Most people who use the word intersectionality understand it as “sum of various identities”.
Ask them to explain what intersectionality means and they’ll go “Oh, so think about a Dalit woman, she’s doubly oppressed — through caste and through gender”
This is a crude and problematic understanding of intersectionality.
Firstly, it leads to what’s called “oppression Olympics”. You start looking at various identities that can be put on a person and then literally count the number of such identities. Then you call them “most oppressed”, “less oppressed”, etc. You compare oppression.
Secondly, it frames oppression as something that’s static, mathematical, and homogenous. You make intersectionality all about “Dalit women”, “tribal women”, or “black women”.
And thirdly, you lose the whole point of intersectionality.
The idea of intersectionality is to not see everyone with a particular identity the same. It is to see whose realities are left out when speaking about a group. One early example is in a women’s right convention, Sojourner Truth standing up and saying “Ain’t I a Woman?“
It is also about realising oppression isn’t a commodity item that adds up neatly when identities intersect. Say a company has a policy to hire 50% women and 50% from scheduled caste. If the company hires 100 people strictly following this policy, how many scheduled caste women will get hired? 50? 25? 0?
If you think about intersectionality mathematically, the answer is 25. If you think about it with my preamble in mind, you’ll say 0. But the real answer is “closer to 0”. All women hires would be privileged caste individuals. And most scheduled caste hires would be men.
Scheduled caste women will get left out from both categories, except the few with class privilege who might get selected. And there will be 0 people with visible disabilities among all the 100.
You can’t ignore the intersections of “other” realities when you’re talking about intersectionality. It is those “other” factors that make intersectionality different from addition.
When most maternal deaths in a state are indigenous/tribal women, it’s intersectionality at play. But it is also intersectionality when Dalit men and savarna women call each other out on twitter. And it is indeed intersectionality illustrated when all the CEOs are savarna men. And it is intersectionality which lets you look at things outside the larger identities of class, caste, race, gender and go look at the numerous smaller identities and situations that shape a person.
One could say “we don’t need to understand intersectionality like this to be able to work for social justice”. And they would be limiting themselves. This understanding of intersectionality is what makes it possible to find solidarity and allyship across movements, to be nuanced when it comes to cancel culture, and to be not stereotyping people based on two or three of their identities.
This understanding of intersectionality is also a starting point to examine how power operates differently in every moment, every interaction, and every relationship.
And it’s also the foundation for a love ethic.