The politics of ‘including everyone’: Popular intersectionality as new feminist sensibility in digital feminism

Affective desire for intersectionality

Popular intersectionality is a highly affective discourse which moves digital feminists to claim intersectionality for themselves or aspire towards it. In Hannah’s words, ‘it is my aspiration to be as intersectional as it is possible for me as a white cis woman’ (video call). The affective desire for intersectionality also operates through speech acts that express intersectionality as a ‘common sense’ perspective in feminism. As Elizabeth puts it, ‘if feminism wants to be entirely discrimination free, then it needs to be intersectional’ (email). And Franzi declares feminists should be ‘following the motto: only intersectional feminism is actually feminism’ (email). These sentiments suggest that there is only one right, one ‘good’ feminism, which implies that other feminisms, such as white feminisms, are not right, are ‘bad’. As Sara Ahmed (2010: 38) theorises, ‘to be affected in a good way by objects that are already evaluated as good is a way of belonging to an affective community’. Through positioning intersectionality as ‘common sense’ and ‘good’ feminism, digital feminists affectively relate to each other and form an ‘affective community’. At the same time, such shared emotions and affects enable a discursive distancing (Döveling et al., 2018) from exclusive kinds of feminisms like ‘bad’ white feminism. Leah describes an example of such affective boundary making:

I believe many debates about intersectionality never go beyond ‘Check Your Privilege’. And this is where digital feminism makes it easy to get the good feeling of being on the right side [. . .] Then you can give yourself a pat on the back, then you’ve done something good. I think digital feminism is sometimes not profound enough. (video call)

Leah’s account suggests that speech acts such as ‘Check Your Privilege’, through their repeated re-articulation, give feminists a ‘good feeling’. Thus, being on the ‘right’, the ‘good’ side of feminism creates affective relatability among digital feminists.

Importantly, relatability is a key feature in producing normative (white) femininities in contemporary neoliberal popular cultures (Kanai, 2019). Feminists who engage in popular digital debates on intersectionality relate through shared re-articulations of popular intersectionality, often in the form of images, memes or slogans such as ‘Check Your Privilege’, and thus perform normative and anti-racist feminine subjectivities. Yet, the affective desire for intersectionality ultimately forms a ‘fantasy’ of a ‘good’ feminism marked by ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011). That is, the ‘affective attachment’ (Berlant, 2011) to and desire for intersectionality, as I demonstrate in the remainder of this piece, prevents meaningful engagement with intersectionality.

Imperative of inclusion

Another way normative white femininities are produced in popular intersectionality discourses is through articulating normative feminine notions of care (Kanai, 2019), frequently expressed in the interviews as ‘inclusion’, ‘empowerment’ or ‘support’. For instance, Maria believes it is important ‘to always check: Have we perhaps forgotten about somebody on the way to completing the picture [of intersectional feminism]? That’s what I would consider intersectional thinking. To start with yourself and to see [. . .] who is there who might need my support?’ (video call). This example illustrates how normative feminine subjectivities are interpellated through articulating popular intersectionality as an imperative that requires feminists to be inclusive and supportive. Popular intersectionality challenges feminists, as Louisa puts it, to ‘[think] intersectionally, to really include EVERYONE, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, origin, age, disability or illness’ (email). Similarly, Kathi tells me, ‘it is really part of it, that [feminism] is intersectional and does not exclude anyone, and not just, dunno, only biologically born women or just white women’ (video call). Inclusion, in these accounts, is articulated not only as a defining feature of intersectionality but also as an imperative without whom feminism cannot be considered intersectional. As Akane Kanai (2019: 163) notes, ‘feminism is often translated into an affective performance of “kindness” that reconfigures feminism into something that (white) young women with good intentions cannot afford to ignore’. Popular intersectionality is equally adapted into ‘affective performances’, most notably through the imperative of inclusion. However, as I will demonstrate later, such affective articulations contribute to the reproduction of power imbalances in feminism and white saviourism.

Crucially, the feel-good feminism that buzzwords like inclusion create is actively encouraged by the digital platforms popular intersectionality circulates on. As digital media scholars have noted, affects like positivity entice user engagement and visibility, and in turn create economic gain for the platform through data generation (Kanai, 2019; van Dijck, 2013). Instagram, for instance, fosters these positive affective articulations through design affordances such as a feminine colour scheme and a heart-shaped ‘Like’-button which enable users ‘to externalize their feelings’ (Saraswati, 2021: 58). Thus, if ‘positivity’ on social media is encouraged and rewarded by platform affordances, it is unsurprising that my participants, many of whom have learnt (more) about intersectionality on social media, articulate intersectional feminism in positive terms like inclusion. Notably, the practical and epistemological difficulty of ‘including everyone’ is rarely addressed by my interviewees. When I ask Louisa how she attempts to ‘include everyone’ in her feminist art on Instagram, she contemplates, ‘In my art, I do not always include multiple discriminations in my thinking, I’m doing [my art] only in my free time’ (email). This suggests that ‘including everyone’ is rather difficult, if not impossible, in practice – particularly for feminists who participate in digital feminist activism in their free time and potentially under precarious conditions (Mendes, 2022).

Individual identities, narratives and experiences

Popular intersectionality’s high visibility correlates with a focus on representation and individual identities, which reverberates in my interviewees’ articulations of intersectionality as ‘lived realities’, ‘multi-layered-ness’, or ‘multiple perspectives’ of persons. It is also noticeable in the use of the term ‘experience’. Clara describes intersectionality as ‘the reality that several experiences of discrimination can simultaneously interlock, and [. . .] we all have our own experiences and I can’t use my experiences to speak for everyone, and also don’t want to’ (email). The sentiment that ‘we all have our own experiences’ alludes to an understanding that everyone ‘can recognize themselves in (at least) one of the categories provided by intersectionality’ (Carbin and Edenheim, 2013: 245), which resonates with popular intersectionality’s imperative of inclusion. Intersectionality is also articulated as helpful in talking about personal and individual experiences with racism and sexism:

Intersectionality is a great term [. . .] to understand that everything that happens to us, our experiencing, our coming together with other people is multifaceted and not just one thing that someone who, for example, makes a racist remark against me, or in a job, erm, the insult can be very sexualised and related to the fact that I’m dark skinned, mixed, [. . .] a woman, background plays a role. (Samantha, video call)

Following Patricia Hill Collins (2009: ix), intersectionality has come to signify individual ‘identity narratives, in part, because intersectionality can be grasped far more easily when constructing one’s own autobiography’. As such, popular intersectionality’s ‘turning inward’ (Collins, 2009: ix) not only aligns with the continued neoliberal co-optation of social justice movements and intersectionality in particular but also refers to a discursive and visual focus on individual identities and embodiments.

This focus is evocative of Instagram and other platforms’ visual cultures, where popular feminisms circulate in ‘economies of visibility’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018). And while visibility allows marginalised communities to be seen and their political demands to be heard, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Zoe Glatt (2023: 501) caution that ‘the representation of intersectionality becomes an end in itself, severing ties with both politics and structures’. These developments have only been intensified by popular influencer cultures in which individuals come to represent a certain identity group. ‘I often feel that certain people (who are particularly vocal in the media) are used as spokesperson for racism/sexism/ableism etc. and through that, a general truth is formed’, Clara observes (email). Influencers who self-brand as ‘minority identities’, Tobias Raun and Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø (2022: 1799) analyse, tend to ‘subscribe to an individualised identity politics in which visibility is a requisite for social change’. Unsurprisingly, popular intersectionality, circulating in comparable social media economies of visibility, signifies visibility of individual identities, experiences and lived realities. Yet, such an understanding of intersectionality opens up countless options of identities to consider in one’s activism, rendering it epistemologically impossible to ‘include everyone’. As Alexis reflects, ‘All these different levels of discrimination need to be kept in mind [. . .] this is of course super difficult because most of us aren’t affected by all possible combined forms of discrimination’ (email).

Hierarchies of oppression and privilege

The strong affective desire for intersectionality and rejection of white feminism, in combination with imperatives to demonstrate care and inclusion, ultimately leads to hierarchical thinking in popular intersectionality discourses. There is a noticeable awareness among my interviewees of how white privilege operates in everyday spaces (Kanai, 2021). Yet, at the same time, intersectionality is employed as agglomeration of a person’s various oppressed identities and compared to more privileged configurations, thus producing a discursive ‘hierarchy of oppression’ (Lorde, 2018 [1983]). For example, Fabienne explains, ‘a Black, Muslim, homosexual trans woman is affected by many more discriminating factors than a white, heterosexual, healthy German [woman] like me [. . .] intersectional feminism keeps these discriminating factors in mind and campaigns to make all discriminating factors better’ (video call). Similarly, Louisa contemplates that ‘a black trans woman with a disability experiences more discrimination, and that these probably condition and reinforce each other’ (email). While the comparison is not further specified, ‘someone more privileged’, such as a white, cis, able-bodied woman, can be inferred here. Importantly, such articulations consider intersectionality as ‘merely additive’ (King, 1988), while producing caricatures of archetypal oppressed figures rather than critiques of structural oppression. A comparable exclusionary mechanism occurs through declarations of privilege in another interview:

Even when I have my own points where I might be less privileged [. . .] certain mechanisms of discrimination work together in such a way that other women might be discriminated, maybe differently than me [. . .] for me, intersectional feminism means indeed this unconditional recognition and solidarity and acceptance of all women. Every woman, who regards herself as a woman, feels as a woman. (Jessica, video call)

The notion of intersectionality as an inclusive feminism is at work here, operating through the sentiment that intersectional feminism equals ‘unconditional recognition and solidarity and acceptance of all women’. Popular intersectionality’s imperative of inclusion thus implies the recognition of privilege. Yet, similar to ‘declarations of whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2004), such privilege declarations are ‘non-performative’, and ‘do not do what they say’ (Ahmed, 2012: 117).

Although the comparison articulated here might be less explicit than the examples focusing on oppression, it nonetheless configures a similar intersectional hierarchy in which more privileged women are positioned higher in the hierarchy, that is ‘less oppressed’, than less privileged women. Following the logics of this rhetoric, those who are perceived as ‘less oppressed’ still wield (discursive) power over other groups who are assumed ‘more oppressed’. While this is not to deny existing power structures and inequalities among marginalised groups, feminists must be wary of the implications of ‘ranking’ the importance of group-specific social justice fights. As Gloria Wekker (2004: 490) critically notes in the Dutch context, ‘by representing white Dutch women as the epitome, the teleological endpoint of emancipation’, they are constructed as ‘the example for black, migrant and refugee women, who apparently still have a long way to go before they can measure up’.

Such rhetorical devices, especially when articulated from a position of privilege, evoke ‘progress narratives’ (Hemmings, 2011) of emancipated white women, in which the racialised Other is still in need of saving, and subsequently reaffirm existing hierarchies of power, rather than disrupting them (Mohanty, 1988). Popular intersectionality thus avows and simultaneously reproduces power inequalities through employing postfeminist logics and vocabularies. That is, popular intersectionality, in contrast to postfeminist sentiments, actively acknowledges and affectively embraces the continued need for feminist politics (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020), while also producing discursive hierarchies that articulate relatively privileged white women as more ‘empowered’ than other subordinated groups. Crucially, popular intersectionality’s ‘double entanglement’ (McRobbie, 2009) is enabled by the ‘suturing’ (Hemmings, 2018) of a popular intersectional feminism and postfeminist notions of normative femininity. This allows relatively privileged (white) feminists to both claim the subject position of someone marginalised by sexism (and potentially other -isms), while simultaneously taking the position of the ‘feminist subject who continues to do the rescue work’ (Hemmings, 2018: 973) for others who are (perceived as) more marginalised – which ultimately re-establishes a hierarchy of oppression and privilege. In this regard, the positionality of Western white women, such as that of many of my participants, is no longer the same as it was under postfeminism, i.e. allegedly empowered and freed from patriarchal oppression (Scharff, 2012). Yet, I contend that through discursive devices such as the comparisons discussed above, postfeminism manages to tighten its grip on contemporary expressions of popular feminisms (Gill, 2017), such as popular intersectionality.

Allyship as neoliberal self-governmentality

Popular intersectionality is marked by a neoliberal self-governmentality that requires feminists to constantly consume knowledge, learn, reflect and actively work on becoming a ‘good’ intersectional ally. My interviewees repeatedly articulate allyship with various marginalised groups through the common imperative to ‘listen, learn, and reflect on yourself’ (see Carlson et al., 2020). As Tim explains, a white person’s role in intersectional feminism ‘is first and foremost the role of someone listening. It makes sense that one learns about other people’s perspectives’ (video call). Torben believes for him as a ‘hetero man [. . .] the first and most important step is the mind-set, simply to reflect oneself’ (video call). Notably, these articulations share an understanding that through listening to and learning about the experiences of other groups, a process of self-reflexivity is ignited through which the self is transformed into an ally (Kanai, 2020). Such articulations correspond with neoliberal self-improvement narratives (Scharff, 2015), which postulate that ‘through reflexivity, individuals can reinvent themselves in adherence to their subjectivity’ (Gerodetti and McNaught-Davis, 2017: 355).

These neoliberal logics are embedded in social media and entice users to stay on the platform to continue to learn, which increases its potential for economic gain, as it relies on users spending as much time as possible on the platform for data collection purposes (Fuchs, 2014). Indeed, social media is usually described as a resource of learning by my interviewees. Laila explains that as an ally with queer communities, it is important ‘to read a lot, books, but also on social media, how people of various gender identities and sexualities report about their histories (of suffering)’. It’s only then that I feel properly connected with the topic and the people’ (email). Two aspects are noteworthy here: first, allyship is articulated as consumption of marginalised identities (hooks, 1992), and, second, successful allyship enables feminists to connect with marginalised identities on an affective level, highlighting once more the desire to form ‘affective communities’ (Ahmed, 2010) in popular intersectionality and allyship discourses.

In discussing the role of ‘learning’ in intersectional allyship, several participants also expressed a sentiment of ‘not knowing enough’ to be a ‘good’ ally. Hannah, for instance, shares that she feels she needs to learn more about ‘the whole discussion around ableism, I’ve zero engaged with it, yeah, I should engage with it much, much more. I don’t know enough’ (video call). This illustrates that one is expected to be knowledgeable about the intersectional experiences of various identity groups before joining feminist debates (Kanai, 2021; Scharff, 2023), which, once more, is epistemologically impossible, and thus complicates the notion of social media as a resource of learning.

High-stakes discourse and anxiety

Popular intersectionality functions as a high-stakes discourse for digital feminists. The accounts of my participants reveal that the ‘affective attachment’ (Berlant, 2011) to popular intersectionality reaches beyond the simple ‘feel-good’ nature described earlier. Although intersectionality is articulated in positive and relatable terms, my interviewees also recount experiencing pressure in digital debates about intersectionality, especially in the context of the ongoing pandemic and national lockdowns at the time of the interviews. As Hannah puts it,

Honestly, we’re just living during a glaring pandemic, we realise more and more that we are being exploited, we are all mentally at the end of our tether, because it isn’t possible anymore. We still have to perform though. [. . .] And then you have to fulfil your own aspiration to be morally good, whatever that means. (video call)

The pressure many participants experience, I contend, is not only due to the increased (self-imposed) demand for feminists to perform normative notions of femininity such as care (Kanai, 2019) – which many experience as particularly pertinent during pandemic times – but also because foregrounding digital feminists’ efforts to ‘do good’ is a profound political thrust for a socially-just feminism, which popular intersectionality seemingly promises to be. This profound desire for justice distinguishes popular intersectionality from other popular feminisms, in which desires for radical change are less articulated.

Yet simultaneously, foregrounding one’s efforts to ‘do good’ also bears the risk of over-centring the self. Kathi describes the required balancing act and associated feelings of insecurity and anxiety in an email post-interview:

I know that there are many BIPoC who celebrate when white people campaign against racism, but for many there is also a fine line between ‘this is good support and allyship’ and ‘here is someone who wants to show off by appropriating OUR topic and wants to gain attention, appreciation, and appraisal, because the topic is currently getting attention’ [. . .] I absolutely do not want to fall into that second category, but I don’t always find it easy to recognise that fine line. That’s why I am (as someone who avoids conflicts) very careful – and then of course I’m scared to be too careful and not to do enough (that gets demanded a lot as well and I’m trying to comply, which is not always easy, because there are these hardly distinguishable lines). (email; italics and capitalisation in original)

Articulations of anxiety and insecurity around navigating allyship, as Shannon Sullivan (2014) writes, can be related to feelings of white guilt, which in turn can prompt decision-making paralysis concerning questions of allyship. Moreover, I claim that the performance of normative femininity in digital feminism further encourages articulations of insecurity about ‘correct’ behaviour. Indeed, ‘a certain kind of performative insecurity has historically been a mandatory element of femininity’ (Gill and Kanai, 2018: 322). Yet, the paucity of critical interrogations of such expressions of femininity in digital feminist spaces prevents meaningful allyship. Ultimately, insecurity over the correct balancing of allyship demands and the resulting lack of action refer the responsibility of opposing oppressive systems back onto those groups who are oppressed by these systems in the first place (Sullivan, 2014).

Navigating digital allyship is further complicated by the affordances of social media compared to allyship in offline life. Digital feminists, as other users, are acutely aware that profile pages and timelines present (to varying degrees) visible and public ‘archives’ (Robards et al., 2018) showcasing one’s ‘feminist politics’ (Mahoney, 2020). However, my participants’ accounts are also symptomatic of neoliberal-capitalist platform cultures which actively encourage anxiety as an ‘affective practice’ (Lehto, 2021). In line with the wider cultural turn to confidence (Gill and Orgad, 2022), the expression of vulnerability, anxiety, and insecurity on digital platforms leads to more traffic and engagement and is therefore capitalised on, not just by the platform but also its users (Duffy et al., 2024). While this is not to suggest that my participants engage in self-serving ‘performances’ of anxiety, I do want to emphasise social media’s structural dimension of anxiety as a gendered technology in popular intersectionality discourses, as well as the affectively experienced risks of participating in popular intersectionality discourses.