The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”—a precursor to “intersectionality”— was introduced in a social movement context by the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in pamphlet form in 1977. Addressing Black lesbians’ and feminists’ experiences of invisibility within white male-dominated New Left and socialist politics, male-dominated civil rights, Black nationalist, and Black radical organizing, and white-dominated women’s liberation and lesbian feminist movements, the CRC argues for an “integrated analysis and practice” of struggle against “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class (...) oppression” (CRC 1977/1981/1983, 210). I argue the CRC articulates and problematizes sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows racialized lesbian visibility and resists the tendency to “heterosexualize” women of color feminisms. I delineate three aspects of the concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”: its attentiveness to the phenomenological simultaneity of multiple oppressions; its synthesis of identity politics and coalition politics; its immanent critique of socialist concepts of class and class struggle. While some accounts of “intersectionality”—the now-predominant way of referencing the multiplicity of identities and oppressions—tend to reproduce a race-gender dyad (or a race-gender-class triad), the CRC notably articulates sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows lesbian visibility and thereby enables contemporary readers to resist the tendency to “heterosexualise” intersectionality—and women of colour feminisms more generally. (shrink)

This chapter examines María Lugones’s germane and insightful attempt to theorize “intermeshed oppressions,” which, she argues, have been (mis)represented in women of color feminisms by the concepts of “interlocking systems of oppression” and, more recently, “intersectionality.” The latter, intersectionality, introduced by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as a metaphor (1989) and as a “provisional concept” (1991), has become the predominant way of referencing the mutual constitution of what have been theorized as multiple systems of (...) oppression, constructing the multiplicity of social identities. But Lugones’s analysis, which maintains subtle but important distinctions among the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions, shows that intersectionality theory often conflates fragmentation with multiplicity, and—by reifying “intersectional identities”—reproduces social-ontological fragmentation at the political and perceptual-cognitive levels of representation. Intersectional accounts redeploy unitary categories (for instance, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) that are defined to the exclusion of each other by privileging the identities of normative group members. Consequently, they remain within what Lugones calls the “logic of purity,” which erases “curdled,” impure, category-transgressive, border-dwelling, mestiza subjects. Although, according to Lugones, intersectionality enables us to discern how the logic of purity produces “women of color” as impossible beings, she argues that the liminal identities of subjects dwelling in categorial interstices can only be made visible by conceptualizing oppressions as fused or “intermeshed.” However, as I interpret her, Lugones is not merely criticizing intersectionality or seeking to transcend its conceptual limitations by proposing an alternate concept. Rather, the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions do significantly different work in her account and illuminate different aspects of the social ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology of resistance to oppression. First, I situate Lugones with respect to the current conjuncture in intersectionality studies, in which some scholars are calling for a post-intersectional turn. Then, I reconstruct Lugones’s complex account of intermeshed oppressions, interlocking oppressions, and intersectionality. Finally, I discuss the status of intersectionality in the shift in Lugones’s work from “women of color feminisms” to “decolonial feminism.” Intersectionality is now routinely invoked as a representational theory of multiple identities, but Lugones’s heterodox interpretation helps us to see that it is best understood as a critique of representations based on the logic of purity: specifically, of how categorial axes of oppression (mis)represent intermeshed oppressions. Lugones’s triadic distinction (intersecting/interlocking/intermeshed) points toward a provisional usage of intersectionality, namely, to diagnose the fragmentation of social experiences of multiplicity (which, I would argue, is more consistent with the concept’s original aims). In her visionary philosophy, which attempts to theorize resistance against the grain of fragmentation from a conceptual space outside of the “logic of purity,” we find “glimpses” of a non-fragmented account of oppression, and praxical possibilities for liberatory, decolonial feminist coalitions. (shrink)

Inspired by Mariana Ortega's invitation to reflect on diverse iterations of intersectionality, this article focuses on María Lugones's engagements with two Black feminist concepts, namely, interlocking oppressions and intersectionality. It explores these concepts alongside Lugones's use of her own terms such as intermeshed, curdling, multiplicity, and fusion, in several paradigm shifting essays, specifically, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation”, “Tactical Strategies of the Street Walker”, “On Complex Communication”, “Heterosexism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”, “Methodological Notes Toward a (...) Decolonial Feminism”, and “Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Color Feminisms”. It also underscores Ortega's important contributions bringing these Black and Latina feminist concepts together in philosophically productive ways—in a spirit of collaboration and coalition rather than zero-sum competition. (shrink)

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between (...) modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression. (shrink)

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, (...) it captures the confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

This special theme of Big Data & Society explores connections, relationships, and tensions that coalesce around data, power, and racial formation. This collection of articles and commentaries builds upon scholarly observations of data substantiating and transforming racial hierarchies. Contributors consider how racial projects intersect with interlocking systems of oppression across concerns of class, coloniality, dis/ability, gendered difference, and sexuality across contexts and jurisdictions. In doing so, this special issue illuminates how data can both reinforce and challenge colorblind (...) ideologies as well as how data might be mobilized in support of anti-racist movements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler EnvironmentsMishuana Goemanindians are the "singing remnants" or "graffiti," in the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ("i am graffiti"). The forms this graffiti takes, our inscriptions on the landscape, are as numerous as our Nations, abundant as our ancestors who loved, lived, and passed down knowledge of our lands and histories. "You are the result of the love of thousands," writes Linda (...) Hogan, who beseeches us to listen to the environment surrounding us (159). Deborah Miranda (Coastal Esselen and Chumash) reminds us that we are also the result of violent histories, in her tribal memoir Bad Indians, a book that relishes the tales of her ancestors who resist and act out to survive. This harm, genocide, and settler mapping of worlds also must be attuned to in our surroundings and in "our bodies [that are] bridges over which our descendants cross, spanning unimaginable landscapes of loss" (Miranda 74). Visual cartographic mapping has been part and parcel of the erasure of California Indians, relegated to the small, contained, and past temporal space of a romanticized mission.This paper centers on the NDN Collective's work and the photography of Cara Romero's project Tongvaland and the works of Gabrielino Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame. The setting of these projects is in the sprawling landscape of Los Angeles, or the homelands of the Gabrielino Tongva people, who call it Tovaangar. I will examine the anti-colonial aesthetics and care practices mapped out in the work rather than presenting a "true" Indigenous map or alternative map. Mapping a history of the landscape by creating a "new" narrative or "true" narrative is not enough. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhwi Smith states, "[w]e believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact, history is mostly about power. … [A] thousand accounts of the truth will not alter the fact that indigenous peoples are still marginal [End Page 50] and do not possess the power to transform history into justice" (34). The Gabrielino Tongva, who comprise an estimated 2,300 people, do not possess the population power and cannot access the form of voting or democracy to make the changes needed just by telling their truth. Across California, people know about the raw deal, the embezzlement, the genocide, and the so-called lost treaties. In fact, under Eisenhower, recompense was paid out in small amounts to Tongva families of the dispossessed. Instead, to continue with the words of Smith, "[i]t is also about reconciling and reprioritizing what is really important about the past with what is important about the present" (111). What Romero and the NDN Collective—made up of numerous tribal leaders, scholars, and other artists—did was relay and prioritize how they wanted to be seen in their homelands. These billboards invite us in, in a gift of sharing, or what tribal cultural leader Craig Torres related to me as a spirit of Maxxa, a sharing, gifting, or swapping of knowledge. Dorame's beautiful and critical installations in public art spaces reflect Maxxa—they invite the viewers to think through land from her curious arrangements. As artists, part of their practice is not that of a Western version of a tortured genius but instead is energized by pulling in community and creating a collective practice. They undo settler space together and with us. The cartographic practices of these California Indians' creative arts exemplify communities of care that must be considered when we think through the unmapping of settler terrains. This question requires an approach of radical care. As Hi'ilei Hobart and Tamara Kneese make clear, the notion of care is "inseparable from systemic inequalities and power systems" (Hobart and Kneese 1).The work of the NDN Collective and Dorame counters a settler-based, commercial map of Los Angeles. Indigenous people, relegated by the settler state as expendable and erasable graffiti, confront capitalist and state ordinances at various scales. Rather than understand this as a subjugated positionality, I posit that graffiti is the critique necessary and valuable to understanding interlocking structures of oppression. In the following words of Leanne... (shrink)

This book investigates the impact of misinformation and the role of truth in political struggle. It develops a theory of objective truth for political controversy over topics such as racism and gender, based on the insights of intersectionality, the Black feminist theory of interlocking systems of oppression. Truth is defined using the tools of model theory and formal semantics, but the theory also captures how social power dynamics strongly influence the operation of the concept of truth within (...) the social fabric. Systemic ignorance, propagated through false speech and misinformation, sustains oppressive power structures and perpetuates systemic inequity. Truth tends to empower marginalized groups precisely because oppressive systems are maintained through systemic ignorance. If the truth sets people free, then power will work to obscure it. Hence, the rise of misinformation as a political weapon is a strategy of dominant power to undermine the political advancement of marginalized groups. (shrink)

North American music education is a commodity sold to pre-service and in-service music teachers. Like all mass-produced consumables, it is valuable to the extent that it is not creative, that is, to the extent that it is reproducible. This is demonstrated in curricular materials, notably general music series textbook and music scores available from a rapidly shrinking cadre of publishers, as well as rigid and pre-determined pedagogical practices. Distributing resources and techniques that produce predicable, consistent, and repeatable goods and services, (...) the economy of music teacher preparation and development must necessarily exclude creativity, which consequently must be viewed as not only inefficient but unprofitable. More than undesirable, however, creativity is constructed as dangerous as it injects difference in a system that relies on sameness. Because of its implications for music education discourse and practices, I focus my discussion on research in general and feminist critique in particular in music education. Reading through Monique Wittig's ‘The Trojan Horse’ as literary war machine, I argue that creative writing and academic research are not mutually exclusive, and that it is only through infusing the literary or creative in scholarly writing that interlocking systems of oppression may be altered and difference implicated in music education. My analysis of Roberta Lamb's (1995) research piece, ‘Tone Deaf/Symphonies Singing: Sketches for a Musicale’ depicts it as Trojan Horse, albeit one that Lamb herself, most likely as a function of editorial imperative, hobbles. (shrink)

Today the relationship between food and cities is revitalizing urban areas, as food production practices transform locales one block and one neighborhood at a time. The key catalysts of this transformation include the commitment to address the root causes of inequalities within food systems and the desire to increase local control over food systems that have been increasingly industrialized and globalized. These goals, encapsulated by the terms “food justice” and “food sovereignty,” play major roles in guiding local food (...) initiatives in cities today. This study explores how justice-oriented urban agriculture projects transform city contexts in ways that reduce regulatory barriers – barriers that, when left in place, could perpetuate systems of oppression. The study ends with the argument that, by removing regulatory barriers, urban agriculture projects are transforming cityscapes in ways that cultivate justice at the system level. (shrink)

This Discussion Note calls for attention to the cultural practices of Neural Engineering as part of the life sciences as practices and technologies of manufacturing life. Through focusing on Disability, Ableism, and especially Technoableism within the field, I point out instances of onto-epistemological violence, which influence the likelihood of survival of disabled people individually and as a group. By drawing on Crip Technoscience, a method assemblage is introduced that allows to address these issues in an intersectional-kyriarchal understanding of interlocking (...) systems of privilege and oppression through generative critique and productive collaborative work. Criptical Neural Engineering is dedicated to disability justice and disability gain. It centers disabled people as epistemic activists and demands response-ability and accountability from non-disabled people, specifically engineers that want to build adaptive technologies with disabled people. (shrink)

If we ask who might be interested in obtaining the stolen material, a plausible hypothesis suggests itself. The natural hypothesis gains support from the fact that persons whose names appeared on the stolen lists were then contacted and harassed by FBI agents, and a personal letter of resignation from the party, apparently stolen from headquarters, was transmitted by the FBI to the Civil Service Commission. Information that has since been obtained about FBI activities, including burglaries over many years, lends further (...) plausibility to the conclusion that the FBI was engaged in one of its multifarious endeavors to undermine and disrupt activities that fall beyond the narrow bounds of the established political consensus. (shrink)

Despite the concern with oppressive systems and practices there have been few attempts to analyse the general concept of oppression. Recently, Iris Marion Young has argued that it is not possible to analyse oppression as a unitary moral category. Rather, the term ‘oppression’ refers to several distinct structures, namely, exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. This paper rejects Young's claim and advances a general theory of oppression. Drawing insight from American chattel slavery and the (...) situation of the German Jews during the 1930's, I argue that to be oppressed is to be unjustly denied the opportunity for what I call ‘resilient autonomy’. I argue that all instances of oppression can usefully be analysed in these terms. I test my analysis against each of Young's five structures of oppression, concluding that in each case they are captured by my analysis. (shrink)

In a diversity course for pre-service teachers, we explored coursework by students of color to uncover instances in which they resisted the existence systemic oppression in K12 schools. First, we examined the written responses from three students of color (Asian-Indian, Asian immigrant, and Latina) who were largely agreeable to the existence of different forms of oppression presented in the course content. Our work illuminated instances of what we have described as narrative-based resistance. Students initially referred to narratives of (...) rugged individualism or the American Dream to resist the existence of systemic barriers. As the course progressed, students shifted to deeply entrenched responses that rejected the course content to refute systemic oppression. Secondly, we developed a case study for one student, a biracial female that self-identified as White who consistently rejected systemic oppression during class interactions to the point of displaying openly defiant behaviors. The examples of resistance we encountered served as a reminder that students of color along with their White peers must be able to critically examine and understand systems of oppression that are pervasive throughout education. Furthermore, the underlying sources of the resistance were closely associated with indoctrination in Whiteness, limited understanding of systemic oppression, deeply held beliefs and understandings and the lived experiences of individuals. While we agree that teacher education must recruit and retain more teachers of color for an increasingly diverse US K12 student population, we add that preparation that meets the needs of teachers of color is essential. -/- . (shrink)

Visual culture has normalized systemic and institutional cruelty toward animals in North America through an iconography of oppression. Certain kinds of images that sanitize and celebrate the consumption of animal bodies through our contemporary food systems are constantly repeated through marketing channels. In doing so, they help us to avoid addressing the very ethical questions at the heart of these practices. In contrast to this, a number of contemporary artists have relied on visual culture to disrupt this pattern (...) of representation and to challenge the status quo. The following discussion explores some recent attempts to reimagine human–animal relationships in nonspeciesist terms through imagery and artistic practice. (shrink)

This chapter discusses three main forces of economic oppression: oppressive economic systems, direct forces of economic oppression, and indirect forces of economic oppression. It is argued that while capitalism and socialism are not intrinsically oppressive, both systems lend themselves to oppression in characteristic ways, and therefore each sort of system must take certain steps to guard against their respective characteristic oppressions. Direct forces of economic oppression are restrictions on opportunities that are applied from (...) the outside on the oppressed, including enslavement, segregation, employment discrimination, group-based harassment, opportunity inequality, neocolonialism, and governmental corruption. Direct forces may not always be clearly visible, either because they happen far from the reach of legal authorities or from the view of consumers, or because they are diffused in a large society, and only apparent from a statistical analysis and comparison among social groups. In indirect forces, or oppression by choice, the oppressed are co-opted into making individual choices that add to their own oppression. When this force is at work the oppressed are faced with options that rationally induce them to choose against the collective good of their social group, and in the long run, against their own good as well. But choosing otherwise requires choosing against their own immediate interests, and changing their beliefs or preferences in ways that they may resent. (shrink)

This article is an exercise in theory-building about the stories that justify, feed upon, and reproduce systems of oppression. I argue that emotional narratives contribute to the constitution and reproduction of systems of oppression, and that different emotional narratives constitute different forms of oppression. I examine two of these emotional narratives: a narrative articulated around pity and a narrative that draws on fear. I propose that the former prevails when those in power do not perceive (...) the members of the oppressed group as posing a threat to their power structure, in turn inducing low-intensity charitable state action. Conversely, narratives that deploy fear prevail when the group in power believes that the oppressed group presents a threat to their power structure, in turn eliciting high-intensity repressive state action. While narratives of pity recur to the infantilization of the members of the disadvantaged group, narratives of fear animalize them. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 491-513, July 2022. This article is an exercise in theory-building about the stories that justify, feed upon, and reproduce systems of oppression. I argue that emotional narratives contribute to the constitution and reproduction of systems of oppression, and that different emotional narratives constitute different forms of oppression. I examine two of these emotional narratives: a narrative articulated around pity and a narrative that draws on fear. (...) I propose that the former prevails when those in power do not perceive the members of the oppressed group as posing a threat to their power structure, in turn inducing low-intensity charitable state action. Conversely, narratives that deploy fear prevail when the group in power believes that the oppressed group presents a threat to their power structure, in turn eliciting high-intensity repressive state action. While narratives of pity recur to the infantilization of the members of the disadvantaged group, narratives of fear animalize them. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 491-513, July 2022. This article is an exercise in theory-building about the stories that justify, feed upon, and reproduce systems of oppression. I argue that emotional narratives contribute to the constitution and reproduction of systems of oppression, and that different emotional narratives constitute different forms of oppression. I examine two of these emotional narratives: a narrative articulated around pity and a narrative that draws on fear. (...) I propose that the former prevails when those in power do not perceive the members of the oppressed group as posing a threat to their power structure, in turn inducing low-intensity charitable state action. Conversely, narratives that deploy fear prevail when the group in power believes that the oppressed group presents a threat to their power structure, in turn eliciting high-intensity repressive state action. While narratives of pity recur to the infantilization of the members of the disadvantaged group, narratives of fear animalize them. (shrink)

The hegemony of Western science, inherent in international development projects, often increases the poverty and oppression of Third World women by pre-empting alternative realities. In African and Asian agrarian societies women grow from 60 to 90% of the food (World Bank, 1989); they hold incredible potential to increase food production. Their ability to operate under more marginal conditions than their male counterparts would seem to indicate that they have developed valuable knowledge— knowledge often generated in response to limited access (...) to the more tangible resources offered by development assistance to male farmers.Recognizing the marginalization of women in the Third World, the Women in Development (WID) network was established during the 1970's to produce knowledge about women, fill in the gaps, and set the record straight. But knowledge creation for these purposes leaves underlying paradigms of Western science-based development unquestioned. Research from a feminist standpoint is used to challenge the objectivity and reliability of EuroAmerican development science. To date, WID has documented and analyzed the causes and consequences of Third World women's oppression with no substantial results to end them. Alternatively, feminist research validates women's perceptions of their reality, helping ordinary people to understand the connections between their experiences and broader social, economic, and political struggles. The paper emphasizes research pursued in order to act, closely linking knowing to doing to promote the emancipation of oppressed groups. A feminist standpoint is used to privilege the perspective of rural women in developing countries and ask: “What are the implications of the standard EuroAmerican approach to science for maximizing the potential contributions of rural women to agricultural development?” Some of these implications are illustrated with examples from on-farm research in Nigeria. To some extent, implications can be addressed by constructing meanings to structure a symbolic framework that includes female farmers and other disadvantaged groups. (shrink)

An interlocking-directorates monitoring system The subject of the study was interlocking directorates in Polish joint stock companies. In order to explore this area a monitoring system has been developed which consists of a database and query system. Data is automatically introduced from printed announcements into the MySQL database using PHP scripts.The phenomenon of interlocking directorates in Polish joint stock companies is comparable with other countries. Board members in Poland are significantly younger than, for example, in the USA. (...) Women constitute an important group of board members. Insurance companies and investment funds are closely connected with other companies, but banks are not.The monitoring system developed enables us to identify who is, and who was, a board member of every joint stock company. It also enables us to identify, for every person, which board he or she now serves on, and has served on, in the past. The system also enables us to produce different reports concerning, for example, changes in certain indexes in subsequent years. The system is also accessible via the Internet. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses the growing literature in critical race studies, which holds that racism is permanent or incurable, and that by adopting this pessimistic view of racism, we can enact improved and healthier racialized lives. I argue that the focus on curing anti-Black racism, and the failure to do so in the civil rights era and its aftermath has left people of all races, to varying degrees, stuck in pessimistic states of racialized anger, resentment, guilt, and shame. These pessimistic (...) states have brought about an additional level of oppression for targets of racialized oppression. I call it “meta-oppression,” and it is the oppression of being oppressed. I argue that this oppression has exacerbated the effects of the social disease of racism, and it has literally affected the physiologies of many African Americans. This article provides a diagnosis of these existential and physiological states of meta-oppression and a clarification of its characteristics. This diagnosis is an initial step in a larger project of formulating and enacting effective treatments for it. I then argue that meta-oppression is a helpful diagnostic tool for clarifying the characteristics and ramifications on Blacks of US systemic racism during the post–civil rights movement period. I aim to establish meta-oppression as an existential and physiological condition that requires attention so as to expand the social imaginations of people of color and to allow us to engage in more systemic joyful affirmations of our racialized lives while still living within racist conditions. (shrink)

When one takes an intersectional perspective on patterns of oppression and domination, it becomes clear that familiar forms of systemic injustice, such as misogyny and anti-Black racism, are inseparable. Some feminist theorists conclude, from this, that the systems behind these injustices cannot be individuated—for example, that there isn’t patriarchy and white supremacy, but instead only white supremacist patriarchy. This chapter offers a different perspective. Philosophers have long observed that a statue and a lump of clay can be individuated (...) although inseparable, and that statues and lumps of clay do different explanatory and predictive work for the same causal outcomes. This chapter suggests that the same is true of systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy. These systems, like the injustices they produce, are inseparable. But they can be individuated, and when they are individuated, they do different explanatory and predictive work. (shrink)

Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and (...) oppression (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

The rules that govern Jewish Orthodox women’s bodies, in particular those of ritual purity and immersion, are often criticized as patriarchal and an expression of oppression or domination. This study challenges the structuralist analysis of the regimen of ritual purity by examining how religious women themselves live and experience this system. The authors interviewed 30 Orthodox Jewish women living in Israel who observe these rituals in an effort to hear their experiences. The women’s expression of their experiences moved beyond (...) the conventional, schematic abstractions of the oppression-empowerment dichotomy into a multitextured range of responses. This article presents the ways in which they voiced this multiplicity of feelings and experiences. (shrink)

In this dissertation I develop a philosophical theory of scapegoating that explains the role of blame-shifting and guilt avoidance in the endurance of oppression. I argue that scapegoating masks and justifies oppression by shifting unwarranted blame onto marginalized groups and away from systems of oppression and those who benefit from them, such that people in dominant positions are less inclined to notice or challenge its workings. I first identify a gap in our understanding of oppression, (...) namely how oppression endures despite widespread formal commitments to principles of equality and justice. I argue that prominent theories of oppression do not place enough weight on the question of how oppression is justified and concealed from us through blame-shifting, in ways that enable its persistence without our explicit approval of its systems. Scapegoating, a concept as old as the Bible, offers potential insight into the means through which we shift blame and avoid responsibility. However, my survey of the genealogy of scapegoating shows that existing conceptualizations of scapegoating are limited in their scope and cannot be applied to explain the endurance of oppression. I propose an ameliorative theory of scapegoating that accounts for deficiencies in prevailing theories of both oppression and scapegoating. Distinct from interpersonal theories and psychologistic analyses of scapegoating, my theory characterizes scapegoating according to its social function in oppression, thereby explaining structural dimensions that are not already captured by other accounts.With the motivation and ingredients in place, I develop my theory of scapegoating as made up of three sub-mechanisms: essentialization of marginalized groups as blameworthy, collective interest in protection against a threat, and social exclusion of the blamed. These sub-mechanisms work together to construct certain groups as scapegoats and encourage us to treat them accordingly through various structural and interpersonal means. I argue that scapegoating has important implications for the formation of social identities; namely, scapegoating constructs social identities in an oppressive arrangement that is largely hidden from us but informs our social and affective relations. By constructing some identities as essentially blameworthy and threatening, dominantly situated identity groups are encouraged to internalize a protected status, act together in defense of their status, and maintain systems of oppressive exclusion. Finally, I elaborate the epistemic dimensions of my theory of scapegoating to argue that scapegoating functions within our social imaginaries and structural epistemic practices. In particular, I focus on the ways that ignorance functions to maintain the scapegoat mechanism, and how scapegoating helps insulate structural forms of ignorance. I end by considering the potential for resistance to scapegoating. (shrink)

Kafka's work has exercised immense influence on cinema and his reflections on diminished human agency in modernity and the dominance of oppressive institutions that perpetuate individual or social alienation and political repression have been the subject of debates by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Alexander Kluge. Informed by a world-systems approach and taking a cue from Jorge Luis Borges’ point that Kafka has modified our conception of the future, and André Bazin's suggestion (...) that literary concepts, characters and styles can exceed “novels from which they emanate”, I understand the Kafkaesque as an elastic term that can refer to diverse films that might share thematic preoccupations, but also aesthetic and formal differences. In this article, I explore the politics of humour in Kafkaesque cinema with reference to the following films: The Overcoat ( Шинель, 1926, Gregor Koznitzev and Leo Trauberg), The Shop on Main Street ( Obchod na korze, 1965, Ján Kadár), and Death of a Bureaucrat ( La muerte de un burócrata, 1966, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea). I draw attention to the dialectics of humour and the connection between the Kafkaesque and slapstick so as to show how humour is deployed as a means of political critique. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Kathryn MacKay advances a defence of ectogenesis that is grounded in this technology’s potential to end—or at least mitigate the effects of—gender‐based oppression. MacKay raises important issues concerning the socialization of women as ‘mothers’, and the harms that this socialization causes. She also considers ectogenesis as an ethically preferable alternative to gestational surrogacy and uterine transplantation, one that is less harmful to women and less subject to being co‐opted to further oppressive ends. (...) In this article, I challenge some of the assumptions that underlie MacKay’s case in favour of ectogenesis by questioning whether the relationship between women’s capacity to gestate and birth children and gender‐based oppression is as strong as MacKay makes it out to be. I subsequently argue that—even if MacKay’s reading of this relationship is accurate—ectogenesis is not a desirable means to end gender‐based oppression. It embodies a strategy that could be used to pursue liberating projects that follow what Iris Marion Young defines as ‘the ideal of assimilation’, but that must be resisted. I then concur with MacKay’s contention that ectogenesis is better than gestational surrogacy and uterine transplantation. My argument is that many of the problematic issues that MacKay herself sees as features of these practices will not disappear with ectogenesis. Finally, I conclude that MacKay’s narrow focus on women’s biology and ectogenesis as a solution to gender‐based oppression results in the overlooking of broader systemic issues that contribute to the upholding of oppressive norms. (shrink)

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress contributes significantly to the literary debate on the definition of whiteness. The socio-historical construction of whiteness emerging from the novel is amplified by white imagery dovetailing with the claims made about white people directly. For the African American first person narrator, Easy Rawlins, living in post-World War II Los Angeles, whiteness mostly spells terror. The oppressive faces of whiteness consist in the following trajectories: property relations, economic exploitation, labour relations, the legal system, different (...) miens of oppressive white masculinity denigrating blackness, spatial dynamics of post-World War II Los Angeles and the white apparatus of power that the narrator needs to confront throughout the novel. White imagery carried to the extreme magnifies the terrorizing aspect of whiteness in the narrative. Like many authors of colour, Mosley associates whiteness with death. Whiteness inundates Easy Rawlins from all sides, entailing insincerity, dishonesty, interestedness and hypocrisy. (shrink)

What is the nature of agency under oppressive social conditions? Oppressive structures inhibit our agency in ways to which we are often blind, yet social movements show that as agents we can enact emancipatory change. My dissertation articulates a social ontology to account for this conflict between structure and agency. I analyze structures in terms of practices built around implicit values, which require agents to occupy valued or denigrated statuses. Agents can participate in practices without being aware of their oppressive (...) frames, thereby unwittingly perpetuating oppression. Making these frameworks explicit can lead to social change but, as oppressive practices shape agents’ senses of value and status, practices themselves must also change. (shrink)

I argue that the overt subjugation in the system of American slavery and its subsequent effects offer a case study for an existentialist analysis of freedom, oppression and humor. Concentrating on the writings and experiences of Frederick Douglass and the existentialists Simone De Beauvoir and Lewis Gordon, I investigate how the concepts of “spirit of seriousness”, “mystification”, and an existentialist reading of “double consciousness” for example, can elucidate the forms of explicit and concealed oppression. I then make the (...) case that subversive humor is an effective means to bring to consciousness the inconsistencies and incongruities of the serious oppressors. I also illustrate how humor can act as a bulwark against the rise and persistence of oppression by (non-violently) attacking the absolutist stance on human nature maintained through the use of dominating and “authoritative” language and action. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but (...) also shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

I argue that Kant's ethical framework cannot countenance a certain kind of failure to respect oneself that can occur within oppressive social contexts. Kant's assumption that any person, qua rational being, has guaranteed epistemic access to the moral law as the standard of good action and the capacity to act upon this standard makes autonomy an achievement within the individual agent's power, but this is contrary to a feminist understanding of autonomy as a relational achievement that can be thwarted by (...) the systematic attack on autonomy that occurs within oppressive social conditions. Insofar as Kant's negative duty of self-respect is unable to accommodate the ways immersion in oppressive social environments can warp an individual's understanding of what she is owed and capable of as a moral agent, it perpetuates the cruelty of unjust social systems in the guise of respecting individual autonomy. I conclude by considering Carol Hay's argument that those who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression, in order to explore how this limitation in how Kant conceives of the duty to respect the self may reach expression in contemporary ethical theory inspired by Kant. (shrink)

It is well-known that racism is encoded into the social practices and institutions of medicine. Less well-known is that racism is encoded into the material artifacts of medicine. We argue that many medical devices are not merely biased, but materialize oppression. An oppressive device exhibits a harmful bias that reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations. Using pulse oximeters and spirometers as case studies, we show how medical devices can materialize oppression along various axes of social difference, including race, (...) gender, class, and ability. Our account uses political philosophy and cognitive science to give a theoretical basis for understanding materialized oppression, explaining how artifacts encode and carry oppressive ideas from the past to the present and future. Oppressive medical devices present a moral aggregation problem. To remedy this problem, we suggest redundantly layered solutions that are coordinated to disrupt reciprocal causal connections between the attitudes, practices, and artifacts of oppressive systems. (shrink)

In this article I explore a central paradox of contemporary identity politics: why do we look for recognition from the very institutions we reject as oppressive? I argue that neoliberalism’s continued assault on the bases for collectivity has led to a suspicion that ‘the collective’ is an essentialising concept. The assault on the collective coupled with the neoliberal imperative to create an ‘authentic’ self has led to trauma and victimhood becoming the only bases on which people can unite. This manifests (...) discursively and theoretically in the primary trope of contemporary activism: ‘intersectionality’. Mobilising around this analytical concept has led to an analysis of oppression that, even as it claims to be systemic, is totally dematerialised and relentlessly individualised. Instead of building collective power, we are left with a politics of individual demand coming from a coalition of dispersed subject positions. (shrink)

In this article I explore a central paradox of contemporary identity politics: why do we look for recognition from the very institutions we reject as oppressive? I argue that neoliberalism’s continued assault on the bases for collectivity has led to a suspicion that ‘the collective’ is an essentialising concept. The assault on the collective coupled with the neoliberal imperative to create an ‘authentic’ self has led to trauma and victimhood becoming the only bases on which people can unite. This manifests (...) discursively and theoretically in the primary trope of contemporary activism: ‘intersectionality’. Mobilising around this analytical concept has led to an analysis of oppression that, even as it claims to be systemic, is totally dematerialised and relentlessly individualised. Instead of building collective power, we are left with a politics of individual demand coming from a coalition of dispersed subject positions. (shrink)

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

The article presents an original needs-based partial theory of human injustice and shows its relationship to existing theories of human need and human liberation. The theory is based on an original typology of three social structural sources of human injustice, a partial theorization of the mechanisms of human injustice, and a needs-based theorization of the nature of human injustice, as experienced by individuals. The article makes a sociological contribution to normative social theory by clarifying the relationship of human injustice to (...) human needs, human rights, and human liberation. The theory contends that human injustice is produced when oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation create systematic inequality in opportunities to address human needs, leading to wrongful need deprivation and the resulting serious harm. In one longer sentence, this needs-based partial theory of the sources, mechanisms, and nature of human injustice contends that three distinct social systemic sources—oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation—produce unique and/or overlapping social mechanisms, which create systematic inequality in opportunities to address universal human needs in culturally specific ways, thus producing the nature of the human injustice theorized here: wrongfully unmet needs and serious harm. (shrink)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. (...) From the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

Hedwig Dohm is a radical German feminist whose work critically engages Nietzsche's writings. In this article, I develop and draw out the implications of a Dohmian critique of Nietzschean nihilism by looking closely at Dohm's novella Become Who You Are!. In this novella, Dohm provides an extended case study of two distinct types of Nietzschean nihilism common to women living in Germany in the late nineteenth century. And Dohm's writings illuminate a double standard in Nietzsche's theory of nihilism: Overcoming nihilism (...) is going to require greater effort for a woman than it will for a man. Dohm emphasizes the challenges that women face in overcoming nihilism. Women must first throw off the shackles of oppressive systems of social norms and institutions in order to reveal a new or different way of interpreting themselves and their world. (shrink)

The US food retailing industry continues to concentrate and consolidate. Power in the agriculture, food, and nutrition system has shifted from producers to processors, and is now shifting to retailers. Currently, only eight food-retailing corporations control the majority of food sales in the United States. Expanding on previous research by Lyson and Raymer (2000, Agriculture and Human Values 17: 199–208), this paper examines the characteristics of the boards of directors of the leading food retailing corporations and the indirect interlocks that (...) bind the food retailers into a corporate community. (shrink)

Suggestions that academic medicine is systemically racist are increasingly common in the medical literature. Such suggestions often rely upon expansive notions of systemic racism that are deeply controversial. The author argues for an empirical concept of systemic racism and offers a counter argument to a recent suggestion that academic medicine is systemically racist in its treatment of medical trainees: Anderson et al.’s (Academic Medicine, 98(8S), S28–S36, 2023) “The Long Shadow: a Historical Perspective on Racism in Medical Education.” Contra the authors (...) of “The Long Shadow,” the author argues that racial performance disparities in medical education cannot be validly attributed to racism without careful empirical confirmation; he further argues that standards of assessment in medical education cannot be properly deemed racist merely because minority trainees are disproportionately disadvantaged by them. Furthermore, the history of medicine and society in the Anglo-European West is not, as argued by the authors of “The Long Shadow,” best viewed as one long tale of racial oppression culminating in the present day pervasive racism of academic medicine in the United States. Racism is a deplorable stain on our history and our present but it is not the historical essence of Christianity, European civilization, Western medicine, or contemporary academic medical institutions. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage in (...) interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

This paper reinvents Freire’s concepts of ‘banking education’ and ‘literacy’ within the context of the exponential growth of digital instruction in the 21st century. We argue that digital learning (i.e. online or technology enhanced) undoubtedly increases access to education globally, but also can intensify some of the worst problems described in Freire’s banking model. Accordingly, we draw from postdigital theory to scrutinize the specific structures and functions of common digital Learning Management Systems (LMSs) used by schools (i.e. Blackboard and (...) Google Classroom) to reveal a type of learning that further exacerbates the teacher-student dichotomy without liberating either party in a Freirean sense. We then use a Foucauldian lens to bring an awareness to how the accelerated use of these systems at scale, in part caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, can further entrench a data-driven, dehumanized educational experience which increases corporate profitability perhaps over the needs of students. Finally, we use these insights to modernize Freire’s concept of ‘literacy’ by building on Critical Medial Literacy (CML) in order to help educators address LMSs, (mis)information facilitated by digital content, and schooling in a (post)pandemic and postdigital world. (shrink)

This dissertation draws on the Aristotelian and contemporary communitarian belief that humans are socially constituted, and analyzes the manifestations of this belief in contemporary identity politics and in the concept of 'culture' that often underlies identity politics. While I argue that it is important to maintain a communitarian conception of the self, I depart from Aristotle and the communitarian tradition by rejecting the assumption that a constitutive community is characterized by unity and homogeneity. I then claim that identity politics has (...) inherited both the virtues and the problems of communitarian theory. Just as communitarians claim that the self is never free from social constitution, so identity politics have taken the self's identity to be formed along lines of socially defined group differences, and like communitarianism, some identity politics has entailed a call for unity. In the case of identity politics, the requirement for membership in the community may be sharing certain essential characteristics of identity; difference can result in marginalization, forced assimilation to the group norm, or expulsion. Because identity politics often relies upon the concept of 'culture' to ground group identities, I also examine this concept. When a community's unity derives from its members understanding themselves to share a culture, the maintenance of the culture itself can be conservatizing; the culture can remain closed off from changes as it preserves the "traditional" or "authentic"; furthermore, it can come to be treated as an object outside of the people who live it and as such the changing lived realities of these people--particularly changes that cross lines of identity--do not serve to continually offer new, changing, and ambiguous ways of conceiving of what is shared between members of the community. I argue for the development of group identity that recognizes intersecting group differences, and can permit hybridity or mixed identities. I end by suggesting that for a constitutive community to remain truly constitutive without harming its members through marginalization, forced assimilation to a norm or a shared essence, or stagnation, members must give up the sort of control that maintains the community as a unity. (shrink)

Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism’s decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way. This adaptationist perspective suggested the scope hypothesis: When a generalization is retrieved from semantic memory, episodic memories that are inconsistent with it should be retrieved in tandem to place boundary conditions on the scope of the generalization. Using a priming paradigm and (...) a decision task involving person memory, the authors tested and confirmed this hypothesis. The results support the view that priming is an evolved adaptation. They further show that dissociations between memory systems are not—and should not be—absolute: Independence exists for some tasks but not others. (shrink)

There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and represented. Second, there has been a growing challenge to orthodoxy under (...) the banner of connectionism. Although this connectionist challenge has evoked emotionally-charged rebukes from the symbolist camp, connectionists as a group have not articulated a conception of representation to replace the symbolist view. Nonetheless, most agree on the need for a nonsymbolic notion of representation. This paper advances a "stands for" sense of representation as primary by incorporating it into a general approach to cognitive science consonant with the connectionism. The idea is to marry connectionism to a particular version of functionalism, viz., one that builds its notion of "function" on the similarity between functional analysis in biology and in psychology. It builds on my earlier work adapting and revising Marr's tri-level approach to cognition. My proposal frees Marr's analysis from its moorings in the orthodox symbolic view of representation and allies it with a notion of functional analysis akin to that proposed by Cummins, developed further by Haugeland, and invoked by Millikan and Dretske. Unlike these authors, however, I do not wed representation to a general belief-desire analysis of behavior. Rather, I follow what I take to be the lesson of psychological practice, according to which the investigator does not seek to explain behavior in general but seeks to analyze the cognitive capacities that underlie behavior, such as vision, memory, learning, and linguistic capacities. Accordingly, ascriptions of representational content are made not by working back from belief-desire ascriptions, but in the context of forming psychological models to account for specific cognitive capacities. Because conceptions of representation in cognitive science typically are embedded in a general approach to the study of cognition, arguments for the comparative plausibility of a particular conception of representation must scout these larger frameworks. I therefore begin by characterizing the interlocking set of assumptions that gave life to the orthodox symbolist approach, paying special attention to the complementarity between representation and process that naturally arises from those assumptions. I then consider two versions of an alternative approach to representation: Dretske's and my own. Finally, I urge the merits of the "cognitive capacities" over the "belief-desire" approach to the subject-matter of cognitive science. (shrink)

There is ongoing philosophical debate about the kinds of properties that are represented in visual perception. Both “rich” and “thin” accounts of perceptual content are concerned with how prior assumptions about the world influence the construction of perceptual representations. However, the idea that biased assumptions resulting from oppressive social structures contribute to the contents of perception has been largely neglected historically in this debate in the philosophy of perception. I draw on neurobiological evidence of the role of the amygdala in (...) visual processing to show that the influence of biased assumptions on visual perception gives us a unique path to rich evaluative content that does not require an appeal to controversial mechanisms like top-down modulation. (shrink)

There is a large and growing literature on communal interpretive resources: the concepts, theories, narratives, and so on that a community draws on in interpreting its members and their world. (They're also called “hermeneutical resources” in some places and “epistemic resources” in others.) Several recent contributions to this literature have concerned dominant and resistant interpretive resources and how they affect concrete lived interactions. In this article, I note that “using” interpretive resources—applying them to parts of the world in conversation with (...) others—is “a rule‐governed activity”; and I propose that in oppressive systems, these rules are influenced by the rules of oppression. Section I clarifies some rules governing the use of resources. Section II draws on work by Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. and others to suggest that according to the present rules of our oppressive system, it is permissible for dominantly situated speakers to dismiss interpretive resources developed in marginalized communities. Section III appeals to Charles Mills's work on White ignorance to propose, further, that our system's rules make it impermissible and deserving of punishment to use resistant resources. The conclusion enumerates several further points about such rules governing the use of interpretive resources, their social effects, and some philosophical literatures. (shrink)