Is apparently what Linda Hirschman thinks intersectionality brings to Feminism, as expressed in the Washington Post. Apparently women’s issues and race issues are separate things.
The limitations of this position should be obvious when the author apparently made no effort to garner the opinions of the women of colour that she uses as examples, brownfemipower and sudy. Women, who actually engage with intersectionality.
Hirschman’s feminism illustrates perfectly what bell hooks calls ‘reformatory feminism’ – feminism that does not strive to bring social justice to women are, so to say, at the bottom of the heap, but to a small subsection of women, who already have a considerable amount of social privilege (based on class, race, etc). Intersectionlity, in contrast, can address the worst circumstances women are in and allows women to articulate their concerns.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adele-m-stan-and-shireen-mitchell/a-feminist-focus-includes_b_106519.html
This was a nice response as well, I thought.
Hirschman is also completely dismissive of the notion that class analysis or something like it needs to be part of feminism. She says something like, I’m gonna leave the assault on capitalism to people like Barbara Ehrenreich. Well, if you leave out class and you leave out race, you’re certainly left with only a bunch of rich white women. They can help themselves.
[...] (wikipedia article, blog post [amazing pictures, but probably NSFW], another blog post, link post). I was aware, in a general way, of race issues, certainly of queer issues, to a lesser extent of [...]