My Note On A Note On My Note Below Trying To Provide A Brief Beginning Account Of Intersectionality

Note to a guy who sent me this note on my immediately below post.

.... I think you pretty much get it. What you do not do is expose its bullshittines. Don't  look to me for advice. I have given up on it all...

Me: 

I wasn’t tying to expose its faultiness, just trying to see if I was “getting it.”

So if you think I “pretty much get it,” then for me that’s mission accomplished.

The word is thrown around so much, is so pervasive in chatter these days, the way “deconstruction” used to be, I suspect that many who use it don’t understand what is meant by those who do understand it. 

So I think it’s at least minimally helpful to try to clarify what it at its core means.

So, again, if I pretty much did that, then I did what I set out to do.

And, again, to tell me I haven’t exposed it as nonsense is to tell me I haven’t done something I didn’t set out to do.

In critiquing intersectionality, I would, rather than focus on its indeterminacy, reject its foundational premises. 

Some are: 

that, regardless of our past, we now systemically oppress the marginalized; 

that the most privileged—that is, the privileged by way intersectionality’s criteria—form a hegemony intent on maintaining its power, advantage and control; 

that the criteria for ascribing privilege form a coherent basis for its assertion and application—essentially identity politics on steroids; 

that the idea of free expression is delusionary since speech is but a mode of power, one of the hegemon’s chief means of oppression and thus sustaining itself rather than a means of pursuing truth; 

that it’s delusionary to say we live in a free society rather than one in which controlling power seeks its own persistence; 

and, generally, the idea of culture and institutions as operating as a kind of superstructure.

But, yet again, none of this was part of what I’d set out to do in trying to clarify what intersectionality means.