Intersectional Solidarity Research Articles

Unpacking intersectional solidarity: dimensions of power in coalitions

Scholars have often oscillated between celebrating the transformative potential of solidarity and recognising the ambivalent nature of cooperation for disadvantaged and marginalised groups. How can we make sense of these differences? This article addresses this question by unpacking intersectional solidarity along two dimensions: the ways issues are framed; and the extent to which organisations adopt a transformative praxis to redress disparities in resources and representation. By focusing on the interplay between discursive and material dimensions of power, we identify four types of intersectional solidarity, with different transformative potential. The usefulness of this typology is illustrated by means of secondary analysis of coalition work developed around reproductive justice and domestic workers’ rights. It shows that only an ideal form of transformative solidarity reflects feminist normative theorising of an alliance across differences.

Embodied relational praxis in intersectional organizing: Developing intersectional solidarity

AbstractThis qualitative study examines the development of intersectional solidarity among organizers of an academic workers’ union. Participants were 12 union organizers who participated in semistructured, in‐depth interviews. This research is value‐driven, examining in context how community organizers address the reproduction of systems of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism) in order to build power and make socially just change. Respectful and supportive relationships were required for participants to understand and make sense of their complicity in systems of oppression in proactive and potentially transformative ways. Additionally, individuals’ understanding of their complicity with oppressive structures occurred in a visceral, embodied manner. Thus, two overlapping practices, supportive relational labor and corporeal literacy, form the basis of a praxis model for intersectional solidarity. This study concludes with implications for organizing practices and organizations, which focus on accountability practices and praxis among group members.

Everyday Spatialities of Intersectional Solidarity and Activism

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale GeografieVolume 112, Issue 2 p. 101-106 Original Manuscript Everyday Spatialities of Intersectional Solidarity and Activism Maarten Loopmans, Corresponding Author Maarten Loopmans Valerie.Decraene@ees.kuleuven.be orcid.org/0000-0002-7157-5608 Division of Geography and Tourism, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, Belgium E-mail: Valerie.Decraene@ees.kuleuven.beSearch for more papers by this authorGavin Brown, Gavin Brown gpb10@le.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-8350 School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH United KingdomSearch for more papers by this authorValerie De Craene, Valerie De Craene Valerie.decraene@kuleuven.be orcid.org/0000-0002-1820-3055 Division of Geography and Tourism, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, BelgiumSearch for more papers by this author Maarten Loopmans, Corresponding Author Maarten Loopmans Valerie.Decraene@ees.kuleuven.be orcid.org/0000-0002-7157-5608 Division of Geography and Tourism, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, Belgium E-mail: Valerie.Decraene@ees.kuleuven.beSearch for more papers by this authorGavin Brown, Gavin Brown gpb10@le.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-8350 School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH United KingdomSearch for more papers by this authorValerie De Craene, Valerie De Craene Valerie.decraene@kuleuven.be orcid.org/0000-0002-1820-3055 Division of Geography and Tourism, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, BelgiumSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 November 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12421Citations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume112, Issue2Special Issue: Everyday Places of IntersectionalitiesApril 2021Pages 101-106 RelatedInformation

Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence

As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of ‘criminal contempt’ for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project (“Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion”) was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of ‘irreparable harm’ at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.

From Suffragists to Pink Pussyhats: In Search of Intersectional Solidarity

The 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment is an opportunity to reflect on the role of women in American politics. The tools of intersectionality allow scholars to pinpoint the progress and pitfalls produced by ongoing modes of sexism and patriarchy as well as racism and classism. It is now well known that major movements for the rights of American women have not always addressed the issues specific to black women (Simien 2006). Indeed, in 1851, Sojourner Truth discussed this issue of not being included in conversations about women’s rights (or civil rights for blacks) in her alleged “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Similarly, the fact that Ida B. Wells and other black women were told to process at the back of the 1913 Women’s March on Washington is another illustration of the historical exclusion of black women by their white counterparts (Boissoneault 2017). Decades later and even after the 1965 Voting Rights Act enforced black women’s enfranchisement, the Combahee River Collective (1977) noted the exclusion of issues that affect black women by both 1970s white feminist movements and male-dominated anti-racist movements.

Rethinking justice beyond human rights. Anti-colonialism and intersectionality in the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement

ABSTRACT This article discusses the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) – a contemporary social movement operating across a number of Arab and western countries. Unlike analysis on the Arab Uprisings which focused on the national dimension of youth activism, we explore how the PYM politics fosters and upholds an explicitly transnational anti-colonial and intersectional solidarity framework, which foregrounds a radical critique of conventional notions of self-determination based on state-framed human rights discourses and international law paradigms. The struggle becomes instead framed as an issue of justice, freedom and liberation from interlocking forms and hierarchies of oppression.

Active Solidarity: Intersectional Solidarity in Action

AbstractWhile solidarity lies at the heart of collective action, it is not easily achieved. Social movements are characterized not only by difference within activist ranks but also by power asymmetries that reflect broader domination and distrust. The concept of intersectional solidarity is central to contemporary social justice movements’ efforts to negotiate these divisions, but how can it be achieved? To answer this question, we offer some guidelines for enacting intersectional solidarity, drawing on a theoretically grounded examination of three contemporary social movements in the United States and abroad (Occupy, Gezi Park, and the Women’s March).

Currently married women’s present experiences of male intimate partner physical violence in Bangladesh: An intercategorical intersectional approach

ABSTRACTIn Bangladesh, one in five currently married women (CMW) presently experience male intimate partner physical violence (MIPPV). While previous studies analysed women’s individual-level multiple locations–younger age, lower education, income, and poverty in an additive manner, we took an intersectional approach to look at the effects of their multiple intersectional locations on MIPPV. Using McCall’s intercategorical intersectional approach, we examine how women’s intersectional locations are associated with their odds of experiencing MIPPV. Our sample from a 2015 nationally representative survey comprised 14,557 CMW living with their spouses. Thirty-four percent of CMW are young, 49% below primary educated, 19% income earning, 23% poor, and 25% experience MIPPV. We found that CMW in their dual disadvantaged younger age–lower education and single disadvantaged higher education–poor locations have 13.57% (95% CI, 9.25, 17.89) and 12.02% (95% CI, 6.87, 17.17) (respectively) higher probabilities of experiencing MIPPV than their counterparts in the corresponding dual privileged older age–higher education and higher education–nonpoor locations. Consistent with intersectionality theory, instead of prioritising a few groups over others (i.e. Oppression Olympics), we recommend building intersectional solidarity with women, men and communities to disrupt the underlying socio-economic-educational-legal-political structures and processes that have sustained these marginalised locations.

Moving from intersectional hostility to intersectional solidarity

PurposeTreatment of intersectionality in empirical studies has predominantly engaged with individual categories of difference. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that there is utility in exploring intersectionality at the intersection of individual and institutional levels. As such the authors move beyond the polarised take on intersections as either individual or institutional phenomenon and tackle intersectionality as a relational phenomenon that gains meaning at the encounter of individuals and institutions in context. Therefore, the authors explicate how intersectionality features as forms of solidarity and hostility in work environments. As such the authors posit that not only individuals but also the institutions should change if inclusion is aimed at societal and organisational levels.Design/methodology/approachA thematic analysis on qualitative interview data of a purposive- and snowball-selected sample of 11 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer working adults in Turkey was used.FindingsThis paper finds evidence to support the existence of a multidimensional model of intersectionality, where conflicting and complementary individual and institutional intersections create four intersectional typologies in the form of intersectional hostility, intersectional struggle, intersectional adjustment and intersectional solidarity.Originality/valueThe extant literature offers rich insights into individual intersectionality but sheds very little light on institutional intersectionality and its interaction with individual intersectionality. This paper attempts to fill in this gap by investigating intersectional encounters as interactions between the individual and institutional intersections.

‘Burn it down!’: Materialising intersectional solidarities in the architecture of the South African Embassy during the London Poll Tax Riot, March 1990

This paper offers a new way of conceptualising how intersectional solidarities are actualised. It recounts and theorises an outbreak of radical internationalism, when working class struggles in Britain and South Africa were unexpectedly linked. It examines how intersectional solidarity was materialised through a process of coming together against the architectural fabric of the South African Embassy and considers the interwoven temporalities that enabled this action to occur. On 31 March 1990, nearly a quarter of a million people demonstrated in London against the Poll Tax that was due to take effect in England and Wales the following day. On the day, the Metropolitan Police lost control of an already enraged crowd and provoked a large scale riot that engulfed the West End of London for several hours. In the midst of the riot, during a short retreat by the police, protesters took the opportunity to attack the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square – many windows were broken and an attempt was made to set the building alight. Drawing on interviews with former anti-apartheid protesters who were present on that day (and who had concluded a four-year long Non-Stop Picket of the embassy a month earlier), this paper explores and analyses their memories of that unexpected moment when their previously symbolic call to ‘burn it down’ was (almost) materialised. In doing so, it contributes new ways of conceptualising the spatiality and temporality of intersectional solidarity.

When Similarities are More Important than Differences: “Politically Black” Union Members’ Experiences of Racism and Participation in Union Leadership

AbstractEmploying survey data from the largest (known) sample of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic staff in British higher and further education, I respond to King's call to examine minority leadership within trade unions. Drawing on theoretical insights from the psychology of social movements, I examine how perceptions/experiences of racism, exclusion, bullying, and barriers to promotion impact on minority union leadership through different types of union involvement (e.g., attending local meetings, seeking union help, etc.) The findings suggest that perceptions of racism and experiences of bullying have a positive indirect effect on minorities taking up union leadership through attending union meetings and raising issues of racism with the union, but not through other forms of union involvement. In line with theory, this pattern of results suggests that union efforts to increase attendance and positive contact at local group meetings, along with efforts to build trust in the union's position on racism, may be important for increasing the representativeness of union leadership. As an ancillary goal (not explicitly stated in King's call), I test various intersectional accounts of experiences of racism across ethnicity and gender and find commonality across difference. Employing appropriate (Bayesian) methods offers intersectional researchers with the opportunity to examine such similarities across social categories that may form the basis for action against common systems of oppression–echoing King's own practice of intersectional solidarity.

Muslim American Cyber Contestations between Scholars and Activists Debating Racism, Islamophobia and Black Lives Matter

Over the last half-century, African Americans have been supplanted as the representational face of Islam in America by an immigrant population they initially perceived as obsequious to power and unconcerned with seeking redress to their historical grievances. Recently, however, a widespread cognizance of this strategic miscalculation coupled with the precipitous rise of Islamophobia in the Trump era has younger descendants of Muslim immigrants identifying with the left, combating Islamophobia as a type of racism in intersectional solidarity with other social justice platforms like the Black Lives Matter movement (blm). Thus, when fundamental disagreements emerged at the ris conference in late 2016 over endorsing the non-profit blm entity, they sparked robust social media debates. This paper analyzes those inter-communal negotiations as they played out on the Facebook pages of Muslim scholars, associating discourse models with contestations of community members negotiating the boundaries involved with integrating the heterogeneous discourses of antiracism.

Intersectional solidarity? The Armagh women, the British left and women’s liberation

In 1980, three Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the hunger strike being conducted by male Republican prisoners in Maze Prison. Overshadowed by the fatal 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved these women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior, while generating sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their competing narratives.

“A Black Man Replies”: Claude McKay’s Challenge to the British Left

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremacist logics mobilized by prominent 1920s leftists that contributed to the reestablishment of policing of and violence against black men. Donlon’s archival discoveries weave together biography, material cultural analysis, and histories of trans-Atlantic activism, and, in the process, reveal the labor of building radical intersectional solidarity that came before and followed the moment of “A Black Man Replies.”

Intersectional Solidarity

Intersectional Solidarity

“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles

L'A. reprend son essai feministe Under western eyes ecrit seize annees auparavant, dans le contexte d'un mouvement feministe transnational en pleine vitalite. Apres en avoir rappele les arguments centraux, elle analyse la reception qu'a eu cet article, puis tente de clarifier le sens qu'elle donne a des concepts-cles comme l'Occident ou le Tiers-Monde. Elle reengage le debat sur la relation entre le particulier et l'universel dans la theorie feministe. Elle tente enfin d'evaluer ce qui a change durant la periode qui s'est ecoulee depuis la parution de la premiere edition de Under western eyes. Elle inscrit parmi les nouveaux defis du feminisme le combat contre la mondialisation capitaliste et ses effets de predation dont les femmes sont plus particulierement victimes. A la suite de Vandana Shiva, elle s'insurge notamment contre la confiscation imperialiste des savoirs indigenes par le biais des brevets