I’m a former English professor, so I’m familiar with the jargon literary theorists often use—aporia, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and the French différance, a favorite word of the impenetrable Jacques Derrida—but in a recent book review I came upon an academic-sounding word that I had never seen before: intersectionality. I soon learned that the gospel of intersectionality is an unhealthy political phenomenon.
Intersectionality, I rightly assumed, has nothing to do with street intersections. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used in the 1960s to describe a mathematical phenomenon. Two decades later it became a sociological term, referring to “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”
In How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (2017), Alan Jacobs offers a definition that is not overloaded with abstract nouns. Intersectionality is “shorthand for an argument that begins with one key insight: that someone who belongs to more than one oppressed or marginalized group—a black lesbian, for instance—experiences such oppression or marginalization in a particularly intensified way thanks to the ‘intersection’ of those social forces.” The word is a rallying cry, Jacobs says, for people who belong to “various marginalized groups,” urging them to make common cause.
The OED offers three sentences with intersectionality, including one from a short story by the novelist Zadie Smith. “Now, almost adult, he . . . saw the matter from a fresh perspective, which he hoped would impress Mr. Lin with its age-appropriate intersectionality.” How can “intersectionality” be modified by “age-appropriate”? Is Smith being satirical?
In search of enlightenment, I read her short story, a dystopian fable set in a Hobbesian future. When I finished the story, I still was not clear what age-appropriate intersectionality meant.
Intersectional, a literary critic says, “is a popular adjective in contemporary political discourse, especially feminist theory.” Intersectionality, she adds, is a theme in all of Zadie Smith’s work. “Swing Time, her fifth novel, is the finest rendering yet of Smith’s intersectional vision.” I remembered reading Smith’s novel On Beauty, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t notice her “intersectional vision.”
How might one use intersectionality in a sentence? Alan Jacobs imagines like-minded people chatting in a restaurant and one saying: “Come on, people, intersectionality.” Would anyone really say that? I suppose the person uttering that sentence means that intersectionality explains a variety of negative phenomena. Joseph Epstein once wrote (I think) that at many academic conferences someone would say, “Come on, people, it’s capitalism. Let’s go to lunch.”
A seven-syllable word like intersectionality will never become popular, but the word is a symptom of two disturbing aspects of contemporary discourse. First, an increasing number of Americans like to talk about how they’ve been oppressed or not given a fair shake by the government. Second, people who claim that they’ve been oppressed reject even the mildest criticism from people whom they deem the non-oppressed. The oppressed person says (in effect) to the non-oppressed: “You have no idea what I’ve endured, so you have no right to comment on what I’ve said.”
Intersectionality is thus not only an enemy of conversation, it also fans the flames of political polarization. Too many people today shout at each other, “We’ve suffered as much as you have. Or more.” How is governance possible when the country is increasingly divided into groups telling the government, “We demand redress!”
Those who preach the gospel of intersectionality should give it a rest, but I doubt that they will.
Stephen Miller is the author of Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (Yale, 2006).
