Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression

This toolkit was developed through a collaborative process with CRIAW's partners for the Embracing the Complexities of Women's Lives project

Originally conceived by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 as a tool for the analysis of the ways in which different forms of social inequality, oppression and discrimination interact and overlap in multidimensional ways, the concept of 'intersectionality' has attracted much attention in international feminist debates over the last decade. "Framing Intersectionality" brings together proponents and critics of the concept, to discuss the 'state of the art' with those that have been influential in the debates that surround it. Engaging with the historical roots of intersectionality in the US-based 'race-class-gender' debate, this book also considers the European adoption of this concept in different national contexts, to explore issues such as migration, identity, media coverage of sexual violence against men and transnational livelihoods of high and low skilled migrants.

Examining the ways in which feminist and queer activists confront privilege through the use of intersectionality, this edited collection presents empirical case studies from around the world to consider how intersectionality has been taken up (or indeed contested) by activists in order to expose and resist privilege. The volume sets out three key ways in which intersectionality operates within feminist and queer movements: it is used as a collective identity, as a strategy for forming coalitions, and as a repertoire for inclusivity. The case studies presented in this book then evaluate the extent to which some, or all, of these types of intersectional activism are used to confront manifestations of privilege. Drawing upon a wide range of cases from across time and space, this volume explores the difficulties with which activists often grapple when it comes to translating the desire for intersectionality into a praxis which confronts privilege.

In this clearly written book, Mary Romero presents intersectionality as a core facet of the sociological imagination. One-dimensional approaches are no longer acceptable. Instead, we must examine all systems of oppression simultaneously and how they integrate and work with or against each other to shape life experiences. Recognizing the dynamics of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, Romero shows how social inequality is maintained or minimized in various social settings and everyday sites of interaction. Drawing the theoretical threads together, the book demonstrates intersectional approaches in action in relation to the care crisis and wealth divide, to highlight the different understandings of these issues and their solutions arising from a comprehensive, intersectional examination.

In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods. She places intersectionality in dialog with several theoretical traditions--from the Frankfurt school to black feminist thought--to sharpen its definition and foreground its singular critical purchase, thereby providing a capacious interrogation into intersectionality's potential to reshape the world.

Championing the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queerness In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival.

This handbook unravels the complexities of the global and local entanglements of race, gender and intersectionality within racial capitalism in times of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, the Chilean uprising, Anti-Muslim racism, backlash against trans and queer politics, and global struggles against modern colonial femicide and extractivism. This book offers new ways to think about what is absent/present and why, how erasure works in historical and contemporary theoretical accounts of the complexity of lived experiences of race and gender, and how, as new issues arise, intersectionalities (re)emerge in the politics of race and gender.

Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: this is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating elderly as economically profitable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age--which portrays different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, This manifesto starts with an experience of sexual abuse, narrating the way in which young people (kids) are not supposed to have sex, but often are subject to sexual experiences before the societally assumed ‘decent’ age. QAnon's obsession with pedophilia relates to the ways in which age and youth function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. Against Ageism problematizes the centralization of white ageing, as white experiences and portrayals of ageing are universalized as ageing itself.