create 4questions and answer it
DQ’s should follow the format of a proposed question, followed by a personal paragraph response. DQ’s receiving full credit (1) pose questions warranting a paragraph response related to week’s topic(s) and pull on key concepts presented in class to supply a relevant response I will return DQ’s the following section with, any necessary feedback at that time.
The Uses of Anger
Author(s): Audre Lorde
Source: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Looking Back, Moving Forward: 25
Years of Women’s Studies History (Spring – Summer, 1997), pp. 278-285
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The Uses of Anger
Audre Lorde Fall 1981
Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others
and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.
Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived
with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger,
ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger, learning to use that
anger before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did
it in silence, afraid of the weight of that anger. My fear of that anger
taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.
Women responding to racism means women responding to anger,
the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions,
of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal,
and coopting.
My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and pre-
sumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If in your dealings with
other women your actions have reflected those attitudes, then my
anger and your attendant fears, perhaps, are spotlights that can be
used for your growth in the same way I have had to use learning to
express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt
and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we will all perish,
for they serve none of our futures.
Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am
going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that I hope
will illustrate the points I am trying to make. In the interest of time, I am
going to cut them short. I want you to know that there were many more.
For example:
• I speak out of a direct and particular anger at a particular acade-
mic conference, and a white woman comes up and says, “Tell me how
you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my
manner that keeps her from hearing, or the message that her life may
change?
• The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites
a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and
white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most
278
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Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1997: 1 & 2 279
vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women
really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of
where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of
the racist problem. These are the bricks that go into the walls against
which we will bash our consciousness, unless we recognize that they
can be taken apart.
• After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to
address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear,
on campus after campus. “How can we address the issues of racism?
No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement,
“We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In
other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women
of Color, and only we can discuss it.
• After I have read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in
Rage” a white woman asks me, “Are you going to do anything with how
we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I ask, “How
do you use ^owrrage?” And then I have to turn away from the blank
look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own
annihilation. Because I do not exist to feel her anger for her.
• White women are beginning to examine their relationships to
Black women, yet often I hear you wanting only to deal with the little
colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nurse-
maid, the occasional second-grade classmate; those tender memories
of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral. You avoid the
childhood assumptions formed by the raucous laughter at Rastus and
Oatmeal, the acute message of your mommy’s handkerchief spread
upon the park bench because I had just been sitting there, the indeli-
ble and dehumanizing portraits of Amos and Andy and your Daddy’s
humorous bedtime stories.
I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a super-
market in Eastchester in 1967 and a little white girl riding past in her
mother’s cart calls out excitedly, “Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!” And
your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you. And so, fifteen
years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humor-
ous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and dis-ease.
• At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-known
white American woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of
women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes off to an
“important panel.”
• Do women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism? It
will require recognizing the needs and the living contexts of other
women. When an academic woman says, for instance, “I can’t afford
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280 Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1 997: I & 2
it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her
available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,”
she means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely
subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the
National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a Conven-
tion in which it commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to
waive the registration fee for poor women and women of Color who
wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossi-
ble for many women of Color – for instance, Wilmette Brown, of Black
Women for Wages for Housework – to participate in this Convention.
And so I ask again: Is this to be merely another situation of the acad-
emy discussing life within the closed circuits of the academy?
To all the white women here who recognize these attitudes as familiar,
but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and survive thousands
of such encounters – to my sisters of Color who like me still tremble
their rage under harness, or who sometimes question the expression
of our rage as useless and disruptive (the two most popular accusa-
tions) , I want to speak about anger, my anger, and what I have learned
from my travels through its dominions.
Everything can be used, except what is wasteful. You will need to remember
this, when you are accused of destruction.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful
against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that
anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source
of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I
do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of ten-
sions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and
radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.
I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark,
resent what has been said, become filled with fury, and remain silent,
because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within them like
an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of
Color who talks about racism.
But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our
vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarifi-
cation, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify
who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are
our genuine enemies.
Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of
women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. We are also Asian
American, Caribbean, Chicana, Latina, Hispanic, Native American,
and we have a right to each of our names. The woman of Color who
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Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1997: 1 & 2 281
charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her strug-
gles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me
that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the
truths between us. If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sis-
ter’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my
own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It
wastes energy I need to join with her. And yes, it is very difficult to
stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I
do not share, or even one in which I myself may have participated.
We speak in this place removed from the more blatant reminders
of our embattlement as women. This need not blind us to the size and
complexities of the forces mounting against us and all that is most
human within our environment. We are not here as women examin-
ing racism in a political and social vacuum. We operate in the teeth of
a system for whom racism and sexism are primary, established, and
necessary props of profit. Women responding to racism is a topic so
dangerous that when the local media attempt to discredit this
Convention they choose to focus upon the provision of Lesbian housing
as a diversionary device – as if the Hartford Courant dare not mention
the topic chosen for discussion here, racism, lest it become apparent
that women are in fact attempting to examine and to alter all the
repressive conditions of our lives.
Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly
white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as
an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like evening time or the
common cold.
So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the cause
of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather
that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color,
Lesbians and gay men, poor people – against all of us who are seeking
to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions,
moving toward coalition and effective action.
Any discussion among women about racism must include the recog-
nition and the use of anger. It must be direct and creative, because it is
crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor to seduce us
into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty;
we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers
entwined within it, because, rest assured, our opponents are quite seri-
ous about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here.
And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger,
please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you
to lock your doors at night, and not to wander the streets of Hartford
alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy
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282 Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1997: 1 6″ 2
us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in our
academic rhetoric.
This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of
those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruc-
tion. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is
change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view
any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black
women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or
immobilization or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative
idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine dif-
ference, and to alter those distortions which history has created
around difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And
we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?
Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of
anguish at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we
survive, it is in spite of a whole world out there that takes for granted
our lack of humanness, that hates our very existence, outside of its
service. And I say “symphony” rather than “cacophony” because we
have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear
us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them
for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us
who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my
anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when
the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those
women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their
own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is our anger more threatening
than the woman-hatred that tinges all the aspects of our lives?
It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us, but our
refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move
beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger
as an important source of empowerment.
I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor
answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt
is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack
of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it becomes
no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt
is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of
communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the
continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for
changelessness.
Most women have not developed tools for facing anger construc-
tively. CR [consciousness-raising] groups in the past, largely white,
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Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1997: 1 & 2 283
dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these
groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their
oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine
differences between women, such as those of race, color, class, and sex-
ual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the
contradictions of self, woman, as oppressor. There was work on
expressing anger, but very little on anger directed against each other.
No tools were developed to deal with other women’s anger except to
avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt.
I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another
way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need
to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the
earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have
spoken to you; I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in
the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked.
“What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white
women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant
Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921 ,
and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of
the Nineteenth Amendment for all women – excluding the women of
Color who had worked to help bring about that amendment.
The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them
with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as
much intensity as we defend ourselves from the manner of saying. Anger
is a source of empowerment we must not fear to tap for energy rather
than guilt. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will
accept only the designs already known, those deadly and safely familiar.
I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.
For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation.
In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives
depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of
others was to be avoided at all costs, because there was nothing to be
learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come
up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept
our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.
But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between
us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited
without blame but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women
can transform differences through insight into power. For anger
between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and
sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.
My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my
living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It has also
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284 Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1997: 1 & 2
served me in classrooms without light or learning, where the work and
history of Black women was less than a vapor. It has served me as fire
in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in
my experience and the experience of my people only new reasons for
fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for not dealing with your
blindness, no reason to withdraw from the results of your own actions.
When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of
our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are “creat-
ing a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from getting
past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting communication and
action.” All these quotes come directly from letters to me from mem-
bers of this organization within the last two years. One woman wrote,
“Because you are Black and Lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral
authority of suffering.” Yes, I am Black and Lesbian, and what you hear
in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is
a difference.
To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the
pretexts of intimidation, is to award no one power – it is merely
another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed
privilege, unbreached, intact. For guilt is only yet another form of
objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a
little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black
women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other peo-
ple ‘s salvation, other people’s learning. But that time is over. My anger
has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give
it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful
to replace it on the road to clarity.
What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression, her own
oppressed status, that she cannot see her heelprint upon another
woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become pre-
cious and necessary as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from
the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
I am a Lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because
I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my
commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because
she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are
rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the
Lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains
closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support,
the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman
who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to
recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not
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Women ‘s Studies Quarterly 1 997: 1 & 2 285
only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger
which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual
empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am
not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very
different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of
Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.
I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction,
but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of
her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
I have suckled the wolfs lip of anger and I have used it for illumination,
laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food,
no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices
of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instru-
ments of flagellation; we are women always forced back upon our
woman’s power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to
use the dead flesh of animals; and bruised, battered, and changing, we
have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are mov-
ing on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths
we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world
where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where
the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and
wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.
For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over
this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets,
spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other
agents of war and death, pushes opera singers off rooftops, slaughters
children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodom-
izes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women
which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the anni-
hilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to
examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work;
our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone
upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to
support our choices.
We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objec-
tification and beyond guilt.
Audre Lorde’s Chosen Poems and her “bio-myth-ography ” entitled I’ve Been
Standing on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time will be out in 1982.
Copyright © 1981 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted by permission of the Charlotte
Sheedy Literary Agency.
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Looking Back, Moving Forward: 25 Years of Women’s Studies History (Spring – Summer, 1997), pp. 1-459
Front Matter
Elaine Hedges: A Tribute
Editorial: Looking Back, Moving Forward [pp. 6-22]
Looking Back
Institution and Ideology
The First Ten Years Are the Easiest [pp. 23-33]
Evaluation: Reflections of a Program Consultant [pp. 34-39]
The “Bridge” between Black Studies and Women’s Studies: Black Women’s Studies [pp. 40-43]
Staying the Course: The Necessity for Remaining True to a Radical Vision [pp. 44-46]
Outside the Sisterhood: Ageism in Women’s Studies [pp. 47-52]
What Happened at Sacramento [pp. 53-58]
Closeups of Women’s Studies Programs
University of Washington (Fall 1973) [pp. 59-62]
Portland State University (Spring 1975) [pp. 62-64]
State University of New York, Albany (Summer/Fall 1975) [pp. 64-67]
State University of New York, Buffalo (Summer/Fall 1975) [pp. 67-71]
Cornell University (Summer/Fall 1975) [pp. 71-73]
Santa Ana College (Winter 1976) [pp. 73-74]
University of Pennsylvania (Winter 1976) [pp. 75-77]
University of Virginia (Winter 1976) [pp. 77-78]
San Diego State University (Spring 1978) [pp. 78-83]
George Washington University (Winter 1979) [pp. 84-89]
Hunter College, City University of New York (Spring 1983) [pp. 89-95]
Sarah Lawrence College (Summer 1983) [pp. 95-99]
Personal Narratives: Teachers, Students, Administrators
Teaching about Black Women Writers [pp. 100-102]
Feminist Press Author Reveals Identity [as Harvard Dean] [pp. 103-105]
Making the Bridge between the Woman in Me Who’s a Bitch, and the Woman in Me Who is Sensitive and Tender . . . One Student’s View of Women’s Studies [pp. 106-109]
Personal Reflections on Building a Women’s Center in a Women’s College [pp. 110-119]
Women Trustees and Educational Equity [pp. 120-124]
The Psychological Impact of a Women’s Studies Course [pp. 125-131]
Dual Citizenship: [An Interview with] Women of Color in Graduate School [pp. 132-138]
Pedagogy
Bragging about Bragging [pp. 139-143]
White Woman, Black Women: Inventing an Adequate Pedagogy [pp. 144-151]
Black-Eyed Blues Connection: Teaching Black Women II [pp. 152-160]
Brief, A-mazing Movements: Dealing with Despair in the Women’s Studies Classroom [pp. 161-165]
What is Feminist Pedagogy? [pp. 166-173]
Affective Teaching for Our Lives: Singing in the Feminist Theory Classroom [pp. 174-182]
Critiques of the Disciplines
Women’s Studies and Science [pp. 183-189]
Reconceptualizing Introductory Sociology: Two Course Outlines [pp. 190-198]
We Are Also Your Sisters: The Development of Women’s Studies in Religion [pp. 199-211]
Feminist Art History and the Academy: Where Are We Now? [pp. 212-222]
Curriculum Transformation
Integrating Women’s Studies into the Curriculum [pp. 223-230]
Women’s Studies and Projects to Transform the Curriculum: A Current Status Report [pp. 231-236]
Designing an Inclusive Curriculum: Bringing All Women into the Core [pp. 237-253]
The Origins and Development of the National Women’s Studies Association
The Case for a National Women’s Studies Association [pp. 254-257]
Planning a National Women’s Studies Association [pp. 258-262]
Writing It All Down: An Overview of the Second NWSA Convention [pp. 263-267]
Encounter with American Feminism: A Muslim Woman’s View of Two Conferences [pp. 268-270]
Disobedience Is What NWSA Is Potentially about [pp. 271-277]
The Uses of Anger [pp. 278-285]
Groundbreakers
Tillie Olsen’s Reading Lists I-IV [pp. 286-295]
Second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women [pp. 296-299]
Advice from a Chinese Revolutionary [Feminist] [pp. 300-301]
Finding and Studying Lesbian Culture [pp. 302-308]
The IWY Conference at Houston: Implications for Women’s Studies [pp. 309-313]
Books That Changed Our Lives [pp. 314-335]
National Reports on Women’s Studies around the World
1970s
The Netherlands (Spring/Summer 1996) [pp. 336-338]
Germany (Spring/ Summer 1996) [pp. 338-341]
India (Fall/Winter 1994) [pp. 341-344]
Argentina (Fall/Winter 1994) [pp. 344-347]
Korea (Spring/ Summer 1996) [pp. 347-348]
1980s
West Indies (Fall/Winter 1994) [pp. 349-351]
South Africa (Spring/Summer 1996) [pp. 351-353]
1990s
Russia (Fall/Winter 1994) [pp. 353-356]
Uganda (Spring/Summer 1996) [pp. 356-357]
Moving Forward
Strengthening Women’s Studies in Hard Times: Feminism and Challenges of Institutional Adaptation [pp. 358-387]
The Women’s Studies Ph.D.: A Report from the Field [pp. 388-403]
“Promises to Keep”: Trends in Women’s Studies Worldwide [pp. 404-421]
Resources
Women’s Studies Programs-1997 [pp. 422-455]
Newsbriefs [pp. 456-459]
Back Matter
Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Women’s Studies International Forum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif
Ashley Giraldi, Elizabeth Monk-Turner ⁎
Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, United States
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: Agira001@odu.edu (A. Giraldi), eturne
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.05.001
0277-5395/
© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 18 August 2016
Revised 18 March 2017
Accepted in revised form 2 May 2017
Available online 15 May 2017
© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Rape culture “refers to multiple pervasive issues that allow rape and
sexual assault to be excused, legitimized and viewed as inevitable”
(White & Smith, 2004: 174). In rape culture, women and men assume
sexual violence is a fact of life (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 2005). Like-
wise, Wilhelm (2015) argues that rape culture normalizes, trivializes,
and condones sexual assault against women. Notably, 91% of those
assaulted are women, most (8 in 10) know their assailant, and the
vast majority (90%) never report the sexual assault or rape to the police
(NSVRC, 2015). Rape is the most under-reported crime in the United
States (NSVRC, 2015). Young women in the U.S., between the ages of
16–24, are considered to be at the greatest danger for sexual assault
(Lombardi & Jones, 2009). According to the Campus Sexual Assault
Study, nearly 1 in 5 women experienced an attempted or completed
sexual assault since entering college (Krebs, Lindquist, Warner, Fisher,
& Martin, 2007). Notably, sexual victimization rates among college
women are about three times greater than in the general population
(White & Smith, 2004). In a study of men at one university, more than
half (63.3%) self-reported acts that qualify as attempted rape or rape
and revealed that they had repeatedly engaged in this behavior
(NSVRC, 2015).
In 2015, banners flew off a fraternity balcony on move-in day:
“Rowdy and fun. Hope your baby girl is ready for a good time;” “Fresh-
man daughter drop off;” and “Go ahead and drop off mom too.” The re-
sponsible fraternity said it was all meant in fun; however, they were
suspended by their national chapter and an outcry against rape culture
emerged around the campus community. Across the country, college
and university students engage and maintain rape culture. Yale Univer-
sity was a prime example, when one of their fraternities was caught
chanting, “no means yes, yes means anal” in 2010 (Gasso & Greenberg
2010). Likewise, the 2016 sentencing of Brock Turner to six months in
county jail after he was convicted of three felonies for sexually
r@odu.edu (E. Monk-Turner).
assaulting and raping a Stanford student, who sent a remarkable open
letter to her assailant, stirred many calling for change including the
Vice President of the United States. The current work analyzes social
media comments to a local media post about the banner story to better
understand societal attitudes toward rape culture on university
campuses.
Social media has arguably become a staple in our culture with less
separation between our online and real-life interactions (Strain,
Saucier, & Martens, 2015). This can be attributed to the countless uses
of social media including as a form of public justice through media trials
(Chagnon & Chesney-Lind, 2015; Machado & Santos, 2009), as a method
to gain public visibility (Yar, 2012), or for informational reasons, social
support, or friendship (Ridings & Gefen, 2004). Some universities have
switched from traditional Learning Management Systems to Facebook
communities designed to help students in their programs (Garavaglia
& Petti, 2015). The reaches of social media touch nearly every aspect
of our lives, which makes it an extremely powerful and influential tool
in the dissemination of information, particularly regarding rape culture.
1. Two approaches to understanding perceptions of rape culture in
social media
1.1. Hegemonic masculinity—boys will be boys
Allison and Risman (2013) and Crapo (1991) argue that men are so-
cialized to believe that achieving hegemonic masculinity is the best way
to prove their manhood. Achieving hegemonic masculinity entails sex-
ual dominance over women, sexual freedom, and fostering aggressive
tendencies. Quackenbush (1989) concurs suggesting that the end result
limits a man’s capacity for empathy and sensitivity. Ultimately, men’s
belief in gendered stereotypes and hegemonic masculinity allows for
the justification of malevolent behaviors in which they engage, as well
as the entitlement to feel that their behaviors are morally right. In
other words, hegemonic masculinity fosters the notion that “boys will
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117A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
be boys” which allows for the belief that misogyny is tolerable by ratio-
nalizing acts of gender violence as singular, deviant, and justified
through both masculinity and ensuing gender stereotypes (Klein,
2005).
Reinforcing hegemonic masculinity often means reinforcing the
gender binary, in which genders fall into two neat categories with ‘nat-
ural’ roles and social characteristics assigned to each gender. Women
have been described as the “softer” sex and are thought to be more pas-
sive, meek, and nurturing than men. In their work, Chesney-Lind and
Eliason (2006: 34) argue that women “exist in a world that basically ig-
nores and marginalizes them, all the while empowering [men].” Alter-
natively, gender stereotypes empower men by foregrounding
hegemonic masculine characteristics and establish societal conventions
to regulate anything outside of the norm, such as labeling non-conform-
ists as weak or homosexual. Ellis, Sloan, and Wykes (2013) support this
notion of hegemonic masculinity and maintain that these norms have
been institutionalized in both the public and private spheres. The
“boys the boys” ideology promotes the idea that men’s sexuality is
more natural, acceptable, and uncontrollable than women’s which ex-
empts men from culpability of acquaintance rape and other sexually ag-
gressive behaviors (Miller & Marshall, 1987).
Sexually assaulted women continue to bear the burden of blame and
tend to be reluctant to report offenses for fear of society’s backlash and
devaluing of their experiences (Burnett et al., 2009). McMahon (2010)
argues that college students, along with the larger society, typically con-
sider women responsible for the sexual violence acted out against them
(Boyle, 2015; Burnett et al., 2009; Fraser, 2015; Nurka, 2013; Tieger,
1981). The concept of hegemonic masculinity may well promote the
perception in social media that the activities some college men engage
in are just for fun. It is after all just “boys being boys” and what is the
real harm of that?
1.2. The normalization of rape culture in fraternity subcultures
Fraternities and sororities are known as social spaces for students to
get involved with campus life and establish lifelong friendships. Rape
culture manifests within fraternity norms and values through actions
such as disrespecting women when in group settings, exercising domi-
nating control over women who attend their parties, and engaging in
sexual assault either individually or as a group (Armstrong, Hamilton,
& Sweeney, 2006; Boswell & Spade, 1996). One of the key ways fraterni-
ty men may perpetuate rape culture is through peer support of
disrespecting women. Peer support can range from being informational,
making a joke or a new nickname for the brother who ‘scored,’ or be-
coming ‘in’ with the other members by adhering to perceived pressure
to have sex (Allison & Risman, 2013; Armstrong et al., 2006;
Humphrey & Kahn, 2000; Tieger, 1981). Boswell and Spade (1996:
141) quoted a senior male student who agreed with this logic: “In gen-
eral, college-aged men don’t treat women their age with respect be-
cause 90 percent of them think of women as merely a means to sex.”
Clearly, not all fraternity men engage in this type of behavior, however,
research has shown that they are disproportionally involved (Allison &
Risman, 2013; Armstrong et al., 2006; Boswell & Spade, 1996;
Humphrey & Kahn, 2000; Martin & Hummer, 1989; Tieger, 1981).
Armstrong et al. (2006) found that gender roles within the social hi-
erarchy at college parties contribute to women’s degradation. When at-
tending parties, men exercise control over every aspect of the party, i.e.
the alcohol, the music, the transportation, the theme, and even who is
granted admission, in part, because some college sororities cannot
throw parties. This creates a male regulated party culture where frater-
nity men control who parties, enabling them to reach the type of
women that they want to meet. Fraternities also exercise their control
over women by enforcing dress codes, or themes, that expose women
in a demeaning manner such as CEO/Secretary Hoe (Armstrong et al.,
2006). Because women who attend these parties feel pressure to be
amiable to fraternity members, they are placed in a position of potential
danger for sexual assault by “fulfilling the gendered role of partier”
(Armstrong et al., 2006: 491). For example, it is women who face the
challenge of having to choose an appropriate outfit that fits with the
theme of the party while still appearing attractive, but the outfit must
not be too revealing to the point that others may believe she is “looking
for it” (Burnett et al., 2009). Additionally, women engage in party life to
maintain a social status on campus, which may include drinking at a
party; however, she must not drink too much for fear of being sexually
exploited. The conflict, complicatedness, and imposition of rape culture
on college women demonstrate how hegemonic masculinity and the
notion that “boys will be boys” becomes a challenge that women must
navigate.
College campuses continue to struggle with the seriousness of date
rape (Tieger, 1981). Boswell and Spade (1996) found that fraternity
men thought of rape as someone popping out of the bushes and
attacking a woman rather than having sex with a woman who is too in-
toxicated to consent. One participant volunteered this: “I don’t care
whether alcohol is involved or not; that is not rape. Rapists are people
that have something seriously wrong with them” (Boswell & Spade,
1996: 141). Likewise, Tieger (1981: 155) found that men felt that date
rape was not a serious crime and found more “enjoyment in rape”
than women, meaning that men believed rape was normative and ac-
ceptable to sexually enjoy. Fraternity members report that strategically
getting women intoxicated and then engaging in intercourse is accept-
able. Fraternity culture and parties, then, construct a predatory environ-
ment. Indeed, in the most recent case, Brock Turner defended himself on
sexual assault charges by blaming the party culture and prevalence of
alcohol and drugs on the Stanford campus. These environments pro-
duce a domain in which some fraternity men feel that “no can mean
yes,” as Denes (2011) stated, which entraps women who feel immense
pressures to engage in campus social life.
Burnett et al. (2009) found yet another issue on college campuses
that aids in the maintenance of a rape culture. Specifically, the muted
nature surrounding the communication of date rape and assault on col-
lege campuses maintains its prevalence today (Burnett et al., 2009). Cul-
turally, the ambiguous understanding and definition of ‘consent’
promotes confusion among students identifying, experiencing, and
reporting sexual assault. Individually, rape myths and societal pressures
to follow dominant gendered expectations often leave women silenced
and uncomfortable in certain sexual situations. Situationally, women
may attempt “shadowboxing” against date rape by going to parties
with trusted friends and making their own drinks. However, assuming
responsibility for self-protection from rape and assault places account-
ability on the victim. If a sexual assault occurs, then it becomes the
woman’s fault for not effectively protecting herself from ‘natural’ male
behaviors (Burnett et al., 2009). This victim-blaming is common even
from other women and among friends, leaving the victim with no safe
space to speak about the event freely and without judgement (Burnett
et al., 2009). The muted nature of rape on college campuses before, dur-
ing, and after the assault strongly aids in the maintenance of a rape cul-
ture (Burnett et al., 2009). The normality of these incidents on college
campuses tends to remove all accountability from those who engage
in these behaviors. Thus, the judge, in the Sanford college sexual assault
case in 2016, rationalized giving Brock Turner a six-month county jail
sentence (when looking at a possible 14-year prison sentence) as some-
thing that made sense as he feared the severe impact of a longer sen-
tence on the young man’s life.
2. Method
This work utilizes grounded theory to explore how rape culture is
perceived in social media. The ‘banner incident’ occurred at a large
southeastern university, on freshmen move-in day of the fall semester
of 2015. Most (76%) first-year students live in on-campus housing,
54% are female, and 7% of men participate in fraternity life.
118 A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
2.1. Procedures and instrumentation
In grounded work, the sampling process tends to focus more on
collecting relevant theoretical data than setting a specific number of
participants or responses to reach (Johnson, 2015). Instead of setting a
fixed sample size prior to engaging in the research, the researcher con-
tinues to collect data until no new themes emerge and all relevant data
is completely saturated, allowing the research to shape the sample size
itself (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In this work, the sample consists of com-
ments in response to a local news station’s article posted about the ban-
ner incident. A content analysis was performed on these comments
until no new themes emerged. Initially, comments to the banner inci-
dent were categorized as either dismissive (boys will be boys) of rape
culture or intolerant and concerned that this incident fostered rape cul-
ture on campus.
Three local channels covered the banner incident; however, one did
not make a post on their Facebook page and another received few re-
sponses to this post (N = 87). The third channel posted an immediate
reaction on its Facebook page stating: “signs like this one, that was
hung at a home on 43rd Street near the university’s campus this week-
end, will not be tolerated” and featured an article about the banners
along with pictures of the three banners. Facebook users who follow
and have ‘liked’ this page were able to see this post on their page and re-
spond to it through comments or by ‘liking’ it. The post received 1947
likes and 940 direct comments. Likes on Facebook do not necessarily
mean that the user enjoys the content, but rather that they appreciate
being able to have read it and are using the ‘like’ feature as a gesture
of acknowledgement. There were many replies to comments; however,
they were not included in this analysis due to the often tangential na-
ture of the replies. They often became sites of trolling in which the con-
versation diverged from the topic at hand. Trolling is the act of
disrupting conversations on the internet for the purpose of achieving
“lulz” or amusement derived from another person’s anger (Phillips,
2015). Essentially trolls create profiles on social media sites simply for
the purpose of harassing, disorienting, and exploiting others who ap-
pear vulnerable. Identifying trolls is difficult and we acknowledge that
they may exist in the data though we aimed to identify possible
offenders.
No membership or registration was required to view the comments
included in the data; however, in order to comment on the media post,
users would have needed to possess or create a profile on Facebook. No-
tably, this television channel has been the most followed and most
watched news channel in the area for the past 24 consecutive years, ac-
cording to Pinto (2015), making it the most representative of the com-
munity and thus the prime candidate to include for analysis.
Analyzing the comments on a public, online forum, resulted in the
collection of unmediated and unfiltered responses to a controversial
topic. Analyzing online data has become more common in the academic
world and has developed into its own field, named digital sociology,
which examines the impact of the internet and social media outlets in
the perception and formation of relationships and ideas (Dewey,
2015). Digital sociology “acknowledges that the constructs of relation-
ships, sexuality, community … and gender have been affected by the
massive influence of the Internet” (Dewey, 2015: 1). Thus, Dewey
(2015: 1) argues that gathering data through online resources, such as
social media, provides researchers insight on human interaction and so-
cial construction with “unprecedented rapidity”, allowing for constant
shifting of the research. Social media interactions, including posts, com-
ments, and likes, provide researchers an alternative means of engaging
in a culture even while lacking a physical presence. Therefore, analyzing
posts online, rather than through conventional research methods, pro-
vides the researcher with visceral, immediate responses not influenced
by the researcher’s presence. Also, due to the partial anonymity provid-
ed by the online world, some people gain a sense of bravery to make
comments that they may not make in face to face interaction (Rainie
& Wellman, 2012). In this light, online content analysis may be even
more insightful than perhaps a focus group or interview on the same
topic due to the freedom of expression that the online world provides
for its users. Using Facebook as a tool of analysis then, has provided
for an exhaustive and in-depth understanding of how some feel about
rape culture on a local college campus.
The primary data used here derived from Facebook user responses to
the initial message posted on one local television channel’s Facebook
page posted between August 22–25, 2015. The average length of com-
ments was 27.65 words. Comments also included posts from users
who only posted a photo, or a meme, meant to add humor or sarcasm
to the conversation. Each comment, excluding the replies to comments,
was read and recorded separately, before coding proceeded. During this
first reading, each comment was separated by the assumed gender of
the commenter. To code for gender, Facebook profile pictures and the
name of the commenter were reviewed. Next, comments were read
through again, one by one, this time noting key codes or concepts that
seemed to frequently reoccur. This process was repeated four times.
All possible codes were recorded during this time and were developed
organically.
The ideas that emerged from reading the social media comments
were transcribed and then clustered into groups to create larger themes.
This continued until theoretical saturation was reached, meaning that
no new data appeared and all of the themes were well-established
and saturated enough to create a grounded theory. At this point, the
themes were systematically ordered into an integrated theory (Glaser
& Strauss, 1967). The software program, Dedoose, was utilized in this
process to identify and differentiate themes and the codes that com-
prised those themes. As Glaser and Strauss (1967: 4) state, “grounded
theory is derived from data and then illustrated by characteristic exam-
ples of data,” therefore, exemplary quotes were pulled from the data in
order to more clearly demonstrate the codes and themes.
While including exemplary quotes, the anonymity and confidential-
ity of Facebook commenters was upheld by not displaying usernames
and creating pseudonyms for each user who was quoted. Quotes by
the same person were attributed to the same pseudonym. In addition,
the times and dates of the comments were not disclosed, providing
less ability to track the comment. Although precautions have been
taken to uphold the privacy of commenters, the data is still public and
online, meaning there is a chance, although minimal, that readers
could find the comments should they persist. This work utilizes direct
quotes “as not doing so would decrease the credibility and trustworthi-
ness of the findings” (Ferguson, Piché, & Walby, 2015: 6). As an addi-
tional precaution, an exemption form was filed with the college
human subject committee to ensure that this method of research did
not violate any ethical codes. Human subject permission was granted
before work on this project began.
3. Results
Out of 938 comments on the original Facebook thread, 220 com-
ments from 216 different people were coded and analyzed. Theoretical
saturation was reached at this point, in which no new themes emerged
from the data and comments began to seem repetitive. The sample
consisted of 125 females (56.8%), and 95 males (43.2%). Most respon-
dents (48.6%) deemed that the banners were acceptable, whereas a
third (33.6%) thought the banners were unacceptable (5% posted com-
ments that were difficult to code such as “Ridiculous” or “Wow….”).
Lastly, 13% of those in the sample posted comments that were unrelated
to the banners.
Thirty-four codes emerged from the data. Table 1 lists each code, a
description of the code, an exemplary quote, and the number of hits
each code received. The names for most codes were derived from the
data; however, some phrases were shortened in order to make the
code names more concise. Out of all 34 codes, “funny; hilarious” was
the most frequently noted with 37 hits, followed by “just college fun”
with 25, “mention rape; not okay!” with 21, and lastly “tacky; poor
119A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
taste” with 20. These four top categories indicate that majority of those
who posted a comment to this post felt that the banners were accept-
able as a joke and thus permissive of rape culture on college campuses.
In order to gauge how the community responded to certain types of
comments, the number of likes for each comment were compared to
whether the comments exhibited an overall acceptable attitude toward
the banners or not (i.e. number of likes vs acceptable?). In general, com-
ments that suggested the banners were acceptable received more likes
than comments that were critical of the banners. Overall, the communi-
ty posted more comments displaying a permissive attitude toward the
banners which also received more likes and attention from the online
Facebook community.
Additionally, shorter comments received more likes than longer
comments. The longer the comment, the fewer the number of likes
the comment received. Most comments (177) were between 0 and 37
words and received between 0 and 76 likes. Only one rather short com-
ment received more than 307 likes (between 38 and 75 words). Fur-
thermore, only one comment that was over 228 words received likes
at all, demonstrating that longer comments did not receive much atten-
tion from others.
4. Favorable or critical of the banners
Each code was analyzed separately to determine which codes had an
overall favorable or critical attitude toward the banners and rape culture
in general. Table 1 lists each code in its respective category.
Both categories (permissive or critical) had an almost equivalent
amount of codes in them, with permissive having a slightly higher num-
ber of codes at 15 vs the critical number at 13. Most codes, 28 out of 34,
were easily distributed into the permissive/critical categories; however,
some codes were more challenging as they either fit into both groups or
neither. The few that fit into both groups were “grow up”, “university af-
filiate”, and “parents (upbringing)”. Within these groups, some state-
ments exhibited a favorable attitude toward the banners, while some
displayed an overall critical attitude toward them. For example, within
the code “Grow up”, one individual stated, “Wait, people have sex on a
college campus?? And to all of the people spouting off about rape, this
sign does not say anything about raping anyone. Grow up.”, which ex-
hibits a permissive attitude toward the banners. Another individual
within the “Grow Up” category was clear about her intolerant attitude
toward the banner and said “Grow up people. This is college, not high
school.” A further example of a dually-fitting code was “Parents (Up-
bringing)” in which some participants made comments such as, “If
you’re a parent of a girl and you’re offended by that sign and you get
scared and worried and are having regrets about letting your daughter
attend the university then maybe that might be a sign that you’re
questioning your parenting…” and then continued on to say that the
banners were just college fun, clearly expressing his permissive attitude
toward the banners. On the reverse side, an individual stated, “Parents
need to raise their boys to be respectful. These boys and their parents
should be ashamed of themselves”, which is indicative of an intolerant
attitude in regards to the banners. Comments in these three categories
were thus challenging to neatly categorize into either category.
Table 1
Permissive vs critical.
Permissive
Funny; Hilarious Not that Serious.
Get Over It Reference to the Past
Haha/LOL/LMAO Society Offended by Everything
I’m a Girl; Not Offensive They’re Just College Kids.
It’s a Joke. This isn’t Rape.
Just College Fun Women as Sexual Objects
Lighten up! Young Kids
Have a Sense of Humor!
In addition, some codes were not clearly permissive or critical and
were placed into the unrelated category. The unrelated category applied
to the codes “Off-Campus”, “First Amendment” and “Fraternity”. These
comments did not exhibit any clear attitude toward the banners and in-
stead discussed unrelated content, such as “Joining the fraternity? Your
first task, piss as many people off in one day and let the internet people
voice their “concerns”” or “So why do they tolerate the actual criminal
activity that is “not” on campus.” These codes varied from the other
codes in that they did not speak directly about the obscenity of or the
humor in the banners.
Most of the codes, 28 out of 34, were easily identifiable in terms of
how they felt about the banners. However, even though the codes
were easily split into permissive and critical depending on the language
used, that is not to say that each comment was only coded once for ei-
ther category. Meaning, each comment was separated phrase by phrase
and categorized according to each code the person presented. For exam-
ple, the comment “Oh lighten up. It’s actually hilarious. This overly sen-
sitive society we have now is pathetic” was actually coded three
different times. “Oh lighten up” was coded for “lighten up”, “It’s actually
hilarious” was coded for “funny; hilarious”, and finally “This overly sen-
sitive society we have now is pathetic” was coded for “society offended
by everything”. Then, because the comment exhibited an overall per-
missive attitude toward the banners, it was labeled permissive for de-
scriptor purposes. All comments were coded in this fashion in order to
properly gauge how often participants used specific language in regards
to the banners. Some comments included codes that fell on both sides of
the permissive-critical spectrum which were coded as such. If all com-
ments had just been coded as an overall acceptable or critical attitude,
much of the data would have been overlooked.
5. Pictures
There were three photos in all 220 comments. Two were posted by
men, and one was posted by a woman. The first picture, posted by a
man, was an animated photo of an ambulance with a baby’s head as
the driver, captioned with “Oh no, somebody call the
Waaaaambulance”. The second photo was a meme stating “The winner
for banners on Move In Day” and displayed a picture of a banner from
West Virginia University stating, “She called you daddy for 18 yrs.
Now it’s OUR TURN.” Lastly, the third photo was an animated picture
of Patrick from the Nickelodeon show, Spongebob Squarepants, in
which he is drooling and googly-eyed, admiration and desire explicit
in his expression. Each picture displayed a nonchalant attitude toward
the banners, clearly acceptable of their underlying meaning. The first
photo implied that the banners were not serious enough or worthy of
complaining about, let alone receiving news time. The participant
made it clear through this picture that the people who were bothered
with the banners were babies, worthy of sarcastic and demeaning
jokes. The second photo carried with it the underlying message that
these banners were nothing in comparison to others and thus not wor-
thy enough to take seriously. In this light, the banners seemed funny
and friendly, not worthy of all of the trouble that the banners were caus-
ing. The final picture was captioned with “Yeeee haaaaaw” and
portrayed all of the lust that the fraternity members packed into the
Critical
Advice to College Ladies Rude; Ignorant
Banners Disrespectful Stupid
If My Kids Were At This College… Tacky; Poor Taste
Mention Rape; Not Okay! These are Boys – Not Men.
Not Funny; Bad Joke This is Offensive
Not boys anymore – ADULTS. Warning Sign
Represent University/Reputation
120 A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
meaning of the banners. The picture of Patrick is a representation of the
fraternity members on freshmen move-in day, in which fraternity
members drool in lust over the “new meat” on campus.
6. Gender
Gender was relatively easy to identify among those who posted
comments about the banner incident. The profiles that did not display
characteristics of a male or female, or had a unisex name, were clicked
on and investigated further in order to come to a conclusion on the gen-
der of the participant. This only happened for three individuals. In each
case, their profile was clicked on and the first sentence that appeared,
which says “if you do not know XXX, send him/her a message”, was uti-
lized as the final means of categorization since this sentence shows how
the user wishes to be identified.
Overall, more women in general responded to this post than men;
however, most comments, regardless of gender, displayed an explicit
acceptance toward the banners, explaining them as justifiable and ex-
cusable. For each category that deemed the banners funny, such as the
codes “funny; hilarious” and “Haha/LOL/LMAO”, women were more
likely than men to utilize this type of language to describe the banners.
Women more frequently referred to the banners as a joke, as seen in the
category “It’s a joke”, dismissing the banners as comical. They expressed
on a more frequent basis that the banners were funny and laughable be-
havior, regardless of being the intended target of the banners. In fact,
women were frequently explicit in stating that they understood being
the intended target and the potential disrespect directed toward
them, while still expressing that the comments were funny. This was
done frequently enough that a separate category was created simply
for these types of comments labeled “I’m a girl; Not offensive.” Com-
ments such as, “As a female, that went away to college for 4 yrs, I
found this very funny….” display how some women in the sample
wanted to be clear that they were both a female and educated, and
still believed the banners to be laughable behavior. Such comments sup-
port Strain et al.’ (2015) work which found that women were so accus-
tomed to sexism that they could not differentiate between sexist and
non-sexist jokes.
In addition, women were more likely than men to state the banners
did not portray or suggest rape. Comments such as, “It is an awful big
leap to say that because these boys hung these signs that they are advo-
cating for violence and rape” and “Eh, who cares. Says nothing about
rape” display that these women were not able to see the clear connec-
tion between these banners and sexual violence. Notably, women
were more likely than men to state that the banners were not funny
and that they constituted a bad joke. In addition, they were more likely
to call the banners and the perpetrators “Stupid”, “Rude and/or Igno-
rant”. This adheres to gender expectations in which one would expect
women to be able to recognize that the banners display misogynistic
characteristics and thus disapprove of them. Several women made
their disapproval of the banners even more explicit by clearly linking
the banners to rape, under the code labeled “Mention Rape; Not
Okay!” It was in this category that women made clear that the banners
do, in fact, reference sexual assault and rape, and thus are not acceptable
or tolerable. For example, one commenter posted this: “pretty sure the
people commenting that this is a joke have never been sexually
assaulted or had a family member who had been raped, but “lighten
up its not about rape!!” right?” The comments in this category brought
to light the severity of even the most seemingly unimportant and min-
iscule of actions, such as posting banners meant originally as a harmless
joke. The fact that women fell into this category significantly more than
men did speaks to women being and understanding the reality of rape.
Throughout the data, indications for rape myth acceptance were
noted. For example, women wrote all of the comments that included
the code “Advice to College Women”, in which the commenters advised
college women how to behave properly in order to avoid problems. For
example, “If you subject yourself to a frat house or an off campus party,
use your brain. Don’t drink a drink given to you, and don’t go off by
yourself with a stranger.” All of these comments were written by
women to other women; however, none addressed college men and
how they might behave. These types of comments adhere to rape
myths and victim-blaming, in which solely women are held responsible
for any sexual assaults taken against them due to not protecting them-
selves properly (i.e. not drinking or walking off with a stranger). Advice,
like these comments, for women to avoid sexual confrontations by not
walking alone at night, being “smart”, using “common sense”, and over-
all adjusting their actions provides men with a scapegoat if and when
they sexually assault or rape a woman. Reinforcing the mindset within
women that it is ultimately their fault if they are raped maintains
women’s silence about rape, which then perpetuates the cycle in
which men are placed in dominant positions over women.
In accordance to gender stereotypes, women were more likely than
men to show care and concern toward their children. They reference, in
the category “If my kids were at this college…” the fact that if their chil-
dren attended a university, they would be disappointed, angry, or pull
the children out of the school. One participant said, “If I was a parent
and saw this on my way to drop my child off I might change my mind.
And if I was a parent of someone that lived here and saw this, I would
yank them out and back home you go!” Another participant noted, “I
would feel MUCH better dropping off my daughters at a place that didn’t
make a joke of advertising my baby girls as potential sex toys.” Such
comments imply that women were concerned for their children’s
wellbeing in a hostile or predatory environment more often than men
were, which conforms to societal standards for women as the primary
caretakers.
More women (63.2%) mentioned the reputation of the university
being diminished than men (36.8%). This would make sense according
to women’s constant worry of being judged or scrutinized according
to societal expectations to uphold a proper status. In this case, women
immediately felt the concern that the school reputation was being dam-
aged, which would in turn tarnish their own reputation by poorly
representing their place of education (Armstrong et al., 2006).
Interestingly, women (83.7%) were much more likely to make the
distinction between the perpetrators being boys and not men. Only
16% of the comments that fell into this category were written by men,
which demonstrates that men may be less willing to judge their coun-
terparts for being immature. It could mean that men are likely to under-
stand the mentality that the perpetrators and other college men have,
and are thus less likely to judge them due to the collective brotherhood
that men feel toward each other, such as in fraternities. It is also possible
that it simply did not come to mind for the men who commented on this
post, and instead it was more readily identifiable to the women. Women
may be more likely to judge men due to their own standards for what
constitutes a “real man” based on the hegemonic masculinity ideal
being engrained in our culture as a whole. Gender stereotypes and ex-
pectations have become so intrinsic that both genders have begun polic-
ing the opposite gender on what is right, or in this case, what defines the
proper behavior of a “real man.”
Men were more likely to mention the First Amendment and freedom
of speech in their responses than women, which displays that men were
more likely to seek out and utilize logical responses than emotionally-
driven responses to the banners, conforming to hegemonic masculine
characteristics. Men were significantly more likely to include “get over
it” in their comments than women (80% vs 20%), which, again, validates
the idea that men strive to be stoic and unemotional, following the heg-
emonic masculine ideology. Men were also more likely than women to
mention fraternities in their comments. Additionally, men were more
likely to portray women as sexual objects in their comments than
women. This data falls directly in line with characteristics that define
hegemonic masculinity, such as men being aggressive sexual beings
who see women as simply a means to sex. Comments such as “Female
will be lining up to get into places like this just because some have
been sheltered for 18–19 years & finally getting the freedom to
121A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
experiment” display that men believe that college-aged women, partic-
ularly freshmen who are just receiving their freedom, are prone to en-
gaging in sex. This becomes problematic when college men anticipate
and expect such behavior from women who do not wish to engage in in-
tercourse, at times leading to sexual assault and/or rape.
Lastly, the code “Just College Fun” was utilized very frequently with-
in the data and most participants who used this term to describe the
banners were men. This is very telling as to what men believe fun in
the college age or time period consists of. Perhaps, to men, college is a
time of sexuality and promiscuous behavior, or a time in which fraterni-
ty men should be able to dehumanize women without consequence due
to their environment. If an abundance of men feel this way (i.e. that the
banners are excusable due to simply being all in good, college appropri-
ate fun), then there should be no question as to why rape culture still
exists on college campuses. That is not to alleviate any of the guilt or
blame from women, as some women in the sample referred to the ban-
ners as “good ole college fun” as well. Overall, this is a prime example of
the profound internalization of sexism and gender stereotypes within
society. Both men and women alike were able to make light of the grav-
ity of the banners and the real harm that rape culture causes on college
campuses.
7. Emergent themes
The codes analyzed above were clustered into themes depending on
their underlying connections. They represent the core topics that partic-
ipants referenced in their comments. Out of the 34 codes, four themes
emerged. These themes were: humor, college, age, and sexuality.
Humor was the dominant theme, encompassing eight codes. Those
codes were “Funny; Hilarious”, “Haha/LOL/LMAO”, “Have a Sense of
Humor!”, “It’s a joke.”, “Not funny; Bad joke”, “Lighten Up!”, “Get over
it”, and “Not that serious…” Overall, these codes were clustered due to
their obvious connection to humor in some fashion. All of these codes,
with the exception of “Not Funny; Bad Joke” implied that the banners
were humorous and negligible, demonstrating their attitude of accep-
tance toward the banners. As long as humor is used in the degradation
and sexual oppression of women, such dehumanization becomes ac-
ceptable to society at large.
“Not Funny; Bad Joke” was formed into a sub-theme due to its con-
nectedness with other similar codes and disapproval of the banners.
Five codes fell under “Not Funny; Bad Joke”, including “Stupid”, “Rude/
Ignorant”, “Tacky; Poor Taste”, “Banners Disrespectful”, and “This is of-
fensive.” All of these codes made clear their apparent disgust with and
denunciation of the banners, thus making their clustering very straight-
forward. This sub-theme represents those who recognize women’s deg-
radation as problematic, even if the degradation is in the form of a joke.
The next theme, college, was comprised of six codes, including “Just
College Fun”, “They’re Just College Kids”, “Off-Campus”, “Fraternity”,
“University Affiliate”, and “Represent University/Reputation”. All of
these codes mentioned some aspect of college, whether it was describ-
ing the type of fun that is allegedly normal college behavior, or
discussing that the banners are a poor representation of the college.
This theme exhibited a mostly permissive attitude toward the banners,
excusing the banners as typical college behavior and thus permissible.
Together, this theme uses college as a location scapegoat, in which im-
mature and sexually crude behaviors are tolerable, normalized, and
expected.
Age formed the next theme, which included five codes. Those codes
were “These are boys—Not men”, “Not boys anymore—ADULTS”,
“Young Kids”, “Grow Up”, and “They’re Just College Kids.” All five of
these codes made reference to the age of the perpetrators; however,
some fell on the permissive side while others fell on the critical side.
Codes like “Young Kids” and “They’re Just College Kids” excused the
banners as normal, immature behavior expected from this age group.
Other codes, such as “Not boys anymore—ADULTS”, made clear that
the perpetrators are now in college, and are thus adults who need to
be held accountable for their actions. Some examples of these types of
quotes are: “Let’s stop calling them boys, they are adults who apparently
don’t understand that there are consequences for their actions” and “I’m
tired of college students being called “kids”, it’s time to grow up”, which
also included the code “Grow Up”.
“Grow Up” became a sub-theme under age because it was directly
linked to other, similar comments that referenced parents and the up-
bringing of children. Under this sub-theme, the codes “Parents (Up-
bringing)”, “If My Kids Were at This College…”, “Advice to College
Women”, and “Warning Sign” were included. All of these codes referred
to the perpetrators and potential victims as not being grown adults.
“Parents (Upbringing)” made it very clear that the blame should not
have been placed on the perpetrators, and instead on their parents for
not having “raised their boys right.” “If My Kids Were at This College…”
established that the parents would ultimately make the decision for
their college-aged daughters on whether or not to attend the university,
indicating that the daughters were not capable of making a decision
themselves. “Advice to College Women” and “Warning Sign” were
both written by parents who were attempting to aid the potential vic-
tims of the banners by guiding them in the right direction (i.e. away
from the banners), indicating that females on college campuses still
needed supervision in critical situations. Together, this sub-theme rep-
resents that the college age is a time when parents still feel that their
college-aged children are only children, clearly not adults capable of
making decisions on their own or being held responsible for their ac-
tions. Such beliefs implicitly reinforce the notion that “boys will boys”,
due to men’s apparent never-ending youth in which their actions are
nearly always admissible.
The last theme, sexuality, is made up of four themes, including
“Women as Sexual Objects”, “This isn’t Rape”, “Mention Rape; Not
Okay!”, and “I’m a girl; Not Offensive.” “Women as Sexual Objects”
clearly portrayed women as sexual toys, there for men’s enjoyment.
Some of these comments also portrayed women as equally capable of
posting similar banners and believed women to be just as sexually ag-
gressive as men. “This isn’t Rape” comments made very clear that partic-
ipants did not believe the banners referenced rape or sexual assault on
any level, and in fact, were not sexually driven. An example of such a
comment includes, “You guys are assuming sexual assault… What if he
actually baked cookies for them, who knows, stop thinking so negative…
Geesh.” Additionally, the code “I’m a girl; Not Offensive” explicitly
displayed that these participants are comfortable with both their op-
pression and their sexuality. As a woman, to have no regard for the
harm these banners and types of beliefs, in general, pose, speaks to
how engrained women’s sexual oppression is in our society. Lastly, the
code “Mention Rape; Not Okay!” referenced past and potential victims
of sexual assault and rape in order to bring reality to the alleged joke
that constituted the banners. This sentiment exhibits frustration with
the nonchalant attitude of other commenters due to the danger of mak-
ing light of misogynistic actions, such as the banners. Together, this
theme represents the varying beliefs society holds about sexuality and
rape, also giving insight to how men’s sexuality is privileged over
women’s. Overall, the codes and themes give an idea about what lan-
guage is commonly used in describing sexually-driven incidents, as
well as what ideologies are frequently utilized when discussing sexist
humor.
8. Discussion
The overall attitude of acceptance toward the banners suggests that
rape culture not only exists, but is prevalent, and seen as permissible to
a large portion of society. Most of those who posted comments on social
media in this study did not recognize the banners as rape culture, seeing
as they were initially meant as a joke and were accepted that way to
most observers. The attitudes displayed by participants adhered to the
problematic ideologies presented in previous literature, such as hege-
monic masculinity, the notion that boys will be boys, and sexist
122 A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
humor. The comments illustrated that while disguised as humor, sexism
and rape culture are acceptable due to the excusal of men’s behavior
through the notion that this is tolerable behavior because “boys will
be boys.”
The language that was used to describe the banners speaks to this
apparent excusal of men and women’s continued battle for equality in
today’s society. Women who proclaimed their gender and acceptable
attitude toward the banners illustrated clearly how engrained sexism
is within our society. Sexism and women’s oppression has become so
ubiquitous that it is hardly recognizable and is thus, cast off as unimpor-
tant and tolerable. The comments displayed this overall permissive atti-
tude by showing a lack of empathy, i.e. by saying get over it, the banners
are not that serious, or have a sense of humor. Further, only one-third of
the comments addressed the banners as an issue, and even less specifi-
cally referenced the reality of sexual assault or rape as a result of rape
culture. This use of language suggests that sexism and rape culture are
seen as funny or humorous to majority of society, and suggests that
there is a general ignorance surrounding the real harm of rape culture.
Thus, the majority of respondents proclaiming that the banners are
funny illustrate that sexism, and thus rape culture, is deep-seated in
today’s society.
As seen from the findings above, gender plays a significant role the
type of language used to describe the banners. Nearly every category
that men dominated displayed a lackadaisical attitude toward the ban-
ners, such as “Get Over It”, “Just College Fun”, “Lighten Up!”, “Not that
serious”, “Society Offended by Everything”, “They’re Just College Kids”,
and “Young Kids.” Only two categories that men dominated exhibited
frustration with the banners. In addition, men were also more likely to
portray women as sexual objects. The fact that men fell predominantly
into these categories suggests that they share common beliefs about
how unimportant and worthless women’s sexual liberation is. Men
viewed the banners as light-hearted fun, unworthy of news attention
or societal upset; however, the banners were a clear motion toward
the sexualization and dehumanization of women on college campuses.
This makes clear the connection between being tolerable of the banners
and more frequently portraying women as sexual objects. This type of
attitude and behavior can be expected from men who strictly follow gen-
der stereotypes and hegemonic masculinity. Further demonstrating the
adherence to hegemonic masculinity, men seemed to utilize logical re-
sponses to the banners, rather than emotionally-driven responses. Other
categories that men dominated, such as “First Amendment”, “Fraternity”,
“Off-Campus”, and “Reference to the Past,” established this. The response
categories that men dominated follow nearly every aspect of hegemonic
masculinity, i.e. stoicism, apathetic demeanor, ascendency, and aggres-
sion. Clearly, gender stereotypes have become innate and so deeply en-
grained that hegemonic masculinity is followed and observed at all costs.
Women adhered to gender stereotypes as well, which typically por-
tray women as meek and amenable. The language women used to de-
scribe the banners exhibited their susceptibility by claiming that the
banners, a clear sexist behavior, were simply a joke. They described
the banners as funny, hilarious, and laughable, and made clear that
they did not feel this was related to rape at all. However, it is crucial
to note that women were also the most likely to mention that the ban-
ners were not funny and mention rape/sexual assault in their responses.
Either way, though, women responded to the banners by using an emo-
tionally-driven response, whether describing the banners as funny and
explaining why, or portraying them as a tool in the perpetuation of col-
lege rape. This opposes men’s reactions, which used more lackadaisical
and logical responses. This drives home the fact that gender stereotypes
are repeatedly normalized and utilized on a constant basis. Additionally,
the fact that women fell on both sides of the permissible-or-not spec-
trum is telling about how society is currently split. Some women believe
in their own equality and recognize sexism in all forms, whereas other
women accept and tolerate the misogynistic actions taken against
them due to the context in which they are presented and the extreme
internalization of sexism in our culture.
9. Grounded theory
Glaser and Strauss (1967) explain that the purpose of grounded the-
ory is to produce in-depth understandings about how recurrent rela-
tionships between social agent’s construct reality on a day to day
basis. Through a grounded theory methodological framework, we are
able to unveil a new interpretation of our own reality. In the case of
the banners, our situated reality revealed that even in the modern
world, women still have a treacherous amount of work ahead before
reaching sexual equality and liberation. The four main themes within
the data, i.e. humor, college, age, and sexuality, demonstrated this.
Western culture has made women’s inferior status, sexually and within
the political and economic realms, a joke. Our oppression has become so
innate that it is now laughable and seen as inevitable, thus, when a joke
is made referencing our degradation, the only appropriate response
from society is laughter. Humor is utilized to mask sexism, making it
more palatable to a broader audience. In order to combat sexism and
rape culture as a whole, we must begin recognizing women’s oppres-
sion in all of its forms, including jokes, and stop using humor as valida-
tion for the further deterioration of women.
Participants popularly referenced college as a signal of acceptance
toward the banners. These individuals explained that college is a time
for fun and freedom, not a time to worry about being mature or thinking
beyond the moment. This theme overall suggested that while students
are at college, there should be no expectations of proper or upstanding
behavior. Comments such as “It’s college. Let it go,” suggest that society
should have no regulation or expectations for the period that students
are in college. While students are in college, they receive a pass for
any rudimentary behavior, simply due to their location. College has be-
come a place in which society has come to expect sexually aggressive
behaviors as normal in the campus environment, particularly the
party scene. The excusal of sexually aggressive tendencies or sugges-
tions allows for college men to continue committing these actions,
and additionally reinforces the notion that “boys will be boys” by sug-
gesting that sexist behavior is expected and justified simply for being
a male college student.
Most participants who utilized any of the age codes made explicit
that the perpetrators were simply young boys, immature, and incapable
of thinking beyond the moment. Age was used to justify how careless
the perpetrators were due to their inability to process the consequences
and repercussions of posting such crude banners, compared similarly to
a young child who does not know the difference between right and
wrong. Apparently being in college, living on their own and away
from parents, does not make the perpetrators old or mature enough to
deter them from bad decision-making. Their college age removes any
potential blame from the perpetrators and justifies their actions, similar
to the “boys will be boys” notion in which blame is removed from men
due to their expected, gender stereotypical behavior. In fact, partici-
pants clearly adhered to the “boys will be boys” ideology by excusing
the perpetrators as “boys” rather than the men that they actually are.
Few referred to the perpetrators as men or adults, responsible for
their actions. Even fewer acknowledged that the perpetrators should
be behaving in an adult-like manner, but clearly were behaving proper-
ly due to their childish actions.
A common theme throughout the comments suggested a reference
to sexuality and gender. Sexuality was not used so much as an excusal
for the banners, as the other three themes were, but rather, utilized in
a manner to discuss the various beliefs citizens hold about sexism and
sexuality. The comments further objectified women by portraying
them as sexual objects, meant for men’s entertainment and pleasure.
The comments also spoke to believing that rape culture is not rape,
nor is it harmful or offensive, even to women. Few comments suggested
that these banners were in fact harmful and implied that the banners
were not funny due to their real linkage to rape and sexual assault.
The fact that many comments did not refer to the banners as harmful
or sexually aggressive speaks to the deep internalization of “boys will
123A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
be boys” and the privileging of men’s sexuality over women’s. In this
case, women were not able to recognize their own sexuality being
exploited and thought it was humorous that men would refer to
women as their sexual tease.
These four themes together clearly exemplify prevalent ideologies
that perpetuate rape culture on college campuses, and sexism in the
broader context. Humor, college, age, and sexuality all work together
in the justification of men’s misogynistic behaviors by reinforcing com-
mon ideologies such as “boys will be boys” and hegemonic masculinity.
Through humor and the college context, blatant sexual aggression was
seen as the light-hearted fun of young, sexual kids. If banners that exem-
plify rape culture can become seen as lighthearted humor and well-
intended fun, what does this say of our culture’s standards on what is
humorous or “good old fun”? How does the continued oppression of
and dominance over women suddenly become a joke deemed as “not
that serious”? What kind of society do we live in when one must be
able to laugh at the oppression and domination of another in order to
have a proper sense of humor? These questions cannot be answered
simply with this exploratory theoretical framework; however, part of
the problem “…is rooted in a standard curriculum and pervasive over-
arching culture that tells women how not to get raped but does not
tell men not to rape” (Forni, 2014: 26–7). We must focus our efforts
on telling men not to rape, which occurs by eradicating prevalent ideol-
ogies that reinforce sexism and gender stereotypes, such as “boys will
be boys” and hegemonic masculinity. Once these ideologies lose trac-
tion and popularity, and are replaced with fresh narratives about gen-
ders and sexuality, we may begin to see gains in women’s equality
and less instances of rape culture.
10. The real harm of rape culture
According to Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth (2005: xi), rape culture is
“a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and
supports violence against women. […] A rape culture condones physical
and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.”
Any culture that condones the oppression of women and privileges
men’s sexual experience over women’s is problematic in that women
become inferior social beings, seemingly less-deserving of equality.
The banners exemplified the dehumanization of women by exhibiting
them as sexual toys meant for men’s enjoyment. Rape culture makes
this dehumanization normal and allows sexual violence to become
mundane, seen as almost inevitable (Buchwald et al., 2005: xi). Many
do not see rape culture as inherently problematic because ‘no one is
being raped’ alleging that there are no direct, visual consequences be-
cause no one gets physically hurt as a result of rape culture; however,
accepting and normalizing the degradation of women meets equally se-
vere consequences as sexual violence. Women must maintain a con-
stant awareness of the potential of being sexually assaulted due to
their blatant inferiority in society. We must behave with the constant
worry that we may be victimized if we drink too much, or wear the
wrong outfit, or leave a party too late at night. Rape culture provides
the foundation for sexual violence by normalizing it, thus allowing sex-
ual assault or rape to be excused under the notion that “boys will be
boys” or “he’s just a man”, operating under the hegemonic assumption
that men cannot control their sexuality. Rape culture does not suggest
that all men perpetuate sexual violence; however, it does encourage a
fear of men in general as potential rapists (Forni, 2014).
This constant fear and uneasiness is harmful. The degradation and
dehumanization of women is harmful. Women’s constant objectification
as sexual trinkets is harmful. Our self-esteem, ability to interact, and po-
tential success in life as a whole is compromised by the perpetuation of
rape culture. University and college campuses need to take a clear stand
in the protection and prioritization of women’s safety and equality. As
Dodge (2015: 9) stated, “We cannot just hold these boys responsible,
but must also pay attention to the pervasiveness of rape culture and
the ubiquity of acts of sexism that allow the perpetration of sexual
violence to become banal.” Rape culture has allowed for the objectifica-
tion of women for far too long. As one participant commented about the
banners, “Excusing that kind of behavior from young men opens the
door for rapists and murderers. It is dangerous to make light of the safe-
ty of young women.” The banners were not acceptable. The fact that the
banners were meant as a joke should not excuse the perpetrators, nor
should their age, gender, or status as a college student. The banners
were harmful to women at the university, the overall campus environ-
ment, and women everywhere. It is time that we, as a society, acknowl-
edged that reality.
11. Social media
The use of Facebook to analyze unmediated responses to an incident
of rape culture provided further insight on prevalent attitudes regarding
sexism. Facebook responses are unfiltered and immediate, giving a true
sense of local citizens’ feelings without researcher intervention. In addi-
tion, Facebook, and social media in general, provide the world with a
new platform in the dissemination of information. Without the use of
Facebook and social media, it is possible that the banners could have
gone relatively unnoticed and unacknowledged within the local media’s
eye. Instead, social media was used to further spread awareness of the
banners and thus brought attention to women’s inequality in the college
campus arena, although majority of responses validated rape culture
and sexist behaviors. Unfortunately, such responses “represent the
ways that new media can be seen to exacerbate issues surrounding sex-
ual violence by creating digital spaces wherein the perpetuation and le-
gitimization of sexual violence takes on new qualities” (Dodge, 2015: 2).
Social media can and should be used as a platform to aid in the res-
olution of women’s inequality. The main function of social media, which
is to disseminate information on various topics, should be utilized in a
positive manner, aiding in spreading awareness about the struggles
that women experience on college campuses due to the continuance
of rape culture. In some cases, feminists have begun using social
media as a platform to create new narratives about sexual violence
and gender stereotypes. In addition, new songs and documentaries
have attempted to begin increasing cognizance of the hardships
women face on college campuses, such as Lady Gaga’s recent song “Til
It Happens to You” and the documentary “The Hunting Ground.”
The current work aims to provoke further discussion on the use of
social media in uncovering unmediated attitudes regarding rape culture
and sexism in the male-dominated college domain. This research invites
further investigation and critique of the applicability of the “boys will be
boys” ideology as well as hegemonic masculinity prevalent in rape cul-
ture. In addition, this research offers an exploratory theoretical frame-
work for further investigation on the way in which local citizens
dismiss rape culture through the context of humor, age, college, and
sexuality. These aspects combined have made it nearly effortless for ma-
jority of society to legitimize sexism and the maintenance of rape cul-
ture. In order to truly combat it, society must first acknowledge the
use of these common ideologies as tools to perpetuate rape culture,
and then attempt to revert them through education and activism. Social
media must be used as an aid in this activism due to its extreme popu-
larity and wide reach. The university must also acknowledge rape cul-
ture as a real problem, worthy of addressing and eliminating in hopes
of addressing the predatory environment that the allowance of rape cul-
ture creates. We, as a society, must come to grips with the reality of sex-
ual assault and rape and work to resolve the maintenance of rape
culture through the elimination of sexist vernacular and ideologies. Cre-
ating a climate of safety and comfort in the college setting is becoming
increasingly imperative as statistics continue to demonstrate how fre-
quently sexual assault occurs. If nothing changes on university cam-
puses, rape culture, including normalized sexual aggression from
fraternity members, athletes, and professors alike, will continue to
threaten the overall safety of university settings.
124 A. Giraldi, E. Monk-Turner / Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (2017) 116–124
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- Perception of rape culture on a college campus: A look at social media posts
1. Two approaches to understanding perceptions of rape culture in social media
1.1. Hegemonic masculinity—boys will be boys
1.2. The normalization of rape culture in fraternity subcultures
2. Method
2.1. Procedures and instrumentation
3. Results
4. Favorable or critical of the banners
5. Pictures
6. Gender
7. Emergent themes
8. Discussion
9. Grounded theory
10. The real harm of rape culture
11. Social media
References
Intersectionality
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Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Theory
Online Publication Date: Aug
2015
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.20
Intersectionality
Brittney Cooper
The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Forthcoming)
Edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth
Oxford Handbooks Online
Abstract and Keywords
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality has become the key analytic framework through
which feminist scholars in various fields talk about the structural identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
This chapter situates intersectionality within a long history of black feminist theorizing about interlocking systems of
power and oppression, arguing that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but one of power. It
challenges feminist theorists, including Robyn Wiegman, Jennifer Nash, and Jasbir Puar, who have attempted to
move past intersectionality because of its limitations in fully attending to the contours of identity. The chapter also
maps conversations within the social sciences about intersectionality as a research methodology. Finally, it
considers what it means for black women to retain paradigmatic status within intersectionality studies, whether
doing so is essentialist, and therefore problematic, or whether attempts to move “beyond” black women constitute
attempts at erasure and displacement.
Keywords: intersectionality, race, class, gender, neoliberalism, black women, black feminism
In the nearly three decades since black feminist legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined
the term intersectionality, a host of debates within feminist theory have ensued about what the term means, the
breadth of its intellectual history and genealogies, and the scope of its political possibility. Though intersectionality
has taken on a kind of “citational ubiquity” (Wiegman 2012) in academic circles, giving the sense that “everyone”
does intersectional work, there seems to be less agreement about what exactly intersectionality is and a growing
sense that despite its expansive academic reach, the framework does not sufficiently attend to a range of critical
questions. In this chapter, I provide both an overview of Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality and a sense of
the broader genealogies of black feminist thought from which it emerges. I map the most significant recent
arguments against intersectionality in the work of three feminist theorists: Jennifer Nash, Robyn Wiegman and Jasbir
Puar. I then attend to the work of theorists who take up intersectionality as a kind of feminist methodology and
consider whether this approach solves the problems attributed to intersectional approaches.
Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s as an analytic frame capable of attending to the particular positionality
of black women and other women of color both in civil rights law and within civil rights movements. It is the most
visible and enduring contribution that feminism, and in particular black feminism, has made to critical social theory
in the last quarter century. Coined and elaborated by Crenshaw in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991,
the term intersectionality asserted an analytic frame that disrupted the tendency in social-justice movements and
critical social theorizing “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis
(Crenshaw 1989).” In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Crenshaw exposed the problems of this
“single-axis” analysis when set against the backdrop of “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences.”
“This single-axis framework,” she argued, “erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and
remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members
Intersectionality
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of the group” (1989, 140). Calling attention to the manner in which the single-axis framework erased the
experiences of black women also exposed the larger challenge that “these problems of exclusion cannot be
solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure” (140). The
“intersectional experience,” Crenshaw averred, “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism,” meaning that
“any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in
which Black women are subordinated” (140). These observations demanded a total “recasting and rethinking” of
existing policy frameworks (140).
In her 1991 article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,”
Crenshaw revisited intersectionality with respect to its relationship to social constructionist ideas about identity and
cultural battles over identity politics. She made clear that intersectionality should not be taken as “some new,
totalizing theory of identity” (1991, 1244). Rather intersectionality demonstrated “the need to account for multiple
grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (1245). Explicitly expanding her
framework to include both black and Latina women, Crenshaw talked about the relationship between “structural
intersectionality” and “political intersectionality.” Structural intersectionality referred to a convergence of “race,
gender, and class domination” wherein social interventions designed to ameliorate the results of only racism, or
sexism, or poverty would be insufficient to address the needs of a woman of color marginalized by the interaction
of all three systems of power. For instance, in addressing domestic violence, “intervention strategies based solely
on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to
women who face different obstacles because of race and class” (1246). Political intersectionality, on the other
hand, looked outward to “highlight that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that
frequently pursue conflicting political agendas” (1252).
Taken together, Crenshaw’s essays catalyzed a tectonic shift in the nature of feminist theorizing by suggesting
that black women’s experiences demanded new paradigms in feminist theorizing, creating an analytic framework
that exposed through use of a powerful metaphor exactly what it meant for systems of power to be interactive, and
explicitly tying the political aims of an inclusive democracy to a theory and account of power. As an account of
power, intersectionality attended to the particular forms of subjugation and subordination that characterized black
women’s intersecting and multiplicative (King 1986) experiences of racism and sexism within the law.
After more than a quarter century of traversing feminist academic terrain, there is an increasing concern that
intersectionality has outlived its analytic usefulness. Some argue, implicitly rather than explicitly, that its
overarching investment in speaking about the social conditions of US black women’s lives militates against its
ability to offer a broadly applicable set of theoretical propositions. Others are disillusioned with intersectionality’s
inability to fully account for all the exigencies of identity in the face of multiple and proliferating categories of social
identity, such as sexuality, nation, religion, age, and ability, in contemporary intersectional discourses. Yet, the
political import of paradigms that make the interactive process of social marginalization visible cannot be denied.
The institutional transformation of the status of women of color feminisms within the academy is a direct result of
the political work that intersectional frames do. Thus, there is a tension about what it might mean to jettison or move
beyond intersectionality’s theoretical concerns without jettisoning a commitment to its social-justice aims.
Sirma Bilge (2013) notes that “like other ‘traveling theories’ that move across disciplines and geographies,
intersectionality falls prey to widespread misrepresentation, tokenization, displacement, and disarticulation.
Because the concept of intersectionality emerged as a tool to counter multiple oppressions, there are multiple
narratives about its orgins, as well as tensions over the legibility of its stakes” (410). Thus, I want to begin with an
intellectual genealogy of works by black women thinkers that laid the intellectual groundwork from which Crenshaw
launched intersectionality.
Genealogies
The idea that patriarchy interacts with other systems of power—namely, racism—to uniquely disadvantage some
groups of women more than others has a long history within black feminism’s intellectual and political traditions. As
early as 1892, Anna Julia Cooper wrote, “[T]he colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position
in this country…. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an
unacknowledged factor in both” (134). The “woman question” was nineteenth-century shorthand for talking about
Intersectionality
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the full inclusion of women as legally recognized human beings entitled to property rights and all other rights
attaining to citizens. The “race problem” was nineteenth-century shorthand for discussing the cementing of Jim
Crow segregation in the post-Reconstruction era. Black women endured the ignobility of both systems, often while
confronting crushing poverty too. Even after significant milestones had been reached in the broader women’s
movement, black women often found themselves excluded from employment opportunities reserved for white
women.
In 1940, Cooper’s colleague and contemporary Mary Church Terrell penned a self-published autobiography with
the title A Colored Woman in a White World, with the opening lines, “This is the story of a colored woman living in
a white world. It cannot possibly be like a story written by a white woman. A white woman has only one handicap to
overcome—that of sex. I have two—both sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country, which has two
such huge obstacles to surmount. Colored men have only one—that of race” (Terrell [1940] 2005, 29) Terrell
argued that these “two such huge obstacles” constituted the “double-handicap” of race and sex (29). She
positioned herself in relationship to white women, whose struggles for equal rights had fomented an epic battle in
the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, and also to black men,
whose failure on the basis of racism to attain what Ida B. Wells frequently called “manhood rights” has formed the
basis of the long black freedom struggle. The idea that racism and sexism and patriarchy acted in tandem to duly
disadvantage black women in the body politic became a mainstay of early feminist theorizing among black women.
Over and over again, black women formulated new ways to think and talk about how racism and sexism dovetailed
to wall them out of the benefits of citizenship.
In the early 1940s, while she was a student at Howard University Law School, the only woman in her class, famed
civil rights activist Pauli Murray coined the term “Jane Crow.” Murray (1987, 183) characterized the male-centered
legal culture she encountered in the law school as a culture of “discriminatory sex bias,” a system of “Jane Crow,”
which she understood to be “a twin evil” of Jim Crow. In the 1970s, Murray had come to think more specifically
about how Jane Crow or sexual bias against black women showed up within the confines of the law. In a
groundbreaking essay, “Constitutional Law and Black Women” (Murray, n.d.) she drew a range of parallels
between the treatment of blacks and the treatment of women in the law. She concluded that “Black women have an
important stake in the present movement to make the guarantee of equal rights without regard to sex the
fundamental law of the land” (45). The use of the race-sex analogy became one of Murray’s signal contributions to
legal thought and civil rights activism (Mayeri 2011).
Because Murray felt that sexism functioned analogously to racism, she believed that cases brought under the
Equal Protection Amendment (the 14th) could alleviate sex discrimination against all women. Though she did not
fully factor in that the law was incapable of accounting for black women’s unique position vis-à-vis Jane Crow, she
laid the groundwork for legal interventions that emerged two decades later in Crenshaw’s work and the work of
other critical race theorists.
In 1970, echoing Terrell’s concept of the “double-handicap” of race and sex, Frances Beale argued that black
women were caught in a kind of “double jeopardy” of being both black and female. She described “the black
woman in America … as a ‘slave of a slave,’ ” placed in that position because black women often became the
“scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous system has perpetrated on black men (Beale [1970] 1995, 148).” By
the mid-1970s the Combahee River Collective was arguing that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
Most importantly they argued, “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (1995, 232).
By the late 1980s, Deborah King revisited Beale’s concept of double jeopardy and Beverly Lindsay’s concept of
triple jeopardy, which attempted more explicitly to account for class and to include the experiences of Native
American, Chicana, and Asian American women. King (1988, 47) argued that these frameworks fell into the trap of
taking an “additive approach” that “ignor[ed] the fact that racism, sexism, and classism constitute three,
interdependent control systems,” something that could be better captured in a term like multiple jeopardy.
“Multiple,” she argued referred “not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative
relationships among them as well” (47).
Taken together, this body of proto-intersectionality theorizing advanced the idea that systems of oppression—
namely, racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism—worked together to create a set of social conditions under
which black women and other women of color lived and labored, always in a kind of invisible but ever-present
Intersectionality
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social jeopardy. Crenshaw built on and brought together this body of black feminist theorizing, when she
encountered the legal conundrum of black women who were discriminated against as black women, not only as
women and not only as blacks. What she named “intersectionality,” encapsulated and expanded a body of work
about a set of social problems that black women thinkers had been grappling with and attempting in various shapes
and forms to name for nearly a century. In this regard, Crenshaw’s bringing together of critical race theory with the
work of such black feminist theorists as Anna Julia Cooper, Gloria Hull, Barbara Smith, and the women of Kitchen
Table Press, as well as the work of Paula Giddings, represented the very kind of interdisciplinarity that has become
a hallmark of black feminist theorizing. In the twenty-five years since the publication of these two germinal essays,
Crenshaw has continued over the course of several articles to sharpen her intersectional analysis. For instance,
she argued in “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race, and
Social Control” (2012), that with regard to the growing problem of black and Latina women and mass incarceration,
“not only is there no one way that racially marginalized women are subject to overlapping patterns of power, but
also women of color are certainly not intersectionality’s only subjects when it comes to social punishment” (1425).
Thus, she argues, “intersectional dynamics are not static, but neither are they untethered from history, context, or
social identity” (1426). But the core of her work remains about mapping the manner in which power dynamics
interact to make black women marginalized by social systems like mass incarceration invisible.
Intersectional Feminisms
Crenshaw used a discrete set of problems that black women encountered when bringing antidiscrimination lawsuits
against their employers to point to the broader challenge of the law’s insufficiency to remedy harm done to people
placed along multiple axes of marginalized identities. Although she did not intend it to, her framework, which is at
base an account of structural power relationships, offered a way to begin talking about the interaction of these
systems of power in the formation of identity. To return to Combahee, black women noted that interactive systems
of power “formed the conditions” of their lives. And insofar as material conditions bear some relationship to how
one identifies in the world and moves through the world, intersectionality’s implications for reconceptualizing
identity have had far-reaching consequences, in particular for the development of feminist studies in the academy.
However, the disjuncture between theories of identity and the intellectual project of intersectionality led to a range
of unfortunate consequences as the theoretical framework traveled to other disciplines. The most egregious of
these consequences is the tendency to treat intersectionality as a feminist account of identity, despite Crenshaw’s
(1991, 1244) very clear assertion that the framework did not constitute some “new, totalizing theory of identity.” So
while Crenshaw used intersectionality to demonstrate certain fissures in identity politics and the ways that these
kinds of group politics were frequently unable to meet the needs of certain putative members of the group, the
theory has been accused of fomenting unhelpful and essentialist kinds of identifications.
In the original formulation of intersectionality, Crenshaw demonstrated that black women’s experiences, while
intersectional, were not reducible to intersectional treatments of race and sex, or to any other category, for that
matter. Intersectionality was a first, formative step that allowed for recognition of the black female subject within
juridical structures of power, where she had heretofore remained invisible and illegible, and thus unable to obtain
any kind of justice. Crenshaw’s argument was that failure to begin with an intersectional frame would always result
in insufficient attention to black women’s experiences of subordination. She did not argue for the converse,
namely, that intersectionality would fully and wholly account for the range or depth of black female experiences.
Intersectionality constituted a specific paradigm or framework for understanding black women’s subordinated
social position and the situated effects of mutually constructing systems of power and oppressions within black
women’s lives. Never did her work indicate that intersectionality was an effective tool of accounting for identities at
any level beyond the structural. More recently, she has argued that “at the same time that intersectionality
transcends an exclusive focus on identity or mere categorization, the lived experiences of racially marginalized
women and girls are shaped by a range of social and institutional practices that produce and sustain social
categories and infuse them with social meanings” (2012, 1426).
The implicit distinction being made here between personal kinds of identity and structural identities is an important
one. The law conceptualizes people through the structural identities of gender, race, sexual orientation, or national
origin. These kinds of identities are different from personal identities of the sort that refer to personal taste,
personality traits, gender performativity, or intimate and filial relationships. If Crenshaw’s account of
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intersectionality is implicated in the project of identity politics at all, it is implicated at the structural level rather than
the personal level. However, as an analytic tool it has been erroneously taken up in some feminist academic
circles as a totalizing account of identity, and it has proved insufficient for such projects. That in no way implicates
the merits of intersectional paradigms, but rather calls into question the epistemic routes through which it has
traveled to other places and whether these routes make sense.
In one of the earliest major critiques of intersectionality, legal scholar Peter Kwan argued:
Intersectionality does not pack much of an epistemological punch. In other words, although
intersectionality illuminates the ways in which victims of multiple forms of oppression must be recognized
as such on their own terms, in and of itself intersectionality tells us little about the fiscal, emotional,
psychological, and other conditions nor the subjectivity of those caught in the trajectories of intersecting
categories. Intersectionality tells us, for example, that the condition and subjectivity of and hence the legal
treatment of Black women is not simply the sum of Blackness and femaleness, but it does not shed much
light on what it is nevertheless. Narratives are often used to fill this gap. But narratives provide only
empirical data on which the theoretical work remains to be done.
(Kwan 2000, 687)
Kwan is right on one level: knowing about the various intersections that constitute a person’s structural position
does not mean in fact knowing that person as an individual. But Kwan’s real critique of intersectionality seems to be
not of Crenshaw’s articulation, but rather of black feminist standpoint theory, which is invested in an affirmative
articulation of a black women’s epistemological point of view. Intersectionality is not beholden to a particular
epistemological viewpoint. While it brings into focus marginalized people practicing what Nancy Hartsock might call
“subjugated knowledges,” and while the relations of power intersectionality exposes might be most articulable
through the framework of subjugated knowledges, intersectionality does not tether black women to a certain
epistemological standpoint. By the time Kwan penned his essay at the end of the 1990s there had already been
more than a decade of scholarly dissent among black feminists about the role of standpoint theory in
circumscribing and ghettoizing black women’s experiences and black feminist knowledge production (Carby 1987;
Smith 1998). Still, intersectionality is dogged by critiques of its alleged epistemological and identitarian investments.
Take for instance, the work of black feminist theorist Jennifer Nash. In an essay called “Rethinking
Intersectionality,” Nash (2008, 4) outlines four central problems or “unresolved questions” with intersectionality:
“[T]he lack of a clearly defined intersectional methodology, the use of black women as prototypical intersectional
subjects, the ambiguity inherent to the definition of intersectionality, and the coherence between intersectionality
and lived experiences of multiple identities.” In raising these questions, Nash’s “hope is not to dismantle
intersectionality” but rather to expose intersectionality’s underlying assumptions in order to help scholars
“dismantle essentialism,” “craft nuanced theories of identity and oppression,” and “grapple with the messiness of
subjectivity” (4). Current articulations of intersectionality are situated in Nash’s work in opposition to the
aforementioned goals.
Nash defines intersectionality as “the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race,
gender, class, and sexuality” (2). She further argues that one of the theoretical and political purposes that
intersectionality serves for feminist and antiracist scholarship is “to subvert race/gender binaries in service of
theorizing identity in a more complex fashion” (2). This definition of intersectionality and articulation of its goals
reveals two significant misreadings of intersectionality. The first is that the framework never claimed to be an
affirmative assertion about how subjectivity is constituted, but was rather a claim about how certain aspects of
one’s identity could make them invisible as subjects within the law. The second problem, which is not unique to
Nash’s work but is, rather, indicative of how intersectionality is now discussed in some feminist circles, is that
“vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality,” are conflated with a discussion of remedying “racism, sexism, and
classism.” One set of phrases points to identity categories; the other points to systems of power. Intersectionality is
thus assessed as failing to account fully for identity issues from the view that its goal is to “subvert race/gender
binaries in service of theorizing identity in a more complex fashion” (emphasis added) (2). Undoubtedly, this is
how the project of intersectionality has been taken up in feminist studies, and undoubtedly, intersectionality would
be found wanting as an epistemological system since it was meant to be a provisional solution to a more specific
problem. Nowhere in the genealogies of thought that came to constitute intersectionality do black women ever put
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forth the interlocking nature of racism and sexism as the basis for understanding their identity wholly. In fact, they
assert just the opposite—namely, that the operations of racism, sexism, and sometimes classism make them
civically and juridically unknowable. In this case, the solution to the problem of unknowability is not being known
but being knowable. Therefore, we should not conclude that frameworks that attempt to solve the problem of
“unknowability,” or what we might call juridical illegibility (Carbado 2013, 815), are attempting to help us know
anyone. These frameworks attempt to make some aspect of people’s identity legible. They attend to the problem of
recognition rather than a problem of subjectivity.
Existing structures recognize and provide property rights and protections for a standard white, male, property-
owning, heterosexual, able-bodied subject. But bringing into view lives that have been occluded by obtrusive
structures, such as racism and sexism, does not then mean that the people living them are now known. It means
that the structures making them invisible are now clear and that the negative impact of those structures must be
addressed. Feminist theorists must reject any misrepresentations of intersectionality that suggest that the search
for a theoretical frame that fully encompasses the bounds of articulable identities takes priority over a framework
that sustains critiques of the institutional power arrangements that make those identities invisible and illegible.
Intersectionality’s most powerful argument is not that the articulation of new identities in and of itself disrupts power
arrangements. Rather, the argument is that institutional power arrangements, rooted as they are in relations of
domination and subordination, confound and constrict the life possibilities of those who already live at the
intersection of certain identity categories, even as they elevate the possibilities of those living at more legible (and
privileged) points of intersection. Thus, while intersectionality should be credited with “lifting the veil,” to invoke Du
Bois’s metaphor of the racial “color line,” we should remain clear that the goal of intersectionality is not to provide
an epistemological mechanism to bring communities from behind the veil into full legibility. It is rather to rend the
veil and make sure that no arguments are articulated to support its reconstruction. Thus political commitments
which grow out of intersectionality are rooted in a critical demeanor of vigilance, my riff on Koritha Mitchell’s notion
of a “critical demeanor of shamelessness,” (2014) with regard to challenging the ever-shifting machinations of
systems that seek to reinstantiate and reinscribe dominance.
Barbara Tomlinson (2013, 1000) takes issue with critics, such as Nash, whose work suggests that
“intersectionality’s critique of structural power interferes with its more important use for developing general
theories of identity.” Tomlinson writes, “Diminishing the role of power in identity formation, such critics demonstrate
a desire for individual self-invention, as if history and power no longer have claims on us, as if the significance of
identities lies in expressions of subjectivity” (1000). This set of concerns is markedly different “for scholars
concerned with antisubordination,” for whom “the experience and subjectivity of specific identities is not really the
focus of the argument but rather a proxy or tool to examine and counter structural justice and subordination”
(1000). Tomlinson issues a scathing indictment in the form of a warning: “which meaning of identity we are
interested in depends on the work we want our work to do” (1000).
The stated desire among intersectionality’s most pointed critics to “not dismantle it” has everything to do with their
recognizing that intersectionality is institutionally important for providing the language and justification for a diverse
academy. Robyn Wiegman (2012), for example, makes clear that she agrees with the central thrust of Jennifer
Nash’s argument and that she has many reservations about intersectionality herself. Nonetheless, we are told that
to take her concerns as “an indictment of intersectional analysis is to hear a judgment I do not intend” (250).
Rather, Wiegman is concerned not “with measuring the value of the promise that intersectionality makes but with
the lessons at stake in fully inhabiting them” (250). Moreover, she argues that Nash’s work “brings to the
foreground the significance of the institutional setting in which intersectionality has garnered its critical authority,
such that a theory of marginalization can become dominant even when the majority of those represented by its
object of study have no access to the ameliorative justice its critical hegemony represents” (299). This
assessment of intersectionality’s broad critical reach seems very much to indict it for an inability to achieve
“ameliorative justice” on behalf of black women (and perhaps other marginalized groups of color) that it claims to
represent. To suggest that intersectionality possesses “critical hegemony” in a world where hegemony always
signals a problematic relationship of dominance that needs to be dismantled runs counter to Wiegman’s (and
Nash’s) assertions that they are not interested in “judging” or “dismantling” the project of intersectionality. But the
fear, it seems, is that to fully “inhabit” the lessons of intersectionality is to prevent ourselves from attending to
groups whose experience of marginalization is not akin to black women’s or to suggest erroneously that black
women are always, in every case, marginalized. This kind of intersectional conundrum as articulated by Nash and
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echoed by Wiegman is a skepticism about “whether all identities are intersectional or whether only multiply
marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity” (Nash 2008; Wiegman 2012). Carbado (2013) responds to
this particular quibble about which identities are intersectional essentially by noting that all identities are
intersectional. The theory applies in cases where we are talking about multiply jeopardized or marginalized
subjects, but “the theory [also] applies where there is no jeopardy at all. Thus it is a mistake to conceptualize
intersectionality as a ‘race to the bottom’ ” (814). The theory seeks to map the top of social hierarchies as well. By
suggesting that intersectionality has a range of problems to which it cannot attend, some critics artificially
circumscribe the limits of what the theory can perform. This need to displace intersectionality while claiming a
desire to keep it intact in some greatly altered form is absolutely a function of market-driven, neoliberal forms of
academic knowledge production and the sense that academics must always say something new. It is therefore
bizarre when critics suggest that it is intersectionality itself, and not the impulses seeking to displace intersectional
frames, that acts as a tool of neoliberal collusion, despite a continuing need for its political project within
institutions.
The argument that the way intersectionality accounts for identity and its indebtedness to stable intact categories
reproduce juridical structures that collude with neoliberal and imperialist projects emerges in the work of Jasbir
Puar. In her groundbreaking Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar (2007, 212) argues
for new formulations of identity that don’t begin and end with intersectionality: “As opposed to an intersectional
model of identity, which presumes that components—race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion—are
separable analytics and can thus be disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that
merge and dissipate, time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.” Puar deploys Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (2001, 6) conception of assemblage, which they define as a “multiplicity” that has
“neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions.” They go on to say that “there are
no points or positions … such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.” In other words,
assemblage is a way of describing relationships between constitutive entities that does not assume either an
overarching system or structure, or a shared set of roots or genealogies. Puar suggests that this conception is
more favorable than intersectionality, which
demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic
of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of progress that
deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity, yes, but also
timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space.
(Puar 2007, 212)
One immediate problem with this account is that the black body has never been conceived as being capable of
linearity and coherency, and certainly not of permanency, particularly when it comes to institutionalized and
official knowledges. Moreover, since the earliest days of intersectional theorizing, Patricia Hill Collins (1998) has
stridently rejected the logic of equivalence that inheres in some work on intersectionality, writing that “continuing to
leave intersectionality as an undertheorized construct contributes to old hierarchies (and some new ones) being
reformed under … a new myth of equivalent oppressions” (211). She says, “[I]f all oppressions mutually construct
one another, then we’re all oppressed in some way by something—oppression talk obscures unjust power
relations” (211). Moreover, Rebecca Clark-Mane (2012, 92) argues that this logic of equivalence, this “flattening
and proliferation of difference,” is part of syntax of whiteness that inheres in third-wave or contemporary feminist
theorizing. So a “stabilizing” of black identity across time and space might be politically attractive in the US context
insofar as it creates the conditions for the protection of one’s rights as a citizen. But this would require leaving an
analysis not only of race as identity but also of racism as a system of power at the forefront of analyses of
intersectionality, a point I will return to shortly.
Puar (2007, 215) continues her indictment of intersectionality by arguing that “intersectionality privileges naming,
visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology,
affect, and information.” Because assemblages attempt to “comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory
models,” in Puar’s estimation they are more adept at “work[ing] against narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that
secure empire, [by] challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform practices of state
surveillance and control” (215). Although Puar contends (like Nash and Wiegman) that she does not want to do
away with intersectionality but only to supplement and complicate it through the introduction of the assemblage,
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the claims that intersectionality is complicit with US imperialism, that it is overly beholden to what Wiegman terms
the “juridical imaginary,” and that it replicates taxonomies of violence are nothing short of devastating. Moreover,
to recast the desire of marginalized US subjects for state-based recognition as a collusion with empire suggests a
troubling misunderstanding of the differing material realities of those who benefit from empire and those whose lives
and labor and marginalization buttress the foundation of violence upon which the empire is built.
Yet, Puar writes, “as a tool of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality
colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state—census, demography, racial profiling, surveillance—in that
‘difference’ is encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic
grid” (212). In Puar’s formulation, state recognition is an inherently limiting thing to want, because the desire for
recognition vis-à-vis official channels reinscribes the authority of the state. But if, in the case of racialized others in
the United States. for instance, the state is already interpellating identities in violent ways, then asking for
recognition on different terms constitutes not collusion but dissent from various forms of state-based violence, both
physical and discursive. Crenshaw (2012, 1452) argues in the case of mass incarceration that “some of the
discursive spaces most vulnerable to neoliberal occupation have been those where feminist and antiracist
commitments have been weakened by their failure to address the intersectional dimensions of violence and social
control.” In other words, to lose sight of structural systems of power and their varied interactions is to enable
“neoliberal occupation” of putative social justice discourses. To suggest, for instance, that the desire for
intersectional recognition in the law means that working-class communities of color are acquiescing to the
overpolicing and surveillance of their bodies and communities assumes that lack of recognition and the invisibility
that comes with it somehow constitutes a form of “protection” for black and brown people. That kind of analysis
also suggests that intersectionality is implicated in obscuring rather than exposing the massive kinds of state
surveillance that characterizes life in communities of color. This is simply not the case. Where protection of one’s
body is tied to being a recognizable category, the idea that people of color should not want categorizations and
the protections they afford is short-sighted. And because intersectionality can consider a range of different ways in
which modes of power intersect in these instances, it offers tools for dismantling these systems not reifying them.
Because US-based intersectionality does seek to understand circulations of juridical power, it would be problematic
to impose dominant US identity categories in other national or transnational contexts. But if it is true that
intersectionality’s primary concern is to expose the way circulations of power enable or disable articulations of
identity, rather than to offer better language through which to express and make subjectivity legible, then the
suggestion that intersectionality colludes with rather than exposes power seems to be misplaced. Puar (2012)
returns to this critique of intersectionality as a tool of US imperialism in another essay, called “I’d Rather Be a
Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” Here, she argues that intersectionality
falls victim to certain “geopolitical problems”:
[T]ransnational and postcolonial scholars continue to point out that the categories privileged by
intersectional analysis do not necessarily traverse national and regional boundaries nor genealogical
exigencies, presuming and producing static epistemological renderings of categories themselves across
historical and geopolitical locations. Indeed many of the cherished categories of the intersectional mantra,
originally starting with race, class, gender, now including sexuality, nation, religion, age, and disability, are
the product of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence, operative through a
western/euro-american epistemological formation through which the whole notion of discrete identity has
emerged.
(Puar 2012, 54)
In other words, intersectionality relies on the production and reproduction of fixed identity categories that are
tethered to the apparatuses of the nation-state, which is itself a problematic category and social formation, in order
to make any interventions. Essentially, the argument here is that in seeking to remedy one kind of epistemic
violence—namely, that against black women—intersectionality proliferates a variety of other kinds of violence
against other women of color subjects.
Puar (2012) offers her own intervention to remedy the limitations of intersectionality through recourse again to the
Deleuzean notion of assemblage. Intersectional identities, she tells us, “are the byproducts of attempts to still and
quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility” (50).
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I want to register two concerns about this move. First, I concur with Devon Carbado (2013) that formulations such
as Kwan’s cosynthesis and Puar’s assemblages are “no more dynamic than intersectionality” because they all
grow out of a common problem: “[T]here are discursive limitations to our ability to capture the complex and
reiterative processes of social categorization. The very articulation of the idea that race and gender are co-
constitutive, for example discursively fragments those categories—into race and gender—to make that point. The
strictures of language require us to invoke race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories one discursive
moment at a time” (816). To then suggest that this amounts to a reproduction of the fixity of these categories is
false.
Second, Puar argues that intersectional identities “attempt to quell” the “mobility” of assemblages. To acknowledge
that fixity is an essentializing fiction does not deny either the very real realities of fixed or declining social positions
or the ways that the matrix of domination (Collins [1990] 2000), acts very much like a spider’s web that captures
and immobilizes its prey. The concept of mobility should itself be problematized as being the property of certain
embodied subjects. Intersectionality makes the disciplinary apparatus of the state visible and theorizes the way
legal constructions continually produce categories of bodies existing outside the limits of legal protection. In other
words, the ways in which juridical structures affix narratives of criminality to black male bodies (or brown bodies),
for instance, Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, on the basis of a very particular race-gender schema, works to limit
the mobility of these kinds of bodies in public and private space. In the end, even Puar concedes these realities
and opts for some unarticulated possibility of bridging the two frameworks:
[To] dismiss assemblage in favor of retaining intersectional identitarian frameworks is to miss the ways in
which societies of control apprehend and produce bodies as information, … to render intersectionality as
an archaic relic of identity politics then partakes in the fantasy of never-ending inclusion of capacity-
endowed bodies, bypassing entirely the possibility that for some bodies—we can call them statistical
outliers, or those consigned to premature death, or those once formerly considered useless bodies or
bodies of excess—discipline and punish may well still be the primary mode of power apparatus.
(Puar 2012, 63)
The Paradigmatic Black Female Subject
This tension about the way intersectionality purportedly limits the ability of scholars to develop frameworks that
more fully account for subjectivity leads to a central question: What is the status of the black female subject in a
world where the theoretical paradigm that has made her the most visible is indicted for making the identities of
other marginalized groups invisible? Because Crenshaw constructed the intersectional proposition on the ground of
black women’s erasure in civil rights law, intersectionality has come to stand in as a kind academic and/or
theoretical pronoun, whose antecedent is, or has at different turns been, black women, the black woman, and the
black female experience. It is has also become central to the intellectual scope of black feminism as an institutional
project. Literary scholar Valerie Smith (1998, xxiii) has argued that “there is no black feminism without
intersectionality.”
There is therefore no denying that institutional endorsement of intersectional frameworks has made unprecedented
space for the intellectual production of academic works by and about black women. However, unsubstantiated
claims that intersectionality must always be about black women presume, as Devon Carbado (2013, 813) notes,
that black women cannot “function as the backdrop for the genesis and articulation of a generalizable framework
about power and marginalization.” As Carbado goes on to explain, “many of the articles on intersectionality focus
squarely on black women or on race and gender. Surely, however, that is not, in itself, a problem. It is becoming
increasing[ly] unspeakable (dubbed theoretically backward, monopolistic, identitarian, categorically hegemonic,
etc.) to frame theoretical and political interventions around black women…. It is part of a larger ideological scene in
which blackness is permitted to play no racial role in anchoring claims for social justice” (814). Indeed, there is
disagreement among feminist scholars about whether this is in fact the case. Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2012, 19)
argues that “intersectionality research must be properly understood as the purview of scholars investigating
women of color.” She rejects the view that this is an endorsement of essentialism because intersectionality allows
women of color to “contest and refashion” embattled identity categories. To the extent that intersectionality makes
systems of power that disadvantage other groups visible, the idea that its theoretical and analytic scope should be
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limited to women of color seems parochial. But we should caution against any moves to evacuate or relegate to the
margins women of color from the intellectual trajectories of their own knowledge production. And we should
recognize that part of what it means to have women of color doing knowledge production is that their particular
positionality enables a different view of the way that many other groups move through power structures and not
just themselves.
Still for feminist scholars such as Wiegman, black women anchor intersectionality to a kind of particularity that
seems difficult to overcome. As intersectionality circulates in the academy, Wiegman argues that
the particularity of black women’s identity position functions as the formative ground for a critical practice
aimed at infinite inclusion. The leaps engaged here are most arresting if set in slower motion. On what
terms, for instance can the commitment to particularity take paradigmatic shape without sacrificing its force
as a counter to universalizing tendencies? Or more to the point, how can particularity retain the specificity
it evokes when the destination it inscribes is to render practice not simply coherent but comprehensive in
its analytic capacity and scope? Both of these questions point to the tension between intersectionality as a
commitment to the particularity of black women’s minoritization and its redeployment as the means to claim
paradigmatic mastery over both the experiences of women of color and identity’s historical, social,
political, and psychic complexity as a whole.
(Wiegman 2012, 242)
It seems that what Wiegman points to is a problem of what she terms the “redeployment” of intersectionality rather
than a problem of the framework itself. Moreover, it is intersectionality that exposed the limitations of single-axis
frameworks that presumed a kind of paradigmatic mastery over experience. Still, she and Puar are correct that it is
unfair to saddle intersectionality with the challenge of accounting for the experience of all groups. The problem is
that critiques of the epistemological limitations of intersectionality frequently cast intersectionality as something
either that has been achieved or something that is wholly unachievable. This discourse in which intersectionality
“is ‘hailed’ and ‘failedʼ simultaneously” is part of a neoliberal push in which “some elements of intersectionality are
taken into account, but only to be declared lapsed or obsolete, to be set aside for something better” (Bilge 2013,
407). In either case, the search is for some new paradigm that can do what intersectionality cannot do. But we
should remain skeptical of newer approaches to identity that take as their centerpiece a fundamental belief that the
particularity of black women’s experiences exempt black women from being the foundation on which broadly
applicable theoretical frames can be built. This desire to move on from intersectionality bears the spectre of a
troubling desire to move on from discussions of black women. That kind of move matters not simply theoretically
but also institutionally, since it would have the effect of using a theory rooted in the experiences of black women as
the sine qua non of feminism’s achievement of institutional diversity while potentially marginalizing black women in
the academy who have made space for themselves largely based on the intellectual cachet afforded to
intersectionality.
According to Wiegman, it is intersectionality’s relationship to a paradigmatic black female subject that creates the
need for a new analytic frame. Intersectionality is mired in an analytic impasse whereby “its figural resolution as a
comprehensive, inclusive, and multidimensional approach to the intersections of race and gender not only renders
‘Black women’s experience’ paradigmatic, but stakes intersectional reason on the force of the protocols of
paradigmatic reading it hones” (248). It seems here that this is really an argument against the use of experience as
the basis for theorizing, because no experience can be taken as paradigmatic without apparently doing violence to
the experiences of people who are differently placed. But intersectionality does not argue that black women’s
experiences are wholly paradigmatic for all experiences of social marginalization. Rather, it captures the parts of
black women’s common experiences and suggests that these experiences illumine the experiences of others
marginalized vis-à-vis intersecting categories. Moreover, black feminist engagements with and critiques of
standpoint theory and its attendant epistemologies are as old as intersectionality itself (Carby 1987; Collins 1998;
Smith 1997). Yet Wiegman (2012, 250) concludes that “in exacting its obligation to the figure that compels its
analysis [the black woman], intersectionality becomes enthralled to an object of study that must conform to the
shape of its critical desires, which is to say to the shape of the authority it draws from her perspective and social
position in order to confer on her the very epistemological priority and legal autonomy it promises to her.” In other
words, intersectionality prescribes what it claims to only name or describe. But Carbado (2013) warns that those
who falsely impose these kinds of limits on intersectionality are the ones who are prescribing what they claim only
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to describe. Moreover, all of these critics accede to the politics of diversity and inclusion that buttress calls for
intersectionality—hence their reluctance to move on from it. In response to such reluctance, Tomlinson (2013, 996)
warns that “critics assume that their task is to critique intersectionality, not to foster intersectionality’s ability to
critique subordination.” At the risk of being too prescriptive of the task of the feminist critic, I would add the caveat
that those feminist theorists who claim an investment in challenging structures of power that lock marginalized
subjects out should rethink the role of their criticism regarding intersectionality.
Because intersectionality’s biggest success within feminist studies is largely estimated to be its exposure of the
nonessentialist nature of gender identity, its role in helping us to understand racial formation remains nebulous. The
fact that intersectionality has seemingly successfully named and exposed the problem of racism and white
privilege in feminism has emboldened a new generation of scholars to become postintersectional. Like post-feminist
discourses that positively invoke feminism and cite the prevalence of feminist discourses to prove that there is no
longer a need for feminism, post-racial discourses use the neoliberal language of diversity to prove that we are
either beyond racism or that racism happens in individualist and isolated incidences. Broad systemic racism is no
longer a problem, and one of the ways that we continue to promote racism is to remain invested in the fictive
category of race and racialized discourses. The desire to become postintersectional is bound up with these post-
racial and post-feminist moves. Postintersectional discourses and analyses take the pervasiveness (or citational
ubiquity) of intersectionality in the academy (and now also in feminist social media) to be evidence that it has
achieved its goals, become outdated, and beckons for something new. Further, they insist that a continued focus
on the outmoded categories that inhere in intersectional analysis elides other peoples and problems and prohibits
progress. The turn to intersectionality as methodology is one concrete way that intersectionality has attempted to
get beyond its implicit connections to a black female embodied subject.
Intersectionality as Methodology
One way in which scholars have attempted to demonstrate the broader usefulness of intersectionality beyond its
import for black women is by employing it as a research paradigm. In her book Not Just Race, Not Just Gender:
Black Feminist Readings, literary scholar Valerie Smith (1998, xv) rejects black feminism as a “biologically
grounded positionality,” arguing instead that black feminism vis-à-vis intersectionality “provide[s] strategies of
reading simultaneity.” She proposes that the critic can “read intersectionally in the service of an antiracist and
feminist politics that holds that the power relations that dominate others are complicit in the subordination of black
and other women of color as well” (xvi). This kind of intellectual maneuver is meant to remove black feminism from
all attempts by earlier black feminist critics to situate black feminism on the ground or standpoint of black women’s
experience. In making it, Smith echoes the work of black feminists such as Ann duCille and Hazel Carby (1987, 10),
who argued that “black feminist criticism cannot afford to be essentialist and ahistorical, reducing the experience
of all black women to a common denominator and limiting black feminist critics to an exposition of an equivalent
black ‘female imagination.ʼ ” In response to critics who questioned whether or not this approach to intersectionality
disappears black women from view, Smith attempts to hold in tension a desire “to avoid notions of identity that are
timeless, transparent, or unproblematic in favor of those that are, in Stuart Hall’s words, ‘never complete, always in
process, and always constituted within, not outside representation’, alongside a need to “acknowledge the
strategic need to claim racial, gendered, sexual and class identities as meaningful in specific ways in the name of
struggle and resistance to institutional violence and exploitation” (1998, xvii). In this regard her critique anticipates
Puar (2007, 216) who argues that “intersectionality and its underpinnings—an unrelenting epistemological will to
truth—presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and
thus fixes a permanence to forever [whereas] assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot
be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being.”
Smith runs squarely into the challenge that many of her successors have noted as well—there is a fundamental
tension between intersectionality’s theoretical and intellectual possibilities and its use as a tool of institutional
transformation. But unlike her successors, Smith’s adoption of intersectionality as a reading strategy is a useful
corrective to approaches which attempt to circumscribe the usefulness of intersectionality on the grounds that it
cannot epistemologically account for the intersectional identities that it has made visible. Smith (1998, xxiii)
reminds us that the primary usefulness of intersectionality, whether as a tool of achieving institutional diversity or
as a kind of black feminist reading strategy, is that “by addressing the multifarious ways in which ideologies of
race, gender, class, and sexuality reinforce one another, reading intersectionally can illuminate the diverse ways
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in which relations of domination and subordination are produced.”
Smith’s ability to wrest intersectionality from the clutches of essentialist ghettoization suggest that battles over the
potential essentialism of black feminist perspectives have shaped intersectionality’s traversal through the
academy. These debates about the ways that black feminist criticism had the potential to render black female
identities static have existed within black feminist criticism at least since 1987, when Hazel Carby suggested that,
at best, black feminism should be understood as a “locus of contradictions.” But what Smith reminds us of again is
that intersectionality is most useful not as an account of all the intricacies of the subjectivity of any intersectional
group, but rather it is useful for exposing the operations of power dynamics in places where a single axis approach
might render those operations invisible.
In the fields of sociology and political science, Leslie McCall (2005) and Ange-Marie Hancock (2007), respectively,
have also argued for intersectionality as a rubric that can shape social science research protocols. Attempting to
remedy the failure of intersectionality researchers to clarify a methodology for intersectionality, McCall argues that
in sociology, intersectional research paradigms are indicative of what she terms the intracategorical approach.
Researchers using this approach “tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection … in
order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups.” McCall (2005, 1786) advocates for a move
toward an intersectional approach that facilitates “intercategorical complexity,” which “focuses on the complexity
of relationships among multiple social groups within and across analytical categories and not on complexities within
single social groups, single categories, or both.”
In a follow-up essay about intersectionality as methodology, McCall and Averil Clarke clarify what intersectional
methodologies make possible in the field of social science research. In social science, intersectionality facilitates
what the authors call “different interpretations of the same facts,” by both incorporating and specifying “the
overlap of multiple social dynamics” (Clarke and McCall 2013, 351). “These different interpretations and their
normative implications,” they argue, “are the logical outcomes of intesectionality’s beginnings in women of color’s
critique of the dominant descriptions of gender and racial inequality, and in their production of new knowledge at
the intersection of multiple vectors of scholarship, identity, structure, and social activism” (351). For instance,
Clarke (2013, 353) has used the intercategorical approach to challenge traditional sociological understandings of
fertility as being tied to class, using the experiences of educated black women to demonstrate that “when it comes
to the achievement of low fertility, a race-based deprivation in romance differentiates the experiences of black
women with college degrees from similarly educated White and Hispanic women. The advantages of class in
desired family formation practices are thus distinctly racialized.” Moreover, “this conclusion, buttressed by detailed
analysis of group differences, augments and modifies the conclusions of studies that elevate the role of class-
based explanations” (Clarke and McCall, 353).
Hancock (2007) argues that within political science, intersectionality can be useful not solely as a “content
specialization” but as a research paradigm. Mapping a similar set of concerns in political science as those outlined
by McCall (2005) in sociology, Hancock (2007) notes a shift in political science from single or unitary categorical
approaches, to explorations of multiple approaches (i.e., examinations of race and gender) to finally intersectional
approaches or the interaction of categories such as race and gender. Within political science, intersectionality as
a research paradigm makes at least two important methodological interventions. It “changes the relationship
between the categories of investigation from one that is determined a priori to one of empirical investigation,”
which could make a difference for instance in “large-n quantitative studies,” which might “assume that race
operates identically across entire cities, states, and nations when placed in interaction with gender or class”
(2007, 67). Additionally, “intersectionality posits an interactive, mutually constituted relationship among these
categories and the way in which race (or ethnicity) and gender (or other relevant categories) play a role in the
shaping of political institutions, political actors, the relationships between institutions and actors and the relevant
categories themselves” (67).
These paradigmatic approaches open up useful new avenues for thinking about how various social identity
categories co-constitute and are constituted by other categories and for asking new kinds of questions in empirical
and social-science-based approaches to research. But they also raise concerns about the status of the black
female subject relative to these research paradigms. For instance, there is a way in which despite the many
adaptations of Western political thought, white men are never disappeared from Western intellectual traditions.
Within the history of Western feminism, white women are in no danger of being disappeared as architects of
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feminist theory. Yet, the move toward postintersectional frames shows a resurgence of hesitancy to deal with
racism. Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2012, 2) situates her skepticism toward these instrumentalist approaches to
intersectionality within “two competing currents [that] shape the contemporary moment: a postmodern avoidance
of identity and a postfeminist deployment of feminism focused on incorporation and formal equality.” She argues
that postmodern approaches to identity, in their insistence that we all “have ruptured identities and fragmented
bodies,” “delegitimize the study of racism, sexism, and the structural bases of inequality” (2). Moreover, the
convergence of post-feminist and post-racial discourses has created a kind of “post-Black feminist” sensibility that
“emphasizes gender and racial representation while short-circuiting more far-reaching social and political change”
(2). In this regard, I think that the calls to become postintersectional and to move beyond intersectionality are akin
to and give false intellectual heft to broader political suggestions that the election of Barack Obama has thrust us
into a post-racial era. These institutional and political moves index an increasing discomfort with talking about
racism. Race, removed from an overarching framework of talking about racism, is fine as such conversations
merely signal diversity and mark a sense that we are progressing to a time when such categories will become
devoid of meaning.
Alexander-Floyd takes both McCall and Hancock to task for using rhetorical strategies that reframe intersectionality
in ways that disappear black women from a body of scholarship that emerges from the intellectual production and
political activism that they created. According to Alexander-Floyd (2012, 13), McCall’s focus on complexity
“advances a post-black feminist politics that disappears black women.” For Alexander-Floyd, the “issue is one of
subjugation, not complexity,” but McCall’s categorical approach, “unmoors intersectionality from women of color’s
lives and their multifaceted marginalization as its focus” (11). Moreover, Alexander-Floyd demonstrates that McCall,
in her rejection of the centrality of narratives to the “intracategorical approach” that defines black feminism,
reinstantiates positivist research frames despite “explicit epistemological challenges that black women, along with
feminists in general, have made to the positivist approach” (13). Alexander-Floyd’s critiques sound a note of
concern similar to Smith’s, but she concludes that black women should remain at the center of intersectional
paradigms.
In tandem with what she terms McCall’s “bait-and-switch” approach to the knowledge production of black women,
Alexander-Floyd indicts Hancock for the “universalizing tendency” of her work. Citing Hancock’s argument for
intersectionality as a general research paradigm, Alexander-Floyd (2012, 15) notes that “the re-visioning of
intersectionality that Hancock presents, however, is designed to give it greater appeal in the discipline in ways that
undermine black women and other women of color and intersectionality’s potentially transformative power.” She
argues that the universalizing tendency in Hancock’s work constitutes a post–black feminist reading of
intersectionality that disappears black women. For instance, one of the key ways that Hancock’s work represents a
universalizing tendency is “through its privileging of dominant modes of knowledge production in the discipline.
The relegation of intersectionality to a content specialization, as opposed to a research paradigm, voids its
standing as a vibrant, complex body of knowledge, implicitly suggesting that its knowledge is naïve or
nonempirical” (17). Sirma Bilge (2013, 413) has noted that there is now a troubling move to diminish the import of
the racial foundations of intersectionality by coopting its genealogy and declaring the concept to be the “brainchild
of feminism” rather than the “brainchild of black feminism.” “Such reframing makes intersectionality a property
specifically of feminism and women’s/gender studies,” and erases the intellectual labor of its black women
creators. Wiegman does not erase this history. Instead, she suggests that the depth of intersectionality’s
connections to black feminism saddles it with a kind of baggage—racial baggage—that makes its movement to
other spaces problematic. Alexander-Floyd’s point about the ways in which a desire to “universalize”
intersectionality disappears black women as a material matter while also curtailing and taming its potential to
disrupt problematic relations of power is a powerful one. Thus, she rejects all pretense of universal inclusion and
stakes her territory on the ground of black female particularity.
The broader challenges raised by Alexander-Floyd’s critique of intersectionality’s traversal through the social
sciences reflect issues about the way in which intersectionality works not just as theory but as praxis. And
certainly, we must recognize the manner in which postintersectional moves are deeply tethered to investments in a
faulty post-racial idea. The status of racial others within academic spaces remains fragile, especially in the era of
the neoliberal university, with its increasing commitments to diversity at the rhetorical level but decreasing
commitments at the level of funding for faculty in departments and programs in women’s and gender studies and
ethnic studies. To suggest as Puar does that intersectionality is a tool of a neoliberal agenda rather than a tool that
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works against it is a line of thinking that should be vigilantly guarded against. Still, questions remain: Does
intersectionality need to have a more universal utility in order retain relevance in the academy? Do we really want
to argue that theories about black women should only travel in limited amounts? Is this not an essentializing fiction
that limits black women as much as it limits the import of our knowledge production? And if it achieves citational
ubiquity but is found not to be broadly applicable, is not intersectionality guilty of the charge of doing violence to
other marginalized peoples? These remain challenging questions, but what we must hold front and center is that in
its relationship to dominant institutions (be they juridical, academic, or social), intersectionality has a teleological
aim to expose and dismantle dominant systems of power, to promote the inclusion of black women and other
women of color and to transform the epistemological grounds upon which these institutions conceive of and
understand themselves. If it can be found to be doing this work, whether politically, analytically or
methodologically, then it should be understood not only as a continued boon to feminist theorizing but also to
feminist movement-building. At the same time, intersectionality does not deserve our religious devotion. It has
particular goals. To the extent that intersectional frames have made clear a need for new paradigms that more fully
explicate the lived realities of women of color, across a range of identity positions, the framework does not
preclude the development of new ways of thinking about identity. But as a conceptual and analytic tool for thinking
about operations of power, intersectionality remains one of the most useful and expansive paradigms we have.
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Brittney Cooper
Brittney Cooper is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University