Exploring key intersectionality theoretical arguments

Mainstream feminism argues that men’s power and privileged position in society often result in oppression, and the phenomenon of gender-based VAW is part of this oppression. While there are truths surrounding such claims, they fail to capture ‘other’ narratives and counter-narrative claims, which point to inherent flaws of Western ethnocentric superiority of mainstream feminism in universalising women’s sources of oppression and failure to capture intersections of factors and forces affecting women of

various categories and identities in society (Crenshaw, 1991, 1989; Collins, 1990; Hooks, 1990). This has led, since the 1980s, to highly contested and continuing difficult debates in the academia, with insistence that there is a need for recognition of race, ethnicity, gender and various other overlapping and interacting factors which can be traced to underlying structural oppressions, injustice and inequalities. Using an intersectionality framework of analysis allows an examination of several overlapping categories such as gender, race, and class (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005, p.39) and in my own research I will further explore how various other structural factors such as religion, poverty, and women’s lack of education, interlock to create complex of intersecting issues with potential to negatively influence the lives of the research participants.

Here I draw from a study conducted by Corbin (2012), entitled Intersections of context and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: What can we learn from feminist theory? It offers valuable lessons and evidence supporting the usefulness of intersectionality analysis and of addressing intersections in this current thesis. For instance, in her essay, Corbin (2012) illustrates how adopting an integrated multidimensional approach in research offers valuable information that analyses the complex structures and intersections of factors linked to gender disparity and gender inequality that affect women in health research. This is made possible by asking questions and digging deep to unravel and develop knowledge and insights into the layers and complex mesh of inequalities affecting women. Corbin explores how micro-sociological and macro-sociological layers may intersect and interact with categories of gender, race, social practices, institutional arrangements, cultural ideologies, and various other categories of difference in individual lives, as well as investigating the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power (Corbin, 2012, p.8-9) and the overlapping inequalities that contribute to women’s experiences of violence and violations of their rights.

Advocates of intersectionality perspectives, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), and Patricia Hill-Collins (1990, 1989) amongst others, serve as African American pioneers, advocating the inclusion and recognition of gender, race and class and other dimensions of inequality, particularly referencing the need for researchers to take account of historic and geographic contexts, where complex analysis of matrixes of oppressions and women’s vulnerabilities could be examined and understood to offer solutions to the challenges for resolution of the identified problems, causative factors . While Crenshaw

has been credited with coining the concept of ‘intersectionality’ (Anthias, 2012) as an analytical approach focusing on the overlapping of categories of oppressions (Crenshaw, 1991, 1989; see Hooks, 2015, 2000, 1990), she was in fact one of the many feminist scholars like Hill-Collins whose contribution in the literature on violence explore how men and women may straddle multiple locations in the landscape of dominion and power dynamics. An intersectionality analysis may reveal how women can be both survivors of violence and villains (similarly men can also be villains and /or survivors of abuse of their own power), because any individual, male or female, straddles multiple positions in a landscape of domination, in any given social context. As Hill -Collins (1991) argue “an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed” (p.225).

For the proponents of intersectionality, the central theoretical principles suggest that emphasis on gender as the sole explanation or root cause of violence against women has limitations. Intersectionality theories have shown that ‘gender’ is not the only defining category; human experiences cannot be accurately understood by prioritising any one single factor or constellation of factors. Thus, the central issues of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality and ability are constructed as fluid and flexible, and the social locations of the participants being studied are “inseparable and shaped by interlocking and mutually constituted social processes and structures that are influenced by both time and place” (Hankivsky, 2012, p.1713).

Scholars writing on intersectionality approaches argue that they: “provide an important corrective to essentialising identity constructs that harmonise social categories. Although social divisions such as gender, ethnicity and class have been understood through the lens of intersectionality for at least two decades, and have had a profound effect on feminist theories in particular, this approach has only recently acquired a more central place in academic and political life” (Anthias, 2012, pp.3-4). In a similar vein, Hankivsky (2012) also traced the historical background to intersectionality to the work of African American feminist scholars such as (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990; Hooks. 1990). These scholars submit that intersectionality “moves beyond single or typically favoured categories of analysis (sex, gender, race and class) to consider simultaneous interactions between different aspects of social identity … as well as the impact of systems and processes of

oppressions and domination” (Hankivsky, 2012, pp.1713 citing Hankivsky & Cormier, 2009, p.3).

Intersectionality theorist arguments demanded the centrality of the voices of Black women in the mainstream feminist agenda (Crenshaw, 1991). This means that feminist research and scholarship promotes marginalised women’s concerns and advances their full participation in social research by creating safe platforms for hearing and validating their voices as marginalised groups. These scholars do not privilege gender but are concerned with examining multiple interlocking factors which fuel women’s oppressions (race, gender, ethnicity, class) and other structural forces interacting to ‘cause’ women’s oppression and VAW. Their contribution serves as a useful guide to applying an intersectionality theoretical framework in health research, which I intend to explore further as I undertake my own project. As Corbin suggests, intersectional analysis interrogates and examines a “broad framework of macro and micro relations, institutions and processes that are involved in the social construction of inequality” (Corbin, 2012, p.8). In my view, therefore, it is possible to interrogate, and to scrutinise complex overlapping structural factors and forces such as patriarchy, interacting simultaneously with structural violence, and gender inequalities I my own study. It should be possible to examine multiple interconnected socio-cultural factors, religion and ethnicity contributing to women’s oppression and consequently vulnerability to VAW and HIV in my own current research with women living with HIV.