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By Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso / Illustration: Mrs. Milton/ Pikara*

"Mastering intersectionality goes beyond citing legendary names whose works we haven't taken the time to study in depth because, if we did, we might not cite them, since their positions are very different from the ones we are holding," writes Yuderkys Espinosa.

Decolonial and anti-racist feminism is selling like hotcakes on every corner today. While this fills us with satisfaction, I must admit that I am filled with anguish. As the movement expands, we face a latent problem: the risk is a loss of identity and radicalism of the gesture, a process through which many of the critical postulates that encouraged us and guided us in the battles we waged against white feminism seem to dilute or get lost with the passage of time . I wonder how much of this process of expanding a decolonial consciousness ends up being more nominal than substantive.

When I came to feminism, I saw how a handful of Black feminists had come together around 1992, creating a network that united them, while at the same time criticizing feminism for the lack of Black women in their spaces. This short-lived movement didn't escalate much further once a good portion of its key leaders managed to integrate into the mainstream and its labor market, within state institutions and international cooperation agencies. A little over a decade later, and already in a new century, some of the participants or witnesses of that 1992 event were forced to revisit the issue, and we did so by complicating our analysis and revising our political program. I say that we were forced by circumstances, after having persisted in being part of the unified feminist movement and under the banner of sisterhood among women, we ended up realizing the fallacy. From this emerged a radical gesture that allowed for a forceful critique of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic feminism (from which some of us came), observing its complicity with Eurocentrism, and therefore, with racism and colonialism. In this process of detachment, we decided to actively engage in promoting a movement of non-white feminists capable of confronting the most widespread understanding of feminism and its liberation agenda. We have referred to this new moment as decolonial feminism or anti-racist feminism. But in the meantime, new nomenclatures have emerged or been reappropriated: Black feminism, Afrofeminism, intersectional feminism , etc.

This latest nomination recreates what is perhaps one of the most important and best-known contributions of Black feminism: intersectionality. This perspective is what we racialized feminists and, increasingly and unexpectedly, feminists of all kinds, claim as a commonplace. Over time, however, those of us who introduced it into Latin American feminist politics, the same ones who have dedicated ourselves to its rigorous study, are seeing an increasingly widespread use of the noun "intersectional" to justify interpretations of reality that, in my opinion, are increasingly distant from those that, since the 1970s, initiated the thought process through which Kimberle Crenshaw ultimately coined the term. If the first anti-racist decolonial feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean had already observed the advantages and weaknesses of intersectional analysis, in recent years we have seen how these problems have worsened under a reception, in my opinion, distorted, which gives continuity to the feminist narrative and program initially produced by white feminism that we have sought to confront, but which now appears disguised under discourses or self-identifications that claim to assume this perspective.

To this we must add a new problem that we hadn't considered: contemporary Black feminism or Afrofeminism, by naming itself from an identity, brings with it the problem of identity politics . Briefly, this refers to the false belief that there is a unity between experience, politics, and desire. Although intersectionality should indeed only emerge from racialized bodies, this does not apply vice versa: not all racialized bodies should develop this perspective "naturally." Some of us have dedicated years to studying it, applying it, learning from experience, observing its developments and its limits. Mastering intersectionality goes beyond citing legendary names whose works we haven't taken the time to study in depth because, if we did, we might not cite them since their positions are very different from the ones we are holding.

We are at a time when white women and non-gender and sexuality normative people, as well as racialized or subaltern comrades, speak indiscriminately about intersectionality and even attempt to teach what it is, while at the same time one sees with regret how they leave intact the feminist analysis and politics it 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 any group. This idea that a subject, by their very nature, naturally carries or represents a political project is a serious error that we should avoid. Nor does intersectionality mean researching or working with indigenous, Afro-descendant, or popular populations; in reality, this has always been the case. If, by referring to intersectionality, the feminist discourse remains intact, if the argument, the analysis, the treatment merely consists of applying the highest convictions and truths of (white) feminists to the understanding of the world of those below and doubling down by pointing out that everything there is aggravated, then we are seriously misunderstanding the task.

Intersectionality, on the other hand, directs us toward a new form of interpretation that abandons the familiar, gender-centered feminist perspective for a more comprehensive one. The flaw in the main critical systems of interpreting the social order—Marxism, feminism, critical race theory—is that each attempts to offer an interpretation based on what it assumes to be the fundamental axis of domination. When this assumption is based, a false unity of the thing defined by this axis or category is constructed, as well as a false idea of ​​the autonomy of the category . But there is an inseparability of domination and the experience of domination that exceeds the categorical method that attempts to explain it.

María Lugones warns us intersectionality doesn't solve the problem; it only reveals it . Intersectionality can give the false impression that beyond the intersection, these groups exist and function independently. The reality is that the group "gender," for example, is a production historically conceived for and experienced by white women, and everything that stems from it is conceived from their perspective. Therefore, all the truths, positions, and strategies developed from the category of gender are UNSERVABLE for thinking about the conditions of our domination as racialized. This is why intersectionality isn't about taking these interpretations and replicating them for Black women, pointing out that "in addition to racism, we are affected by the gender order." To affirm this is to fail to understand that gender is always conditioned by coloniality and the racial structuring of the world.

To make it clear what I'm talking about, I want to give an example. A large majority of feminists who today claim to have an intersectional or anti-racist perspective (including Black feminists), as well as a portion of academia and institutions, have indeed incorporated a sensitivity to racism. This has not meant, however, abandoning the white feminist perspective when it comes to the problems that feminist theory and program have defined as their own. You then find feminists who are outraged by the murder of George Floyd or by the Chilean state allowing Machi Celestino on a hunger strike due to an unjust sentence. These are the same people who are horrified that prisons are full of shantytown dwellers, Black and Indigenous men, migrants from poor countries in the global South, and racialized people in general. Let's say that, in the face of these problems, evidently stemming from a critical analysis of racism, there seems to be a consensus of widespread indignation within our feminist and leftist movements.

Now, it is highly contradictory that these same people are going to focus their demands for justice for women on exemplary sentencing (through judicial channels or through public shaming and social ostracism) for those who have committed any kind of offense against "women," from the smallest offense to the most cruel and ruthless, such as homicide. Feminist justice will demand more prisons, greater police control, and harsher sentences for rapists, abusers, murderers, traffickers, etc. When it comes to minor crimes, the level of cruelty will be no less, even if it is processed through public ridicule and persecution. For feminist justice, all men are equally suspect, regardless of their racial or ethnic origin, their social status, or their background. If it has already been accepted that women are not one, this does not seem to affect the treatment of males of the species. All will receive the same treatment... at least in theory. Because we must remember the most visible and representative faces of these men: abusers, rapists, murderers, drug traffickers... the vast majority of whom are racialized men.

However, beyond an unjust and racist judicial system that condemns the poor and releases the powerful, beyond the sentencing of innocent people solely for their facial expressions, these men are there because they have committed a crime, not because they are saints. We will keep this in mind when it comes to condemning them and demanding justice for groping a woman, but it seems we forget it or decide to treat it differently when we are outraged that the prisons are full of Black and Indigenous men. While in one case we are relentless in demanding their heads, in another we are outraged by a system that systematically condemns them to the scum of society. It might seem as if we are not dealing with the same subject, but no, in the end it is the same racialized subject who in one case inspires empathy for being a victim of a social order that condemns them and in another case only deserves our cruelty, repudiation, and condemnation. If before we were horrified by police actions, now we are the executioners announcing their deaths, shouting at the State and the police to act.

How can we explain this? This is precisely what intersectionality warns us about. It means that we respond according to the definition of the problem and the treatment of it 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 the type of response, attitude, or solution to it is defined. When dealing with classic problems of the anti-racist struggle, we will apply the treatment that emerges from this program of interpretation and action; when dealing with "women," we will apply the analysis and political program of white feminism!

So let's be clear: either we agree that they should all be killed or imprisoned, or we should start to seriously consider the processes that constitute this violent masculinity, which, of course, goes beyond gender analysis. It's not just about being given balls and guns as children; it's about historical and structural conditions that shape this subjectivity.

The challenge posed by intersectionality implies the progressive abandonment of a categorical and summative perspective in favor of a more alchemical one in which the gender order is always racialized and geopolitically mediated ; one in which these approaches merge, producing a new one, far removed from the formulations to which feminism has already accustomed us. This allows us to move toward a very different politics and 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 definition of strategies to address the problems we face from a non-dominant perspective and from those most affected by coloniality.

*This article was originally published on Pikara. To learn more about our partnership with this outlet, click here .