Ornamental Intersectionality

 The CIA has released a video featuring one of their officers, daughter of immigrants and proudly "intersectional". 

This video has raised consternation on social media. There seem to be at least two different lines of argument. 

The first line of argument is specific to the CIA, based on sweeping disapproval of the CIA and its history. As if to say "how dare an unenlightened organization have enlightened employment policies and practices".

The second line of argument would seem to apply to any large organization. It suggests that the language of emancipation and intersectionality should be reserved for struggles against what bell hooks calls a "culture of domination", and should not be coopted by the establishment.

For example, @zei_squirrel argues that 

CIA has coopted what was supposed to be the emancipatory language of intersectionality as practiced in niche segments of the academy 

quotes bell hooks 

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO, identity politics was the rage because so many exploited and oppressed people were growing in political consciousness and awareness. The hope of identity politics was that it would create a foundation for all of us to respect diversity. Unfortunately, identity politics gradually became more of a tool of separation and competitive one-upmanship. Positively, the struggle for voice, which was centered around identity politics, did foreground diverse perspectives even as it often obscured places of commonality and shared struggle. Within a culture of domination, all our political struggles risk commodification in ways that diffuse their radical intent. This was, and is, certainly the case with identity politics.

and references Bourdieu and Wacquant.

It is a screen discourse, whose intellectual status is the product of a gigantic effect of national and international allodoxia, which deceives both those who are party to it and those who are not.

(I had to look up the word allodoxia, which roughly means false beliefs resulting from faulty categorization.)

There have been many previous arguments against "appropriations of the concept of intersectionality that have watered it down and wrested it from its radical foundations" (Runyan). Sirma Bilge has called this ornamental intersectionality. This seems to be related to the distinction I have made earlier in this blog about imaginary, symbolic and real diversity.

Let's come back to the CIA video. The woman in the video is presenting herself at the intersection between several different categories - Latino woman, mother, daughter of immigrants, successful career, a reasonable level of self-confidence. There is perhaps a difference here between what the word intersectionality denotes (any intersection of categories, whether oppressed or otherwise) and what the word apparently connotes (intersection of specifically oppressed categories). And the CIA itself is also presenting itself as some kind of intersection. So perhaps not surprising that this can be read in many different ways.

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Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality Undone (Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race, January 2014)

Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, NewLiberalSpeak (Radical Philosophy 105, Jan/Feb 2001)

Gail Fine, False Belief in the Theaetetus (Phronesis, 1979, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1979), pp. 70-80

bell hooks and others, Artists and Identity (Art Forum, Summer 2016, Vol 54 No 10)

Anne Sisson Runyan, What Is Intersectionality and Why Is It Important? (Academe Nov/Dec 2018)

Related posts What is the Purpose of Diversity? (January 2010), More on the Purpose of Diversity (December 2014)