Intersectionality

This document contains excerpts from the book Domestic Violence in Immigrant Communities: Case Studies by Dr. Ferzana Chaze, Dr. Bethany Osborne, Ms. Archana Medhekar and Dr. Purnima George that have been translated into Spanish so that a wider audience can access them. The book is a freely accessible educational resource to be used in training with social work and legal practitioners. The translated case studies in this document are real life stories of immigrant women who have experienced domestic violence in Canada. The cases emerged from closed legal case files handled by Archana Medhekar Law Office and reflect the stories of racialized immigrant women who experienced domestic violence in Canada and who sought legal help. Permission to carry out this research was received from the Research Ethics Board of both Ryerson University and Sheridan College in June 2019. All cases included in this research took place within the past ten years and were closed for at least one year prior to the start of the research. In addition to the case studies, included are questions for discussion with community groups on the topic of domestic violence. We hope you will find this tool useful as you engage your communities on issues around domestic violence.

With the growing elusiveness of the state apparatus in late modernity, military service is one of the last institutions to be clearly identified with the state, its ideologies and its policies. Therefore, negotiations between the military and its recruits produce acting subjects of citizenship with long-lasting consequences. Arguing that these negotiations are regulated by multi-level (civic, group, and individual) contracts, we explore the various meanings that these contracts obtain at the intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity; and examine how they shape the subjective experience of soldierhood and citizenship. More particularly, we analyse the meaning of military service in the retrospective life stories of Israeli Jewish women from various ethno-class backgrounds who served as army secretaries - a low-status, feminine gender-typed occupation within a hyper-masculine organization. Findings reveal that for women of the lower class, the organizing cultural schema of the multi-level contract is that of achieving respectability through military service, which means being included in the national collective. Conversely, for middle-class women, it is the sense of entitlement that shapes their contract with the military, which they expect to signify and maintain their privileged status. Thus, while for the lower class, the multi-level contract is about inclusion within the boundaries of the national collective, for the dominant groups, this contract is about reproducing social class hierarchies within national boundaries.

This paper provides an in-depth, ‘case study’ style analysis of the experiences of two 13-year-old British Asian girls from a larger qualitative study investigating minority ethnic students’ aspirations in science. Through the lens of identity as performativity and Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital, the ways in which two girls engage with the field of science is examined. Samantha is British Indian and Fay is British Bangladeshi and they are both ‘top set’ students in science, but only one aspired to study triple science, while the other desired to be ‘famous’. The experiences of the two girls are explicated in this paper, teasing out their experiences and constructions of science. It is argued that cultural discourses of family, peers and teacher expectations can shape students’ perceptions of science and education.

Durante a mobilizacao de rua intitulada Marcha das Vadias, os atos interseccionais exibem corpos que performam e simbolizam a discussao sobre as violencias contra as mulheres, indo alem de questoes sobre roupa, envolvendo pautas como sexualidades e autonomia sobre o corpo. Busca-se com este artigo reunir reflexoes sobre os mecanismos de funcionamento desse tipo de protesto coletivo, considerando as subjetivacoes e interseccionalidades estrategicas adotadas como reacao e denuncia das violencias sofridas pelas mulheres e pessoas LGBTI. Para isso, destacam-se as intervencoes e praticas corporais realizadas durante a Marcha das Vadias de Curitiba/Brasil enquanto uma performance que apresenta de forma marcante a interseccionalidade como principio organizador.

Intersectionality as a theoretical framework argues for the need to account for people's multiple and intersecting social identities in understanding experiences of discrimination. We looked at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and class in shaping the particularity of Filipino urban poor lesbian women's and gay men's experiences of discrimination. Using four case narratives, we examined the experiences of a bisexual (masculine gay man), bakla (feminine gay man), tomboy (masculine lesbian woman), and girl (feminine lesbian woman) in urban poor contexts. Unique themes include: how gender, sexuality, and class identities intersect and fuse in the bakla and tomboy identities to create a distinct form of social inequality that constructs these identities as forms of moral degradation; how non-normative gender expressions trigger overt discrimination; how lesbian and gay identities and relationships are invisibilized; and how providing for the family can facilitate accep...

INTRODUCTIONAccording to CDC, black communities continue to experience higher rates of Hiv/ AIDS than any other group in the United States (U.S.) (CDC, 2011). Black women, despite representing only 13% of the female U.S. population, make up 72% of the female Hiv/ AIDS cases (CDC, 2008). In 2006, the rate of new Hiv infection for black women was nearly 15 times as high as that of white women and nearly 4 times that of Hispanic/Latina women (Prejean et ah, 2011). Research shows that there are socio-economic, historic, and cultural factors that place black women at increased risk of Hiv. This is especially true for black women living in economically depressed urban communities who encounter numerous gender specific stressors including, limited safe housing options, marginal employment opportunities, inadequate resources, geographic and emotional isolation, high rates of sexual trauma, victimization, and fewer eligible men (Boonstra, 2007). When compared to women living in more affluent communities, women in distressed urban communities were more likely to experience multiple risk factors including drinking, early sexual initiation, and multiple childbirths (Coker et al., 2000). These patterns tend to shape personal and community-level behaviors that place black women at increased risk of Hiv infection (Roche et al., 2006).This study explores how social determinants related to race, class, and gender influence Hiv risk among low-income black women by examining the effect of their living conditions and its impact on their sexual decision-making. The significance of this research question is that it departs from conventional research that typically uses quantitative approaches to identify correlational relationships between these variables. While these types of studies are informative they typically use secondary datasets. While these studies use large numbers of variables and yield strong correlations, they never tell us why the relationship exists. The contribution of this qualitative study is that it allows for a more in-depth examination of the relationship from the perspective of the women living the experience.GENDER, POVERTY, AND CLASSTwenty percent (20%) of all women in the United States are living in poverty (Kaiser, 2012). For blacks and Hispanics the rate of poverty is even higher at 36% and 35% respectively Since the 1970s poverty has become increasingly feminine and black (Pearce, 1978; Palmer, 1983). This trend caused Palmer (1983) to coin the phrase "the racial feminization of poverty" to reflect the fact that women of color are at greater risk of falling into poverty than either minority men or white women. According to Elmelch and Lu (2008) poverty rates in the United States suggest that black, Native American, and Hispanic women are disproportionately represented among the poor, and several studies have pointed to a need to study the distinct patterns and origins of women's poverty across both racial and ethnic lines (Hardy and Hazelrigg, 1995; Starrels, Bould, and Nicholas, 1994; Waters and Eschbach, 1995).The literature on gender inequality in poverty generally offers two explanations for this phenomenon (Casper, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1994; Northrop, 1994; Pearce, 1978; Smith and Ward, 1989; Starrels, Bould, and Nicholas, 1994;Treas, 1987). First, the theory of human capital focuses on gender equality in labor market skills, and highlights the dynamic role of human capital and labor market attainment in the development of gender inequality. Human capital theory suggests that women and men acquire different skills and credentials (Mintz and Kyromkowski, 2010) so that, as a result, the economic resources of women fall behind those of men thereby increasing the likelihood that women will fall into poverty. Second, while generally men have greater access to social and financial compensation than do women, the extent of gender variations in human capital and labor force participation varies greatly across racial and ethnic lines. …

The focus of this research is to consider the following questions: Are we using the appropriate conceptual framework in order to understand and terminate the practice of control and violence against women? What epistemic change do we need to understand the systemic violence against women? In order to answer these questions, we will take a look at the dominant epistemic framework—the one called “Western”—to highlight its deficiencies. The proposal will take the usefulness and efficiency of the so-called “epistemology of the South” as formulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Rita Segato. One of the most important conclusions of this research will lead us to propose intersectional feminism as a feminism able to overcome the epistemological barriers and colonial practices that still exist today. The proposal of an epistemology of the South is presented as a useful logical alliance of an intersectional vision of feminisms that may allow us to understand and transform the reality of violence against women.

Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from
the presumed dichotomy between whites and “Others”, yet the focus is still on
white people racialising others: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only
to white versus Others homogenizes select groups of non-whites including
Asians. Racialization and racism by Asians and among Asians have also been
ignored. Consequently, there is a dearth of studies on issues of race in nonwhite settings. Through engaging the themes of co-ethnicity, intersectionality
and postcoloniality, this special issue contributes to extant studies in three
ways through 1) examining new geographical sites of racialization and
racism; 2) illuminating racialization and racism beyond the white/Other
binary; and 3) introducing new dynamics in racialization and racist discourses,
including intersectional factors such as nationality, class, gender, language,
religion, temporal framings and postcoloniality.

When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of ‘Borneo Louis’. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native ‘housekeeper’, Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla’s exploited labour.

Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for historiographical reasons. Borneo Louis was only one of c.70,000 mercenaries from all over Europe in Dutch imperial services. Silla was one of the countless ‘native concubines’ who were forced to support these men and thereby help the Dutch build their nineteenth-century empire in South East Asia. Other empires, too, depended on auxiliary services from Europeans hailing from regions with intra-European or short-lived empires, or none at all. Recent new imperial histories, however, have remained conceptually limited to the study of interconnections within national empires (mostly the British Empire). Pan-European dimensions of colonial histories have continued to lie outside their focus. Explaining how Switzerland became part of the Dutch imperial project, this article therefore calls for a renewed new imperial history: a history that explains how Europe emerged out of continuous connections across the boundaries of national empires.

Feminist scholarship and movements worldwide have extensively engaged in theorising reproductive labour as an undervalued element of local and global political economies and have been pushing for the recognition of unpaid care and domestic work ‘as work’. At the same time, since the late 2000s the conditions of paid domestic workers have become an object of a new wave of mobilisation. Demands for equal labour rights and decent work for this category of workers have been put forward at the national and international level, while new international legislation has been adopted, such as ILO Convention 189. Despite these potentially convergent elements, it is not clear to what extent feminist theories on the valorisation of reproductive labour can be extended to, or can include, the case of paid domestic workers. In order to address this issue, in this article we present a comparative analysis of the relationships between feminist actors and domestic workers’ groups in Ecuador and Colomb...

Las diferentes sentencias DEL TJUE en el curso de procedimientos prejudiciales sobre cuestiones de actualidad, no sólo jurídica sino también social, relativas al uso del velo islámico por las trabajadoras han planteado un interrogante de urgente resolución: la aproximación jurisprudencial a cuestiones que afectan a las mujeres por el hecho de serlo pero que incluyen otras y cruciales variables como la libertad religiosa. En concreto, el tribunal ha avalado, con límites, la posibilidad para empleadores/as de despedir mujeres musulmanas que decidan utilizar un velo si aquélla utilización “menoscaba” su capacidad de relacionarse con potenciales clientes. El TJUE, sin embargo, ignora la cuestión de género centrándose exclusivamente en la perspectiva religiosa de ambas cuestiones. Esta laguna procedimental y de fondo, tan habitual en órganos jurisdiccionales, puede y debe ser corregida. Siendo la violencia de género aquélla manifestación de violencia (de diferentes tipos) sufrida por las mujeres por el hecho de serlo, es urgente una reformulación de la perspectiva jurídica analítica de los órganos judiciales para incorporar la perspectiva de género cuando las víctimas sean mujeres. Sólo una comprensión específica de una cuestión específica puede resultar en una decisión respetuosa con los derechos fundamentales vigentes.

The specialisation of physicians but also of nurses is steadily increasing. What kind of tasks a person accomplishes within a hospital does not only depend on formal qualifications, but also on social categories such as gender, age, and migration as well as informal skills like work experience, language knowledge or one’s assertiveness.

This article reports findings from a two-year case study of teachers in a single public high school. Data were gathered and analyzed using a concep-tual framework that conceived of alienation as a set of five sub-constructs: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, and estrangement. Findings suggested that teachers experienced each of these forms of alien-ation, but that each individual teacher interpreted them in a unique manner. Moreover, data suggested that for individual teachers, experiences of alien-ation varied from situation to situation and evolved over time. The authors concluded that teacher alienation was a fluid phenomenon, a seemingly basic assertion that has profound implications for teachers, administrators, and policymakers as they consider adopting or implementing reform initiatives.

Since form cannot be separated from content-the form of the story being (integral to) the story itself-there is no other way to say it without reforming it (that is, unintentionally modifying, augmenting, or narrowing it). -Trinh T Minh-ha Introduction Our analysis of the 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter explores the formal techniques employed by director Atom Egoyan in his "retelling" of Russell Banks's 1991 novel of the same title. We focus on how Egoyan's use of interruption, haunting, and visual and aural simultaneity does more than push viewers to acknowledge their active role in meaning-- making-these formal techniques also allow space within the narrative for oppositional consciousness and for reconfigured power relationships. Our interpretation combines insights from both women's studies and disability studies to enable us to attend to the political and theoretical implications of the film's form and content and thus explore one of the central paradoxe...

espanolEn este estudio partimos de pensar a las mujeres como agentes de cambio que se apropian de diferentes espacios de resistencia, para reivindicar demandas de mejora de las condiciones de genero y de la precariedad de sus vidas. A traves del analisis de narrativas de mujeres feministas que residen y tienen incidencia en el estado de Baja California, se discute la perspectiva de la interseccionalidad y su relacion con los planteamientos sobre las identidades complejas. Para ello, se propone un esquema analitico de los discursos feministas, considerando las diferencias generacionales, etnicas y de posicion social. Con ello, se logra dar cuenta de la condicion de opresion de genero como un elemento compartido, mas no como componente unificador, asi como de los mecanismos de configuracion de la intersubjetividad feminista. EnglishThe point of beginning of this study is the idea that women are agents of change, who are acting in different spaces of resistance, and who claim demands f...