an ersatz sorority between herself and the actually oppressed women whose subjugation she benefits from, and is invested in perpetuating.

Of course, women are actually oppressed—no one denies that—but marginalized women (a category mutually exclusive with the feminist, of course) have real actual oppression to combat, unlike the silly sex-antagonism that feminists concern themselves with. The racialized woman aspires to the dismantling of white supremacy, the proletarian woman an end to capitalist hegemony, and the colonized woman longs for the emancipation of all her people! Meanwhile, feminists—being the ultimate beneficiaries of all these systems of exploitation—wish for marginalized women to quarrel endlessly with men of their own class and race and nation. Marginalized women are thus enticed to ally with their oppressors— that is, feminists. Their fellow men, naturally, have always taken their concerns seriously—which is to say, guided them to focus on the issues that affect them all, rather than quibble over frivolities such as domestic confinement and reproductive labor and sexual violence, which affect only some of them—impossible to tell which of them, even.

Unlike the feminist, the actually oppressed marginalized woman understands her place in the movement. She nobly supports her comrades, magnanimously upholds the common banner, and places the collective’s concerns above her own with divinely-feminine grace. She is a mother to the movement—and wife and lover and scullery-maid, too—happy in her place and overjoyed to do the thankless, joyless, uncompensated, unrecognized, and uncredited work that must be done.

Could there theoretically be feminists that are not manipulative, deceitful mouthpieces of the ruling-classes? Perhaps someday, there may yet be. Today, however, there is no such thing as a non-white, non-Western, non-rich, non-cis, non-ugly feminist, as surely as there does not exist a non-misandrist lesbian. Do not fall for their propaganda, comrades, and do not shirk your duty to the cause by presuming that your gender matters more than any other identity through which men can lay claim to you. Do not forget who your true enemy is: other women.

Part One: The Three Intersectionalities

In 1989, legal theorist and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex, establishing the most groundbreaking social theory that no one seems to have read. Many, many people want to give the impression that they have read it, however, so that they may position themselves as experts on the topic to others who have read even less. The motivations for this co-optation vary, but can be organized into three broad camps: conservative ‘intellectual’, liberal commentator, and leftist iconoclast.

For the conservative, the motive is straightforward epistemic vandalism, a twisting and redefinition of a term to obfuscate its actual purpose and undermine progressive social movements. The word “woke” and the field of “critical race theory”—ironically, another school where Crenshaw is a towering figure—are examples of such discursive defacing (and it is no accident that every phrase under consideration here stems from Black activism and scholarship). In a 2019 Vox article entitled hilariously as the “Intersectionality Wars”, conservative ‘intellectuals’ no less illustrious than Ben Shapiro himself describe intersectionality as a “new caste system”, intended to place cis, straight, white men “at the bottom”.

While the inadvertent admission that there must have existed an old caste system for intersectionality to supplant is revealing, the blatant dishonesty of the statements border on parodic. Social theories cannot with a single stroke undo centuries of disenfranchisement, exploitation, and hollowing-out, any more than one can get Ben Shapiro to quit yapping for just two minutes. Even without an understanding of intersectionality, it should be obvious that this perceived epistemic threat—this idea that the most dominant voices will somehow be drowned out and be left at the mercy of the most silenced—is nothing but yet another reactionary persecution fantasy, an attempt to cast any attempts at elucidating the plight of the marginalized as violence against not the hegemony, but those of the hegemonic demographic.

It is a strategy that will continue to be deployed for as long as it remains effective.

Meanwhile, the liberal is eager to take up the mantle of intersectionality, even if she is somewhat fuzzy on what exactly taking that mantle up entails. So eager and enthusiastic is she, in fact, that she insists on having always championed it, claiming that her feminism and antiracism and general social project has always been intersectional! Never mind the why and when of intersectionality’s popularization, because even when she wasn’t using the word, the intent was always there. After all, look at how lucrative—that is to say, generalizable—the concept is! Any assertion can spawn a critique to a response to a subheading, by highlighting just how lacking in intersectionality it is. Does your paper or project account for race and sex and ability and sexuality and affluence and immigrant status? It does? Well, what about religion, caste, bilinguality, education level, height, geographic location, and weather on Tuesdays? Keep ‘em coming—there’s grants to secure!

After all, was that not intersectionality’s greatest innovation—the construction of tier lists and rankings of oppressed identities? Forget regimes and the hierarchies they instantiate! Instead, draw up your character sheet, where each axis of marginalization represents a “debuff” or “deviation” from the state of “default human”, while listing every “privilege” that you must acknowledge and repent for. This is surely the approach that Crenshaw intended and certainly not something she critiqued the very legal system for in her original paper! By tallying these oppression points up, we can determine who has the most epistemic authority to speak on any and every topic, on account of being The Most Intersectional. Finally, the kyriarchy is over.

Of course, anyone with that high a rank in Intersectionality surely couldn’t also have the most right to speak. If they have a platform, can speak English, or are just too articulate—why, those are all privileges that bar them from being the most intersectional person in the room! Indeed, anyone can have internalized misogyny or racism or ableism or any other kind of bigotry, and saying the wrong things or otherwise challenging the material roots of systems of oppression proves that they likely are too academic, eloquent, and frankly not intersectional enough! Intersectionality tells us, after all, that men are oppressed too, that men of color cannot uphold patriarchy because white supremacy disempowers them—never mind what they do in order to secure that lost masculinity! bell hooks who? Anyway, it would probably be best if someone more qualified to speak on intersectional matters spoke up on behalf of the Actual Most Intersectional and Oppressed Person, who of course is too oppressed to even be present in the room.

That was the brilliant insight that Ben Shapiro missed—no one can wield intersectionality as a cudgel quite like white people can.

However, all this talk of intersectionality in the mainstream has proven that it has already been recuperated by the bourgeois academy and liberal establishment, irrespective of whether or not its tenets are being accurately understood or represented. The leftist, therefore, remains unmoved by all these silly revisionist distractions, all these identitarian and idealist social constructs that serve only to clutter up Marx—I mean, Mao—or Lenin, or perhaps Kropotkin, if you’re not a filthy statist? Look, it’s polluting the purity of someone’s theory, and we’ll figure out exactly whose, roughly around the time the state withers away, so long as we stick to the five-year plans.

In the meantime, we cannot let identity politics compromise solidarity by creating false antagonisms where none exist among the working class, a historically homogenous entity with no internal contradictions whatsoever. Myopic focus on oppressor/oppressed dichotomies hinder us from recognizing that our true enemy remains the capitalist class, and we only need to disseminate the Perfectly Persuasive and True Science of Socialism to snap literally anyone out of their identification with bourgeois ideologies, so long as they are proletarian! No proletarian has ever materially benefited from or remained invested in the oppression of another proletarian, of course, and no ruling-class worth its salt has ever sown divisions among the masses that prove to be more enduring and persuasive than simple material interest!

Oh, except intersectionality. That one’s definitely a CIA plot, which I can prove with this image of Crenshaw standing next to Hillary Clinton.

In any case, we can all agree on one thing—we all know what intersectionality is, understand it perfectly, and don’t talk about it in a manner that makes me want to claw my own face off.

Part Two: Just Read the Damn Paper

So, after all of that, what is intersectionality, really? What truth about interlocking systems of oppression does it reveal, and how precisely can we incorporate it in analyses of overlapping identities and marginalizations?

Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex walks the reader through three specific cases to illustrate the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences, in the context of antidiscrimination law. Crenshaw shows us how courts are happy to apply inconsistent and indeed contradictory logics in service not of American jurisprudence, but American reaction, the American regime of racialization and patriarchy and settler-colonial logics.

In DeGraffenreid v General Motors, the district court rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to bring a suit alleging employment discrimination against Black women. Despite the fact that General Motors did not hire a single Black woman prior to 1964, and all Black women hired after 1970 were deprived of their jobs in a seniority-based layoff, the suit was rejected on the grounds that GM did hire white women (therefore, could not be accused of sex discrimination) and also hired Black men (which meant there was no evidence of race discrimination).

Most gallingly, the court stated that the plaintiffs “should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new ‘super remedy’”. The audacity of this assertion is best illustrated by the court’s own admission that Black women could be discriminated against on the basis of race or sex, even as it alleged that it was somehow absurd for them to claim both. There is a perfect awareness here that Black women can be injured in ways that either white women or Black men cannot be, but the specter of a “super-protected” class is invoked to deny them any relief at all.

After all, imagine if there was a class of person accorded special privileges in the US-American legal system—how out of the ordinary that would be!

This is a conclusion that stands in stark contrast to the decisions examined in the two following cases, one a case of sex discrimination and the other a case of race discrimination. In DeGraffenreid, it was found that Black women were similar enough to white women and Black men that discrimination against them, specifically, could not be established in the absence of discrimination against either preceding class. However, Moore v Hughes Helicopter, Inc and Payne v Travenol both concluded that Black women were too different from either white women or Black men to be the representative plaintiffs in cases of either sex or race discrimination!

Taken together, we can observe how Black women are denied relief based on their alleged sameness or difference to other demographics. Either they are too similar to (for example) other unharmed women to establish any particular harms against them on the basis of sex, or they are too distinct from other women to be considered truly representative of the wider category. Crenshaw, here, highlights how these opportunistic logics are oriented not around legal or logical consistency, but rather are the thinnest rationalizations available to reinforce Black women’s particular state of marginality. Further, they illustrate a dilemma that Black women are faced with both legally and socially, in courtrooms and activism and social movements: to ‘declare allegiance’ to their race or their sex, to claim injury as women or as Black people, but never both.

Black women, and racialized women more generally, have the particularized harms they face as both women and racialized people invisibilized, an epistemic injustice that is rooted in denying how the multiplicity of their marginalization intensifies their precarity and the violences they face.

Crenshaw’s firm, uncompromising assertion is this: we shouldn’t have to choose. We shouldn’t have to subdivide aspects of our identity to decide which is the ‘most’ injured, the ‘most’ relevant to the current situation, because at no point are we ever just women, or just racialized, or even just lesbians, disabled, working-class, Jewish, etc. Every injury we sustain is impacted by the multiplicity of our identities and experiences because that is how we exist in the world—not as an assemblage of discrete identities but as singular, whole people, whose marginalization both resembles the bigotry faced by those less-marginalized, and is also uniquely intensified by the gestalt of our marginalizations.

Intersectionality, then, is a revolutionary theory that asks us to reckon with the reality of the multiply-marginalized woman on her terms, rather than picking and choosing the parts of her that are most useful or convenient to us. It uncompromisingly asserts that in order to effectively advocate for anyone, we must ensure that we are advocating for and listening to the most marginalized amongst us (who is usually a woman), instead of aiding in her epistemic burial.

And ever since its publication, no one has forgiven Crenshaw for making that point.

Interlude: No Intersectionality For Women

If you understand intersectionality, its repeated diminishment and co-optation to serve the ends of anyone but the most-marginalized is truly hysteria-inducing to witness. Anecdotal though my experiences are, time and time again every feminist I know, whether white or not, whether trans or not, whether queer or not, has related the same story that I do: of being called “white feminist”, “TERFy”, or non-intersectional for stating that male-supremacy animates patriarchy, or otherwise stating that men exploit women.

Dominance feminism in particular—which is the central radical feminist assertion of patriarchal society being founded upon the subjugation of women-as-a-class, by men-as-a-class—is frequently decried as ‘essentialist’, and consequently as ‘incompatible’ with intersectionality. Of the two charges levied against it, the first tends to be that regarding all women as a unified demographic with shared class interests elides the many contradictions that exist amongst women: principally race, but also class, ability, sexuality, and more. As an example, implying that women of color share interests with white women is an anti-intersectional act—supposedly—that erases how white women benefit from their racial privileges at the expense of women of color.

Sealing the deal, the second charge against dominance feminism is that it papers over the cases where women are privileged over men, once more principally deploying race to make the argument. To deny that affluent white women oppress working-class Black men, as dominance feminism—supposedly—does, is to deny a fundamental social reality of US-American society, to instrumentalize sex for reactionary purposes and perpetuate harmful stereotypes of “male threat” against men of color that have been used to justify violence and carceralism against them since the very inception of the United States.

(Astute readers, at this point, might be arching their brows and itching to ask questions, such as “Wait, what about working-class Black women? What about patriarchal societies that aren’t or precede the United States?” That is not important right now. We are demonstrating why feminism is bad.)

By demonstrating these deficiencies, we have conclusively proved that dominance feminism is a bad theory: it fails to grapple with nuanced analyses that illustrate why women of color do not share gendered interests with white women, and intersectional analyses that account for racialized men. (Those who might be asking how ‘racialized man’ is an intersectional identity—what other marginalization is their racialization intersecting with, in this example?—are surely non-intersectional in their own right.) We therefore cannot trust any feminist theory that insists that all men oppress all women, as dominance and radical feminisms obviously(?) do. To do so would be to reify the oppressive logics being neglected to advance a sex-essentialist agenda, and would be colonial and white-supremacist and transphobic and bourgeois and worse!

Truly, no more infallibly compelling argument has ever been made.

I must confess that when I began to conceptualize this essay, I had consigned myself to arguing my case on largely autoethnographic merits, to forefront personal experience and brace for the eventual charges that I was exaggerating a rare reactionary tendency, or generalizing too much from my own accounts. Imagine my delight, then, when I came across a 2010 paper that not only points to these discursive tendencies in both academic and activist settings, but also argues vehemently that this is a misuse of intersectionality theory. The author definitively states that the alleged incompatibility between dominance feminist paradigms and intersectionality is not merely exaggerated, but outright incorrect, and places an undue, unfair burden on feminist theories that other social paradigms, such as antiracism, are not expected to answer for. That—I dare infer—the very charge of ‘essentialism’ is being misapplied for grotesquely antifeminist ends!

Strong claims, all. Hopefully, whoever made them can back up the assertion of understanding intersectionality better than most others, even many academics!

Part Three: That’s Not What ‘Essentialism’ Means

I am of course referring to the 2010 paper, Close Encounters of Three Kinds: On Teaching Dominance Feminism and Intersectionality, authored by Kimberlé Crenshaw. In it, Crenshaw argues for the saliency of intersectionality as a feminist theory, one entirely compatible with the social-constructivist radical feminism of Catherine MacKinnon.

“Listeners often register surprise that MacKinnon would occupy any constructive space in the conceptual universe of intersectionality. I sometimes push the envelope even further by suggesting that her controversial essay From Practice to Theory, or What Is a White Woman Anyway? is among my favorite MacKinnon essays to teach.”

Here, Crenshaw takes us through three ‘encounters’ with MacKinnon. Her appreciation and enthusiasm for MacKinnon’s contributions to both legal theory and feminism is infectious, and her candid discussion of how this radical feminism has influenced and intersected with her own work is, ultimately, unsurprising. We are told how Demarginalizing touches upon MacKinnon’s critiques of feminist paradigms that advocate women’s equality on the basis of our sameness to men, set against arguments that emphasize women’s difference.

“MacKinnon argued persuasively that sameness and difference were merely different sides of the same coin.”

In both cases, “men are the standard”, the default by which all other ‘deviations’ in one’s humanity is judged. Where MacKinnon asks why women must hew to a standard set by men, why our humanity is contingent on that which men find worthy of recognition, Crenshaw reiterates the question for the case of Black female plaintiffs. Why must they be judged based on how similar they are to Black men or white women, and why—Crenshaw notes pointedly—do any differences preclude Black women from representing all women?

For this is one of the more insidious applications of intersectionality, which has been scrutinized and used to call the whole theory into question, but happens to be a practice that Crenshaw has critiques of too: the siloing—the segregation, even—of Black women’s concerns into their own box that does not meaningfully overlap with that of other women. That Black women face unique issues does not mean their interests are wholly distinct from that of less-marginalized women, merely that they are more vulnerable, and require unique considerations that are frequently overlooked. Intersectionality is an argument for forefronting the most-marginalized, not regarding them as wholly distinct from groups they do in fact share interests with. Notably, there is less separatism when it comes to discussing Black people’s interests broadly in antiracist discourses, but it is absolutely rampant in feminist discussions and criticisms of feminism.

Interestingly, What is a White Woman Anyway? shares and expresses this concern:

“There is nothing biologically necessary about rape, as Mechelle Vinson made abundantly clear when she sued for rape as unequal treatment on the basis of sex. And, as Lillian Garland saw, and made everyone else see, it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women's problems with reproduction, not reproduction itself. Both women are Black. This only supports my suspicion that if a theory is not true of, and does not work for, women of color, it is not really true of, and will not work for, any women, and that it is not really about gender at all. The theory of the practice of Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland, because it is about the experience of Black women, is what gender is about.” [Emphasis mine.]

Catherine MacKinnon, it would seem, has read the damn paper.

Another way in which MacKinnon’s work enhances rather than detracts from the thesis in Demarginalizing is through an observation she makes about reverse-discrimination suits, brought by white men in affirmative action cases. It is obvious here that white men cannot represent all men, or all white people, because non-white men and white women alike benefit from affirmative action programs. Nevertheless, their ‘compound reverse-discrimination’ claims are not merely humored by courts, but are not even identified as grievances specific to white men, or cast as an attempt to form a “super-protected” class combining statutory remedies! Preferential treatment, it would seem, only causes a doctrinal crisis when anyone other than white men stand to benefit.

So far, it is expectedly difficult to refute any of Crenshaw’s points. Which makes her ‘final encounter’ with MacKinnon all the more mystifying—the spectral, ‘virtual’ MacKinnon conjured by the students in her own classes, bearing little resemblance to the real article. Crenshaw’s palpable frustration in this section only rivals her writings on DeGraffenreid, as she expresses her bafflement at bright, socially-engaged, activist-minded youths who are highly familiar with intersectionality theory, and yet express such disdain for dominance feminism.

“Whether the conversation is marked by the notion of waves (as in second wave, third, etc.) or by temporal references that modify the brand of feminism at issue (post-feminist, neo feminists, or something else), there are numerous indicators that suggest a certain distancing from what is perceived to be a crude and unappealing feminism. This distancing has been the subject of analysis and debate for some time, but the particular version of it that emerges most forcefully in my Intersectionalities course wraps its logics either implicitly or explicitly around the primacy of race. This relatively traditional strain of argument frames feminism as a white woman's thing while certain male-centric ideologies about racism continue to win the allegiance of many of my progressive students. This stance rarely involves an explicit rejection of feminism per se, but instead a race-centered critique that repudiates white feminism as an embodiment of racism and hierarchy. Inevitably, MacKinnon's iconic status in legal discourse places her at the epicenter of this frame.” [Emphasis mine.]

What perturbs Crenshaw the most is the inconsistency displayed by students who are quick to call ‘essentialism’ in feminist discussions, yet see little issue with the repeated centering of male perspectives, male leadership, and indeed male suffering when discussing anti-racist or decolonial movements. Apparently, race presents an insurmountable barrier that the category ‘woman’ can in no way supersede, while racialization is allegedly homogenizing enough to create no meaningful distinctions between the experiences of men and women (and sexual minorities). Her attempts to highlight the contradiction in allowing for this kind of essentialism in one arena but not another are met with truly stupefying rationalizations: that a greater degree of intimacy between men and women of the same racial class “creates more empathy” within this group, that men of color advocate for the concerns of women of color better than white feminists do, or that race is simply a more “impactful” marginalization than sex in one’s life.

While I could perhaps detail how I’ve rarely seen men of my race advocate for women of my race in a manner that does not reinforce a sexual property relation between us or otherwise infringe upon their inalienable right to beat us to death without repercussion, there is a correct answer to the conundrum of whether race or sex deserves greater consideration when weighing up how one is marginalized. I present this as an exercise to the reader as well: before peeking ahead, please answer whether you think women of color like me ought to be more concerned with racialization or patriarchy.

The answer, of course, is: why the fuck are you making that comparison in the first place, you waste of tuition? Did you not read the damn paper? Classrooms are a place for learning, yes, but falling back on this oppression arithmetic in a class literally taught by Crenshaw should be grounds for immediate ejection, surely.

These students’ critiques of MacKinnon’s essay, when exposed to it, also merit a similar scorn. Despite quite clearly stating the importance of accounting for the most marginalized women, several of Crenshaw’s students have alleged that What is a White Woman Anyway? is itself a “white feminist” screed through which MacKinnon is somehow reinscribing the primacy of the white woman as the central subject of feminism!

Columbia Law, in spite of its illustrious faculty, is clearly not all it’s cracked up to be.

Here, the story of Elaine Brown (who chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977) seems relevant to recall. Brown recounts her initial impressions of so-called “white feminism” in her book A Taste of Power:

“Oddly, I had never thought of myself as a feminist. I had even been denounced by certain radical feminist collectives as a "lackey" for men. That charge was based on my having written and sung two albums of songs that my female accusers claimed elevated and praised men. Resenting that label, I had joined the majority of black women in America in denouncing feminism. It was an idea reserved for white women, I said, assailing the women's movement, wholesale, as either racist or inconsequential to black people.

Sexism was a secondary problem. Capitalism and racism were primary. I had maintained that position even in the face of my exasperation with the chauvinism of Black Power men in general and Black Panther men in particular.” [Emphasis mine]

Directly preceding this excerpt, Brown narrates how a fellow party member had been spreading rumors that she was a “man-hating lesbian” with a “secret sexual life”, a charge justified by noting how women had “taken over” the Party. Implicit to these accusations, Brown notes, is not necessarily judgment for fucking women.

She had been judged for valuing women, for considering them worthy and equal participants in the struggle.

“The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as by being black and poor. Racism and sexism in America were equal partners in my oppression.” [Emphasis mine.]

The tale of Brown’s eventual exit from the party is an unsavory one. Regina Davis, who according to Brown “held together the proudest of our programs, our school”, had been hospitalized with a broken jaw after being beaten by several men in the Party. Brown had called Huey P. Newton to inform him of this, only to be euphemistically notified that he had indeed authorized her “disciplining”.

This compelled her to inform Newton of Davis’ many tasks and responsibilities, as Brown was sure he didn’t realize how indispensable a role Davis played, or was otherwise ignorant of how much she oversaw. She impressed upon Newton that Regina Davis managed everyone from the teachers to the cooks, decided menus and purchases, spoke to parents—“She is the fucking school.” If Davis had asked a male member of the Party to carry out a task and been refused, Brown stressed that she was well within her rights to verbally reprimand him, and the retaliatory violence Davis had suffered was both disproportionate and alarming.

Newton’s response was simply that he already knew everything Brown had told him.

“The Brothers came to me. I had to give them something.” [Emphasis mine.]

Televised or not, it seems the revolution will not be gender-inclusive.

From my own perspective as an Indian woman, I can attest that the hollowing out of my land and people is difficult to reckon with, let alone communicate. How do I explain the totalizing impact of mass starvation and centuries of extractivism that continues to this very day, whereby even our modern economy is structured at the behest of neo-imperial interests that treat my people as a nation of sweatshop workers? The widespread poverty plays a huge role in how little agency Indian women are afforded, and every citizen of Empire, irrespective of sex, benefits from the increased standard of living enabled by Third World labor, Third World resources, and goods assembled in the Third World. That is the inescapable impact of racialization, of being deemed worthy for nothing more than serving the White Nation as an external colony of menial workers. Yet, even still …

Even still.

Even still, it is not the White Woman who is campaigning against the outlawing of marital rape in India.

Yes, white women benefit from the colonial subjugation of brown men and women alike. Yes, I have met more than my fair share of white women who are only too happy to mobilize the violence of racialization to keep me in my place—trust me. That does not, in any way, change the reality of brown men—of “our men”—choosing to value continued sexual access to brown women over our ability to object to it. It does not alter that in India, economic independence from men continues to be almost impossible for a woman to achieve, even if she does manage to secure more than poverty wages, due to the way single women are locked out of renting or owning property in many places. It does not change that in India, even when we’re all brown, women are still womanized, still treated as sexual chattel and broodmares and discarded the very moment we cannot fulfill that role.

It does not change that in order to posit dominance feminism as “too essentialist”, people will smugly invoke the nature of the relationship between white women and racialized men, while overlooking racialized women entirely—just as Crenshaw criticized in Demarginalizing, all the way back in the original text of the damn paper in 1989!

That is what intersectionality has been instrumentalized for—reduced to, frankly. A theory of expansiveness and inclusion and taking a bottom-up approach to feminist and other progressive politics is now most frequently regarded as though it were a theory of fragmentation, as though no woman of color would ever have the temerity and gall to “act white”, to demand redress from the patriarchal limitations “her” men subject her to. This is a perversion, a vandalizing of intersectionality theory so that marginalized men can deflect and demur when asked to demonstrate any contrition or acquiesce to any degree of accountability for perpetuating gendered violence against their women, their rightful sexual chattel to use and abuse as they see fit. A woman of color that asserts herself as a feminist is seen as betraying “her” men, but a man of color that asserts himself as a patriarch betrays nothing and no one—and even succeeds in “reclaiming” some of his “lost masculinity”, denied to him by the emasculating forces of white hegemony.

How revolutionary.

Crenshaw concludes her paper with another biting demand for consistency—either dominance feminism is no more essentialist for dealing with the plight of the “woman” than antiracist projects are (for homogenizing all racialized subjects without paying mind to intraracial contradictions), or antiracist discourses must also answer for the negligence of the multiply-marginalized subject in their formulation.

There is a right answer here, too. I hope the reader can spot it.

Conclusion: Radical Intersectionality

When I set out to crystallize the thesis of Brown/Trans/Les, to decide what I would like my next book on radical transfeminism to be about, I decided to attempt a reconciliation between intersectionality theory and radical feminism. Given the sheer number of people convinced that the twain shall never meet, while nothing about intersectionality precludes or contradicts the precepts of dominance feminism, I thought that it would take at least some work on my part to prove that intersectionality can be easily conceptualized in radical feminist terms. I was wrong.

Because I didn’t have to fucking bother.

To anyone familiar with Crenshaw’s work, who is aware that she did not stop writing in 1989, who has read her discuss the plight of immigrant women trapped in abusive relationships by male partners who exploit their precarity, this compatibility with radical feminism is no revelation. Crenshaw’s work has always been feminist, has always been informed as much by the indignities of patriarchy as it has by the injustices of racialization. The epistemic vandalism intersectionality has been subject to is the selfsame epistemic vandalism that radical feminism itself has been subject to—that all feminism has been subject to, frankly.

If a feminism is found to not adequately serve the interests of patriarchy, it is twisted until it does, or discarded entirely.

On a personal note, I happen to be a trans woman, and thus take great issue with the attempted erasure of womanhood in any avenue. I also, to a certain degree, appreciate that the erasure of multiply-marginalized women from feminist discourses has been widely accepted as epistemic injustice, and that most who would call themselves feminist agree on correcting that error. At the same time, the pervasiveness of this rhetoric in service of discounting or writing feminism off entirely has reduced it to little more than a farce. Activists rebuke feminism on the streets, while in the hallowed halls of knowledge-production, the perspectives of multiply-marginalized women are ghettoized into their own fields and topics, or otherwise excluded even still.

Just ask any trans woman who’s ever attempted to interface with Women and Gender Studies.

Intersectionality’s desecration in this manner is not reflective of a sincere, earnest effort to build an inclusive feminist movement. Rather, the opportunistic leveraging of the very same tendencies the theory critiques is used to destroy solidarity, to say that women who try to come together and identify with each others’ struggles are too Essentially Different to participate in the same, harmonious feminist movement. The Black feminists and the white feminists and the trans feminists and the Third World feminists cannot all relate to the same transcultural, transhistorical struggle against the primacy of male domination in their lives.

So once again, I call bullshit.

I’m going to tell you now what drew me to Crenshaw’s work, what convinced me of its enduring relevance and indispensability to any and all feminist politics. Underneath all the piercing wit and fearless argumentation and excoriating rhetoric, underneath all the eloquence and articulation, there was buried a primal scream: the primal scream of a woman who navigates a society that knows exactly how to hurt her, surrounded by people who understand everything that harms her perfectly, but still refuse to name or acknowledge the mechanisms by which they do so.

I recognize that scream very, very well.

“You know what you’re doing, and if you won’t admit it, then I’ll make you!”

Multiply-marginalized women have always faced these impulses to align wholly against some subcomponent of the various violences we endure, to be for our men, at the behest of race or nation, or to even be for all women at the behest of feminists who consider our particular concerns too “divisive”. We have always been asked, time and time again, “to whom do you really belong?” Who is it that we really fight for? To whom do we owe the most loyalty?

To no one who would ask us that question, let me assure you.

I am hers, who reaches across the barriers of time and space and nationhood, who sees my suffering as her own.

I am hers, who walks blasted and blighted pathways that I can and could never, but still sees in me a mirror to her Self.

I am hers, who despite my many errors and missteps, despite my pulling away in anger and fury and despair, reaches through the haze and takes my hand once more, reminding me that we are now inseparable.

I am hers, whose enemies are my enemies and whose battles are my battles, just as hers are mine.

I am hers, who would call me sister, and feel joy when I call her the same.

I am not now, nor will I ever be, anyone’s to claim, but I am hers to embrace who would proudly fight at my side.

As she is mine.

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks the second entry of my next book, Brown/Trans/Les. All the essays published before have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts, and in both paperback and hardcover from various vendors. Please inquire at your local bookstore if you are interested!