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Viva La Sisterhood
Intersectional Feminism
A movement truly inclusive, and allows women of all races, economic standings, religions, identities and orientations for their voices to be heard. ‘Intersectionality’ was coined by black feminist lawyer and academic Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It describes a way of thinking and organising so that we can understand how different identities affect women in different ways and can overlap. Age, class, disability, faith, gender and sexuality are all forms of oppression that can ‘intersect’. Race is a key part of intersectionality. It’s important to Viva la Sisterhood because it helps us to empathise with understand others.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born 1959) is an American lawyer, civil rights advocate, philosopher, and a leading scholar of critical race theory who developed the theory of intersectionality.
Over the course of its existence, feminism has mainly focused on the issues experienced by white, middle-class women. For example, it is largely shared and advertised that a woman makes 78 cents to a man's dollar. But this is only the statistic for white women. As upsetting as it is, women of minority groups make even less. Black women earn 64 cents to white men's dollar and Hispanic women only earn 56 cents. Intersectional feminism takes into account the many different ways each woman experiences discrimination. “White feminism” is a term that is used to describe a type of feminism that overshadows the struggles women of color, LGBTQ women and women of other minority groups face. So, essentially, it's not true feminism at all.
"When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose".
- Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
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