I have translated here a text by Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso published in Pikara Magazine. I have reproduced it without the magazine’s nor the author’s permission. All rights are theirs, and any inconsistencies will have to be attributed to the present translation.
Today, decolonial and anti-racist feminism sells like hotcakes around every corner. While this fills us with satisfaction, I must admit that an anguish invades me. As the movement expands, we are faced with a latent problem: the risk we run is that of a loss of identity and radicality, a process by which many of the critical assumptions that encouraged and guided us in the battles we fought against white feminism seem to be diluted or lost over time. I wonder how much of this process of expanding decolonial consciousness ends up being more nominative than substantive.
When I first got to feminism I saw how a handful of black feminists came together around 1992 creating a network to bring themselves together, while blaming feminism for the lack of black women in their spaces. This short-lived movement did not escalate once a good part of its main leaders managed to insert themselves in the mainstream feminism and its labour market, within state institutions and international cooperation. A little more than a decade later, and already in a new century, some of the participants or witnesses of 1992 were forced to return to the issue and we did so by making the analysis more complex and revising the political programme to follow. I believe that we were forced by circumstances, after having persisted in being part of the unified feminist movement and under the slogan of sorority among women, we ended up realising its falsehood. From there emerged a radical movement that allowed a forceful critique of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic feminism (where some of us came from) by observing its complicities with Eurocentrism, and therefore with racism and coloniality. In this process of detachment, we decided to become actively involved in promoting a movement of non-white feminists capable of confronting the most widespread feminist understanding and its program of liberation. We have made this new momentum known as decolonial feminism or anti-racist feminism. But in the meantime new nomenclatures have appeared or have been reappropriated: black feminism, afro-feminism, intersectional feminism, etc.
This last designation recreates what is perhaps one of the most important and best known contributions of black feminism: intersectionality. This perspective is what we, racialised feminists and, increasingly and unexpectedly, feminists of all kinds, are claiming as commonplace. Over time, however, those of us who introduced it into Latin American feminist politics, the same ones who have devoted ourselves to its rigorous study, have seen an increasingly widespread use of the noun “intersectionality” to justify readings of reality, which in my opinion are increasingly far removed from those which, since the 1970s, have begun the thought process thanks to which Kimberle Crenshaw ended up coining the term. If the first decolonial anti-racist feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean had already observed the pros and cons of intersectional analysis, in recent years we have seen how these problems have intensified under a reception that is, in my opinion, distorted, which gives continuity to the feminist narrative and programme initially produced by white feminism that we have tried to confront, but which now appears disguised under discourses or self-identifications that claim to assume an intersectional perspective.
To this we must add a new problem that we did not have before, black feminism or contemporary afro-feminism, when it is named from an identity, drags with it the problem of identity politics. Succinctly this refers to the false belief that there is a unity between experience, politics and desire. Although intersectionality would indeed only arise from racialised bodies, this does not apply vice versa: not all racialised bodies have to end up “naturally” developing this perspective. Some of us have spent years studying it, applying it, learning from experience by observing its developments and limits. Mastering intersectionality goes beyond quoting from legendary names whose works we have not taken the time to study in depth because, if we did, we might not quote them since their positions are so different from the ones we are actually holding.
We are at a moment where white women and people of non-normative gender and sexuality, as well as racialized or subaltern comrades, talk indistinctly about intersectionality and even pretend to teach what it is all about, while at the same time one looks with regret at how they leave intact the feminist analysis and politics they first came to oppose. Intersectionality is not an identity, it does not fall from the sky, it is not inherited, it is not a natural condition belonging to some group. This idea that a subject by its very condition naturally carries or represents a political project is a serious error that we should avoid. Intersectionality isn’t even about researching or working with indigenous, Afro or popular populations; in fact, this work has always been done. If by saying intersectionality the feminist discourse remains intact, if the argument, the analysis, the treatment is only to apply the highest (white) feminist convictions and truths to the understanding of the world of those at the bottom and then double the bet that everything is intensified at the bottom, we are understanding the task very badly.
Intersectionality on the contrary leads us to a new form of interpretation that abandons the well known feminist viewpoint and gender-centred interpretation for a more comprehensive one. The failure of the main critical systems of interpretation of the social order — Marxism, feminism, critical race theory — consists in the fact that each of them try to give an interpretation based on what they assume to be the fundamental axis of domination. When one starts from this type of assumption, it constructs a false unity of the object defined by this axis or category, as well as an incorrect view of the autonomy of the category itself. Actually there is an inseparability between the domination and the experience of domination that exceeds the categorical method that tries to explain it.
But, be careful, as María Lugones warns us, intersectionality does not solve the problem, it only demonstrates it. Intersectionality can give the false impression that beyond the intersection these categorical sets exist and function independently. The reality is that the set “gender”, for example, is a production historically thought for and experienced by white women and everything that comes out of it is thought from them. Therefore, all the truths, the positions, the strategies elaborated from the category of gender are NOT useful to think about the conditions of our domination as racialized women. That is why making intersectionality is not taking these white interpretations and replicating them for black women, pointing out that “in addition to racism, we are affected by the gender order”. To say this is to not understand that gender is always conditioned by coloniality and the racial structuring of the world.
To make clear what I am talking about, I would like to give an example. A large majority of feminists who, today, say that they have an intersectional or anti-racist outlook (including black feminists), as well as part of the academia and institutions, have indeed incorporated a sensitivity to racism. This has not meant, however, the abandonment of the white feminist viewpoint when it comes to the problems that feminist theory and the feminist agenda have defined as their own. Thus we find feminists who are outraged by the murder of George Floyd or by the fact that the Chilean state has let Machi Celestino die on a hunger strike because of his unjust sentence. They are the same people who are horrified that the prisons are full of slum dwellers, black and indigenous men, migrants in the Global North from poor countries in the Global South, as well as racialised people more generally. Let’s say that, in the face of these problems which are obviously coming from an analysis critical of racism, there seems to be a consensus of widespread indignation within our feminist and left movements.
However, it is highly contradictory that these same people are going to focus their demands for justice for women on the basis of an exemplary condemnation (by the courts or by escrache and social exclusions) of those who have committed some kind of fault against “women”, from the smallest fault to the cruelest and most ruthless one such as murder. Feminist justice will demand more prisons, more police control and higher penalties against rapists, abusers, murderers, traffickers, etc. When it comes to petty crimes the level of cruelty will not be less, even if it is dealt with through scorn and public persecution. For feminist justice all men are equally suspect no matter their ethno-racial origins, their social status, their background. If it has already been accepted that women are not one, this does not seem to affect the treatment of male members of our species. They will all receive the same treatment… at least in theory. Because, we must remember the most visible and representative faces of these males, abusers, rapists, murderers, drug dealers… are racialized males in their great majority.
However, beyond the unjust and racist judicial system that condemns the poor and releases the powerful, beyond the condemnation of innocents just for their facial features, these men are there because they have committed some crime, not because they are saints. We will keep this in mind when it comes to condemning them and asking for justice because they have touched a woman, but in fact we seem to forget it or decide to give another treatment when we become indignant because the prisons are full of black and indigenous men. While in one case we are relentless in asking for their heads, in another case we are outraged by a system that systematically condemns them to be the social scum. It would seem as if it is not the same subject, but it is, in the end it is the same racialised subject who in one case produces empathy for being a victim of a social order that condemns him and in another case only deserves our fury, repudiation and condemnation; if before we were horrified by police actions now we are the executioners who announce their death, calling for the State and the police to act.
How do we explain this? This is exactly what intersectionality warns us about. The point is that we respond according to the definition and the treatment of the problem developed from each of these analytical sets produced from a central category. Each problem has been defined from a system of interpretation and from there is defined the type of response, attitude or solution to the problem. When dealing with classic problems of anti-racist struggle we will apply the treatment that comes from this program of interpretation and action, when dealing with “women” we will apply the analysis and political programme of… white feminism!
So let’s be clear: either we agree to have them all killed or imprisoned, or we start thinking seriously about the processes that make up this violent masculinity which, of course, goes beyond gender analysis, because it’s not only about if you were given balls and guns as a child, it’s about historical structural conditions that shape that subjectivity.
The challenge posed by intersectionality implies the progressive abandonment of this categorical and summative view, for a more alchemical one where the gender order is always racialised and geopolitically mediated; one where these treatments merge, producing a new one, far from the formulations to which feminism has already accustomed us. This allows us to advance towards politics of a very different form according to the place we occupy as a community within the matrix of domination and, concomitantly, the way we act to confront it. We should not forget this in the analysis or in the definition of strategies to stop the problems we face from a non-dominant point of view and from the viewpoint of those most affected by coloniality.
