The Rise of Intersectionality in 2011

2011 in a nutshell.

      One of the most important shifts in feminism I saw in 2011 was tantamount to revolution: intersectionality. The closest I can come to a definition on my own is this: Feminism does not exist in a vacuum, and in many ways the feminist movement has been operating that way for decades. Over the last year especially we are seeing a huge split in opportunities and advances for women in America. White, wealthy, educated women, or those who otherwise fall into a "more privileged" category are living in a feminist America in many ways. Meanwhile, poor women, women of color, disabled women, and those who otherwise fall into doubly-or triply! marginalized or oppressed categories are still living in a pre-feminism America. Intersectionality is the place where feminism and other forces against social oppression intersect, and the act of addressing these issues in a feminist forum. So many important pieces of writing and activism have been published in the last year, and I'm going to give my two cents of some of these issues after the jump.

Getting to know you

HELLO WORLD!

But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck!

      So, I have this odd hobby of buying books to read for pleasure that for the most part are relegated to the overpriced ghetto of "textbooks". I like literary criticism. I like history. I like books published before 1980. So sue me.

       One of my favorite forays is into second wave feminist science fiction from the mid-seventies to the mid-1980's. Sure, there are parts that are reactionary, unreasonable, dire, dystopian, utopian, and/or "spiritual", and most of it is decidedly Caucasian in flavor, but that's a consequence of the genre. However, the payoff can be exemplified in the following words:

I live between two worlds. Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully (I mean I really admire them, though I'd die before I took the initiative; that's men's business), I don't press my point in conversation, and I enjoy cooking. I like to do things for other people, especially male people. I sleep well, wake up on the dot, and don't dream. There's only one thing wrong with me:

I'm frigid.

In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict you wouldn't think that I'd survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair, face what I know perfectly well is condescension and abstract contempt, get into quarrels, shout, fret about people I don't even know, live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don't care, become stridently contentious, sometimes laugh and weep within five minutes together out of pure frustration. It takes me two hours to get to sleep and an hour to wake up. I dream at my desk. I dream all over the place. I'm very badly dressed.

But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck!*

      Holy shizz. I dunno about you, but I've got a boner. And that boner's name is Awesome. Because once a Riot Grrl, always a Riot Grrl. There is something incredibly empowering about being able to house jarring contradictions in one's own soul, and in my humble opinion that is where all creative force comes from. Art is the flour produced from between every rock and hard place in my life.

       And when I think of myself back when I was say, fourteen or fifteen, with my garishly colored bobbed hair, powdered lips, Frederick's of Hollywood "dresses" and yes!-combat boots, clumsily hand-sewing bits of lacy froth and pieces of t-shirts, whole days where I refused to speak in anything except song lyrics, and penchant for public urination, I was living art. 

       I would direct my pubescent kleptomaniac minions to shoplift glitter crayons from Rite-Aid in order to grafitti giant glittered genitals on the back side of the same damn Rite-Aid. I would sneak out of my house to go drinking in a ditch behind a public park with boys at two AM with my 8-inch kitchen knife laid carefully alongside my leg in order to discourage any ideas that I was in any way sexually available (because what the hell did I know?). I got ejected from a public bus for scream-singing "Under Pressure" with my friend Becky(I was always Freddie Mercury on account of my overbite). I stomped the life out of inch-long cucarachas in the Los Angeles gutters with every step in time with the bassline of the Cure's "Fascination Street".

      I took my ideas of behaving badly very seriously. Was I nuts? Of course I was. Was I amaaazing? No doy.

      Reading those lines invoked the part of me that will always be that girl, and reminded me how glad I am that she still feeds me. She's there when I need her. And she always will be.

*For the insatiably curious burdened with a surplus twenty dollars, the source is the oddly-named The Female Man by Joanna Russ.