Intersectionality: A challenge for cultural studies in the 2020s

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.

Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? (Freire, 2005: 45)

Much has been written about representations and portrayals of race, gender and class, among other categories of social divisions, within the field of cultural studies, in its critical and political approach to culture, as well as its attentiveness to power relations and to the possibilities for societal transformation. Considered multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary, cultural studies scholarship usually develops analyses which draw on different theories and perspectives, avoiding disciplinary fragmentation, and seeking different angles in order to multiply the weapons of critique.

Debates about social inequalities and their relation to media and culture can be found not only in universities, academic events, journals, syllabuses and classes, but also in the mainstream media, on various media platforms, in face-to-face interactions, online communities and networks. More than ever, feminism, antiracism, anti-homophobia, and trans rights are subjects of debate, and the concept of intersectionality is gaining attention in academia as well as among different audiences.

Patricia Hill Collins (2015: 1) understands intersectionality as ‘a field of study that is situated within the power relations that it studies’, as well as ‘an analytical strategy that provides new angles of vision on social phenomena’, and as ‘critical praxis that informs social justice projects’. Intersectional approaches have achieved relevance, especially among women of colour in academia. Yuval-Davis (2006: 206) observed that intersectional analysis ‘has come to occupy central spaces in both sociological and other analyses of stratification as well as in feminist and other legal, political and policy discourses of international human rights’. She adds, furthermore, that this approach, in many disciplines and fields, points to the ‘inadequacy of analysing various social divisions, but especially race and gender, as separate, internally homogeneous, social categories’.

In this text, I intend to unpack concepts that come from Black feminism – namely intersectionality, oppositional gaze and outsider-within – and discuss how they can contribute to research in cultural and media studies, emphasizing the importance of living experiences in the making of theories. What is the relationship between lived experiences and a theoretical and methodological standpoint which adopts an intersectional approach? Can the intersectionality paradigm be applied in empirical research on cultural studies? I argue that, in order to qualify, decentralize and decolonize the investigation of social phenomena, it is necessary to observe and to consider the perceptions, interpretations and theories which come from non-hegemonic groups – not only within the academic field but also in peripheral and adjunct spaces where knowledge is constructed.

Intersecting oppressions in cultural studies

Since the early 1980s, there has been an attention to the interplay of oppressions – of class, nation, race, and ethnicity – in the pioneering work of Stuart Hall. In his article ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’ (1980), he rejected the analysis of social inequalities which would be based on one sole theoretical approach. He defended and adopted a complex perspective to understand class, colour and race as deeply connected categories of domination. Hall distinguishes two opposite (although complementary) tendencies of perspectives that aim to analyse social phenomena related to these systems of oppression. According to him, the first of them would be the economic approach, which takes ‘economic relations and structures to have an overwhelmingly determining effect on the social structures’ of race and racism. In the second tendency, which Hall (1980: 306–7) names as the sociological one, the principal focus ‘is on race or ethnicity as specifically social or cultural features of the social formations under discussion’ that would exhibit ‘their own forms of structuration, have their own specific effects which cannot be explained away as mere surface forms of appearance of economic relations’.

He criticizes both tendencies in the analyses of phenomena which would privilege aspects of class or race, in a dispute between ‘hard’ materialism versus ‘soft’ culturalism in ethnic studies, considering that the either/or alternatives were disabling, and pointing to the importance of understanding practices and effects of class and race acting together. Hall (1980: 307) also stresses that theory ‘as always, has direct or indirect practical consequences’.

Collins (2015: 7) observes that ‘gender was not initially central to cultural studies, entering the field through feminist critiques that moved cultural studies in intersectional directions’. Black and non-white feminists, in different times and places, have been responsible for articulating and researching the intertwined character of forms of domination, such as intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality, claiming that doing this is a way of building and developing a broader knowledge in/about societies. Choosing one aspect as the only important axis of analysis is a limitation to any research. Also connected to cultural studies scholarship, feminist theorists, such as bell hooks, produced important analyses of gender representations in media and communications, drawing attention to interlocking oppressions and systems of power.

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989, considering that racist and sexist discriminations constitute social positions which cannot be reduced to the simple addition of inequalities because these categories function together in complex dynamics, in an entanglement of challenges that an individual or group face in everyday life. The concept of intersectionality is not exactly new: she sees her approach, as well as the coinage and development of the concept, as a continuity of the work of African-American women – and, I would add, of feminists from other parts of the world – who have articulated the need to ‘think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender, or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race’ (Crenshaw, 2014: para. 2).

Due to its many potential applications and increasing visibility over the past three decades, the concept of intersectionality has been broadly used, misused and explained. To exemplify the concept, Crenshaw refers to the case of a group of five African-American women who argued they were being discriminated against while seeking employment in a corporation. The company answered (and won in court with this allegation) that Black male and white female factory workers had been hired, which supposedly disproved racial and gender discrimination. Nevertheless, all Black people that were hired were male, and all the women were white. This perspective shows that there is a deep and interlocked connection between theory, power and practices in everyday life.

In many parts of the world, women of colour have been thinking, discussing and writing about the intersection of gender, race, class and sexuality. We can cite the important work of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison in the United States. In Brazil, Black intellectual Lélia Gonzalez (1983, 1988) connected race, gender and class in her analyses from the 1970s onwards, even before the coinage of the concept of intersectionality, in order to address the specificities of racism and sexism in postcolonial patriarchal societies. She developed the epistemic proposal for an Amefrica and an amefricanity, intending to elaborate new categories of analysis and to promote decolonial counter-narratives that came from peripheral areas, from the colonized. More recently, Bailey and Trudy (2018) created the concept of misogynoir to grasp the specificities of oppressions faced by Black women. Today, in intersectional analyses, researchers and activists have been considering other systems of inequality and discrimination such as geographical location, gender identity, age, ability, religion, nation, etc.

Hall’s remarks about the limitations of monothematic approaches are still relevant, however, as there is a vast range of contemporary academic productions which totally ignores or erases combined factors of oppression. Hall understood that different oppressions work in combined ways, stressing the complexity and interrelation of social inequalities of race and class. His rejection of the hierarchy that underpins both perspectives is coherent with his lived experience within race and class, as I will discuss in the next section.

Lived experiences and oppositional gazes

The scholarship of Black feminism stresses the importance of lived experience as it brings layers of information, impressions, feelings that should not be ignored in the construction of knowledge about the world. Perspective, as a way of seeing, has the potential to develop critical methods derived from attentive observation, and from a standpoint shaped by lived experiences. The subjects’ experience influences, changes and nurtures their ways of seeing, feeling, thinking and acting. Reflecting on one’s own experience may foment intellectual production – critical thinking, art, culture and theories – which may lead to political action and policy making, which, circularly, may interfere in lived experiences of individuals and groups. Here lies the emergence of the recognition that it is important to pay attention to what oppressed persons are saying and writing when they are, as Butler (2005) and Couldry (2010) put it, giving an account of themselves.

For an example of how experience shapes the intellectual life, I go back to Hall (Hall with Schwarz, 2017: 34), in Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, a posthumous memoir. In this book, he recalls that, being the one with the darkest skin among his siblings, he ‘began to feel and behave more and more like an inside-outsider’, and to acquire a sense of being ‘out of place’. Later, considering his lived experience as a young student, he identifies ‘being coloured’ and, at the same time, ‘from a well-to-do middle-class family, had been educated at a good, English-type school, and studied abroad in Oxford’ (2017: 12–13) as the central contradiction in his life. Probably, the originality and inventiveness of Hall’s intellectual work is due to his uncomfortable liminal position, from where he could manage to ‘see the organic connections and dissonances between the two worlds: the colonial and the post-colonial’ (2017: 13)

Reflecting on his own work and career as a teacher, as an intellectual and as a cultural theorist, Hall adds that ‘[t]here is never a single moment in this trajectory which wasn’t impelled by my racial positioning’ (Hall and Schwarz, 2017: 14). His ambiguous status certainly influenced his important reflections on the multiple and contingent character of identity, as it made him ‘understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a shifting process of positioning’ (2017: 16). For him, the lived experience and the intellectual production were inseparable.

This could even explain why, being a man, he did not focus on studying the intersections that would include gender oppressions. He mentions the violences that Black women and gay men face in Jamaica (Hall and Schwarz, 2017: 103), but does not discuss how these identities intersect to make these groups particularly more vulnerable than others. Hall considers that ‘the articulations between race, colour and class underpinned the entire social hierarchy’. Nevertheless, he sees gender as having a colonial specificity, as an ‘independent path through these categories’ (Hall and Schwarz, 2017: 97). Intersectional feminists would disagree with that independence, arguing that different systems of power, oppression and discrimination should be considered together, as interconnected and interlocked pathways.

The idea of a ‘familiar stranger’ in Hall is semantically very close to what Collins (1986) called the ‘outsider-within’, a person who would have the disadvantage of not belonging to a group, but also a privileged position as a ‘stranger’ who would have the ability to see patterns, rules, behaviours that the insiders would not notice. She considers that Black women have an ‘outsider-within’ status in academia, and that this is something positive for the development of social sciences and for the investigation of social dynamics, as we could bring new perceptions and perspectives to various fields of knowledge, because there are aspects of social phenomena which tend to be invisible to the insiders. An example of an outsider-within in literature is Calpurnia, the housekeeper in To Kill a Mocking Bird (Lee, 1960: 138) who surprised the young white narrator because she ‘led a modest double life’, and ‘had a separate existence outside our household . . . to say nothing of her having command of two languages’. The outsider-within lives in at least two worlds and knows that many (white, masculine) hegemonic perspectives are not universal, and that they can be confronted.

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed (2017) connects her lived experiences as a lesbian woman of colour with her work as a feminist philosopher. In Latin America, cultural studies theorists such as Jesús Martín-Barbero, Beatriz Sarlo and Ángel Rama addressed issues related to the place and the context they were writing from, which shaped their perspectives, interests and topics of research. In Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2017), one can see that his original and critical thinking about the contemporary world draws on, among other factors, his experience as a Black scholar who came from Cameroon. His postcolonial perspective helps us to understand why the murder of a Black man in the US attracts global attention (as indeed it should!), but the ongoing genocide of Black young people in Brazilian favelas by the state remains invisible for most of the world.

It is crucial to think of experience as perspective, as does bell hooks (1992), with her notion of the oppositional gaze, representing her particular point of view – but one that is also common to many Black women. bell hooks approaches the gaze as a way of contesting and resisting white patriarchal representations in cinema. In Black Female Intellectuals she discusses the (unfavourable) conditions under which Black women read, study and carry out research in societies where we are expected to care for whoever needs help or attention. She recalls being called out for isolating herself, for reading in her childhood instead of working or interacting with her family. bell hooks also remembers being punished as a child for looking, as the gaze can be considered a lack of respect and obedience. In a perspective of gender, hooks observed that the male is expected to look, and the female to be looked at. In a perspective of race, she pointed to the erasure and invisibility of Black women in feminist film criticism, which considered only white gendered relations. hooks (1992: 128) argues that ‘there is power in looking’ and that this questioning can be productive and creative. Connecting experience and theory, hooks (1991: 150) reflects on her conscious choice to become an intellectual, and stresses that she never thought of ‘intellectual work as being in any way divorced from the politics of everyday life’.

The interplay between multiple systems of oppression affects the experience of individuals, and the awareness of these intersecting power relations may give them tools to see and understand the world through new lenses and perspectives. This intellectual work has the potential of reflecting back into everyday life: into discourses, practices and movements, eventually leading to societal change. In short – and only didactically separating life from theory – I would defend the functioning of a cycle where life (or lived experience) informs theory, which could change life.

A challenge for cultural studies

Concerned with and committed to understanding and fighting social inequalities, cultural studies has often stressed the importance of considering axes of dominance/oppression in societies, investigating aspects of identity and representation, but usually (1) in a separated – and not intersectional – perspective and (2) focused on the audience, privileging the analysis of reception.

The focus of many discussions in cultural studies about media and communications is on reception and on how the identities of the audience would affect it, considering that the ways people will read / see / interpret could be different depending on their class, race, gender, ethnicity, ideology and so on. Not many analyses look at how the lived experiences of producers would affect the culture and media production. ‘Media’, ‘internet’, ‘representations’ are made by subjects, who affect and are affected by the context, as well as by the multiple identities and privileges (or oppressions) that these subjects may face in their trajectory and everyday lives.

How does the subjectivity and the identities of screenwriters, advertisers, journalists, TV presenters, casting managers, directors and celebrities interfere in whatever is circulated on media? In the analyses of mainstream media and popular culture, it is important to consider that media is not an abstract entity, but it is ruled and made by subjects, by individuals who work within the structures of society. These subjects are, mostly, privileged in terms of class, race, gender, geography and so on. In an intersectional approach to pedagogy, Case (2017) considers not only oppression, but also privilege as an essential aspect to be studied, as it operates to maintain oppression. The white upper- and middle-class male is the hegemonic majority in the construction and circulation of meaning in most Western societies, and this fact is seen as natural. As hooks (1992) points out, this arrangement should not be seen as the universal, but as a form of dominance which has been historically maintained and naturalized.

Mainstream media has been analysed as if only the reception could be diverse. Nevertheless, the sphere of production is becoming more permeable to other discourses, and this has key consequences. An example of this could be seen in a controversy around a comment made by BBC presenter Naga Munchetty, who said: ‘Every time I have been told as a woman of colour to “go home”, to “go back to where I came from” that was embedded in racism’, referring to the words Donald Trump used to attack non-white female congresswomen in July 2019. The Editorial Complaints Unit of BBC found Munchetty had breached the corporation’s guidelines; and this fact provoked debates about the importance (and the limits) of oppressed groups’ voices on media when reporting lived experiences and connecting them to social phenomena, such as racism.

Another example, which should not be seen as an isolated mistake, was the invisibilization of Vanessa Nakate, a young climate activist from Uganda, who was cropped ¹ from a photo taken at the World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos in 2020, showing only the three white activists. Global warming and other environment issues always intersect with other problems, which affect people in different ways. Issues related to race, gender, location, age are usually seen as something not important and autonomous, but we know that disasters, diseases, floods, scarcity etc. will have a stronger impact in groups who were already vulnerable because of social inequalities. The erasure of Nakate from the photo, which only became public because she protested on her Twitter account, is very revealing about which bodies matter, which countries matter, which races matter for mainstream press in the Global North.

It is important to stress that the presence – and the voice – of non-white women on mainstream media is not a gift from the dominant groups and corporations, but the result of struggles over visibility, representations, discourses, meanings and perspectives. An intersectional approach could help in observing how the position of these subjects in society could affect the media production and the circulation of culture.

Cultural studies have three main dimensions to reflect upon media and communications: production, context and reception. But the question is: who is analysing them? Many cultural studies scholars have stressed the importance of drawing on the theoretical and methodological approaches of different disciplines, but it is also crucial to pay attention to different gazes – including the ones which do not come from inside academia. Culture has been studied in a logic of we the analysts, they the people. The revalidation by cultural studies of working-class popular culture tends to be a patronizing top-down process, instead of a bottom-up one. It is a question of changing the position: from the feeble status of object of research to the position of the subject, of the author, of the storyteller.

This is a challenge because the question of intersectionality is not about synthesizing, but the need to complicate, to complexify, and to qualify analyses (Case, 2017). In terms of methodology, intersectionality makes the research harder, but it can also make the results less partial and more powerful in terms of their potential for social justice and transformation. The intersectional paradigm is not a simple sum of identities and categories, it is about the consequences of the interplay of different oppressions.

Not only popular culture on mainstream media but also theoretical knowledge of/about societies has been produced by an almost homogeneous group in the Western world. Intersectional and decolonial approaches would value the standpoint of non-hegemonic individuals and groups, and non-hegemonic places, and question the universality of theories, methodologies, concepts and frameworks. One of the main challenges now facing cultural studies seems to be trying to consider the knowledge that Black women, as well as intellectuals from other vulnerable groups, are producing at the moment. As we all know, knowledge and research in Western universities is produced, evaluated, reviewed, edited, ranked, spread, published, and grants given or not given, most of the time, by male, white, heterosexual and middle-class academics based in the Global North. Analyses which ignore the production of the Others, in an intersectional approach, run the risk of being partial to the same privileged and dominant perspectives already in play. Theoretical perspectives are always limited attempts to grab some understanding of reality, and they have been produced by a quite homogeneous group. By bringing in other angles of analyses, decolonial approaches can contribute to many fields of knowledge – especially in humanities and social sciences.

In addition to this, analyses that consider only one of the structural oppressions, that is, a monothematic framework, might miss important data about the social phenomenon studied, and consequently be ineffective in understanding and fighting inequalities, prejudices and violences. Personal experience and a more complex understanding of the gaze are pivotal to finding new ways to study culture and systems of power in societies. Artists, intellectuals, authors from marginalized groups have been asking different questions, experimenting with innovative theories and methods, questioning privileges and established ways of thinking. Searching, recognizing and valorizing this intellectual production is not a comfortable or easy task for mainstream academia, but it opens up new creative pathways towards innovation. There are new methodological procedures for intersectional researches based on the empirical applications of this framework, from data collection to analysis.

Intersectional approaches to culture, art, media and communications are happening in the Global South, on Instagram, in the creativity of the seeing and the making of Black female intellectuals and artists. In Brazil, I can see innovation in the discussions on Semiotics and Afrofuturism by Maria Aparecida Moura (2019), ² in Carla Akotirene’s reflections on Instagram, ³ in the analyses of art by Diane Lima, ⁴ in the work of Grace Passô, ⁵ in the provocations about sex and gender of Jota Mombaça, ⁶ in the lyrics of hip hop, to cite just a few.

In the book Inside the Ivory Tower (Gabriel and Tate, 2017), Black female academics such as Claudia Bernard (2016) defend an autoethnographic methodology of writing, in which researchers should examine the biases and lenses which come from their own oppressions and/or privileges when interpreting and analysing social and cultural phenomena. Obviously, the fact that an author, an academic, a theorist is/was part of vulnerable groups that face intersectional oppressions does not mean that they would necessarily write from a decolonial perspective, nor it is a guarantee that their work is sound, original or inventive. Also, I recognize that this text that claims attention must be directed towards the margins comes from the margin itself, being myself a Black woman from South America, bringing all my lived experiences and biases in my academic luggage, like everyone else.

Keeping intellectual production in the same hands helps to maintain systems of oppression. At the beginning of this decade of 2020, we are living in a reality that looks like a dystopic fiction, in terms of public health, and at the economic, social and political level. Fortunately, societies are in transformation. If we want change in practice, the way we have been building theory so far must change as well. In order to update and to innovate cultural studies, and also to strengthen its potential to contribute to societal change, it is necessary to keep looking from a variety of angles of oppression, and to look carefully at the margins, not only as objects of study but also as a place of intellectual invention. My bet is that the knowledge necessary for transformation, as Freire put decades ago, will come from the outsiders, from the excluded, from the oppressed.