Mapping the Margins:

Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

 

Introduction

Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development.

The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction.

The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color’ have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as “woman” or “person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.

My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism. Because of their intersectional identity as both women and people of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, the interests and experiences of women of color are frequently marginalized within both.

 

 

In an earlier article, I used the concept of intersectionality to denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black1 women’s employment experiences (Crenshaw 1989,p. 139). My objective there was to illustrate that many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the women race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately. I build on those observations here by exploring the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural and political aspects of violence against women of color.2

I should say at the outset that intersectionality is not being offered here as some new, totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender considered here. Indeed, factors I address only in part or not at all, such as class or sexuality, are often as critical in shaping the experiences of women of color. My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.

I have divided the issues presented in this chapter into two categories. In the first part, I discuss structural intersectionality, the ways in which the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively different from that of white women. I shift the focus in the second part to political intersectionality, where I analyze how both feminist and antiracist politics have functioned in tandem to marginalize the issue of violence against women of color. Finally, I address the implications of the intersectional approach within the broader scope of contemporary identity politics.

Structural Intersectionality

Structural Intersectionality and Battering

I observed the dynamics of structural intersectionality during a brief field study of battered women’s shelters located in minority communities in Los Angeles.3 In most cases, the physical assault that leads women to these shelters is merely the most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience. Many ‘women who seek protection are unemployed or underemployed, and a good number of them are poor. Shelters serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often converge in these women’s lives, hindering their ability to create alternatives to the abusive relation-ships that brought them to shelters in the first place. Many women of color, for example, are burdened by poverty, child-care responsibilities, and the lack of job skills. These burdens, largely the consequence of gender and class oppression, are then compounded by the racially discriminatory employment and housing practices women of color often face.4 Women of color are burdened as well by the disproportionately high unemployment among people of color that make battered women of color less able to depend on the support of friends and relatives for temporary shelter.

These observations reveal how intersectionality shapes the experiences of many women of color. Economic considerations-access to employment, housing, and wealth-confirm that class structures play an important part in defining the experience of women of color vis-à-vis battering. But it would be a mistake to conclude from these observations that it is simply the fact of poverty that is at issue here. Rather, their experiences reveal how diverse structures intersect, since even the class dimension is not independent from race and gender.

 

 

At the simplest level, race, gender, and class are implicated together because the fact the fact of being a woman of color correlates strongly with poverty. Moreover, the disparate access to housing and jobs-that is, the phenomenon of discrimination-is reproduced through their race and gender identity. Race and gender are two of the primary sites for the particular distribution of social resources that ends up with observable class differences. And finally, once in a lower economic class, race and gender structures continue to shape the particular ways that women of color experience poverty, relative to other groups.

These converging systems structure the experiences of battered women of color in ways that require intervention strategies to be responsive to these intersections. Strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited utility for those whose lives are shaped by a different set of obstacles. For example, shelter policies are often shaped by an image that locates women’s subordination primarily in the psychological effects of male domination, and thus overlooks the socioeconomic factors that often disempower women of color.5 Because the disempowerment of many battered women of color is arguably less a function of what is in their minds and more a reflection of the obstacles that exist in their lives, these interventions are likely to reproduce rather than effectively challenge their domination.

While the intersection of race, gender, and class constitute the primary structural elements of the experience of many Black and Latina women in battering shelters, it is important to understand that there are other sites where structures of power intersect. For immigrant women, for example, their status as immigrants can render them vulnerable in ways that are similarly coercive, yet not easily reducible to economic class. For example, take the Marriage Fraud Amendments to the 1986 Immigration Act. Under the marriage fraud provisions of the Act, a person who immigrated to the United States to marry a United States citizen or permanent resident had to remain “properly” married for two years before applying for permanent resident status,5 at which time applications for the immigrant’s permanent status were required by both spouses.7 Predictably, under these circumstances, many immigrant women were reluctant to leave even the most abusive of partners for fear of being deported. When faced with the choice between protection from their batterers and protection against deportation, many immigrant women chose the latter (Walt 1990, p. 8). Reports of the tragic consequences of this double subordination put pressure on Congress to include in the Immigration Act of 1990 a Provision amending the marriage fraud rules to allow for an explicit waiver for hardship caused by domestic violence.8

Yet many immigrant women, particularly women of color, have remained vulnerable to battering because they are unable to meet the conditions established for a waiver. The evidence required to support a waiver “can include, but is not limited to, reports and affidavits from police, medical personnel, psychologists, school officials, and social service agencies.”9 For many immigrant women, limited access to these resources can make it difficult for them to obtain the evidence needed for a waiver. Often cultural barriers further discourage immigrant women from reporting or escaping battering situations. Tina Shum, a family counselor at a social service agency, points out that “[t]his law sounds so easy to apply, but there are cultural complications in the Asian community that make even these requirements difficult …. just to find the opportunity and courage to call us is an accomplishment for many.”(Hodgin 1991, p. E1). The typical immigrant spouse, she suggests, may live “[i]n an extended family where several generations live together, there may be no privacy on the telephone, no opportunity to leave the house and no understanding of public phones.” As a consequence, many immigrant women may be wholly dependent on their husbands as their link to the world outside their homes.10

Immigrant women may also be vulnerable to spousal violence because many of them depend on their husbands for information regarding their legal status. More than likely, many women who are now permanent residents continue to suffer abuse under threats of deportation by their husbands. Even if the threats are unfounded, women who have no independent access to information will still be intimidated by such threats. And even though the domestic violence waiver focuses on

 

 

immigrant women whose husbands are United States citizens or permanent residents, there are countless women married to undocumented workers(or who are themselves undocumented) who suffer in silence for fear that the security of their entire families will be jeopardized should they seek help or otherwise call attention to themselves.

Language barriers present another structural problem that often limits opportunities of non- English-speaking women to take advantage of existing support services (Banales 1990, p. E5). Such barriers not only limit access to information about shelters, but also limit access to the security shelters provide. Some shelters turn non-English-speaking women away for lack of bilingual personnel and resources.11

These examples illustrate how patterns of subordination intersect in women’s experience of domestic violence. Intersectional subordination need not be intentionally produced; in fact, it is frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with preexisting vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment. In the case of the marriage fraud provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the imposition of a policy specifically designed to burden one class–immigrant spouses seeking permanent Resident status- exacerbated the disempowerment of those already subordinated by other structures of domination. By failing to take into account the vulnerability of immigrant spouses to domestic violence, Congress positioned these women to absorb the simultaneous impact of its anti- immigration policy and their spouses’ abuse.

The enactment of the domestic violence waiver of the marriage fraud provisions similarly illustrates how modest attempts to respond to certain problems can be ineffective when the intersectional location of women of color is not considered in fashioning the remedy. Cultural identity and class affect the likelihood that a battered spouse could take advantage of the waiver. Although the waiver is formally available to all women, the terms of the waiver make it inaccessible to some. Immigrant women who are socially, culturally, or economically privileged are more likely to be able to marshall the resources needed to satisfy the waiver requirements. Those immigrant women least able to take advantage of the waiver-women who are socially or economically the most marginal-are the ones most likely to be women of color.

Structural Intersectionality and Rape

Women of color are differently situated in the economic, social, and political worlds. When reform efforts undertaken on behalf of women neglect this fact, women of color are less likely to have their needs met than women who are racially privileged. For example, counselors who provide rape crisis services to women of color report that a significant proportion of the resources allocated to them must be spent handling problems other than rape itself. Meeting these needs often places these counselors at odds with their funding agencies, which allocate funds according to standards of need that are largely white and middle-class.12 These uniform standards of support ignore the fact that different needs often demand different priorities in terms of resource allocation, and consequently, these standards hinder the ability of counselors to address the needs of nonwhite and poor women.

As noted earlier, counselors in minority communities report spending hours locating resources and contacts to meet the housing and other immediate needs of women who have been assaulted. Yet this work is only considered “information and referral” by funding agencies and as such, is typically under funded, notwithstanding the magnitude of need for these services in minority communities (Matthews 1989, pp. 287-88). The problem is compounded by expectations that rape crisis centers will use a significant portion of resources allocated to them on counselors to accompany victims to court, 13 even though there is some evidence to suggest that women of color are less likely to have their cases pursued in the criminal justice system (Collins 1990; Field & Bienen 1980). The resources expected to be set aside for court services are misdirected in these communities.

 

 

The fact that minority women suffer from the effects of multiple subordination, coupled with- institutional expectations based on inappropriate non-intersectional contexts, shapes and ultimately limits the opportunities for meaningful intervention on their behalf. Understanding the intersectional dynamics of crisis intervention may go far toward explaining the high levels of frustration and burnout experienced by counselors who attempt to meet the needs of minority women victims.

Political Intersectionality

The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one’s political energies between two sometimes opposing political agendas is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront. Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of the entire group. For example, racism as experienced by people of color who are of a particular gender–male–tends to deter-mine the parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as experienced by women who are of a particular race-white-tends to ground the women’s movement. The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the “additional” burden of patriarchy or of racism, but that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color, and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, dominant conceptions of antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms.

Among the most troubling political consequences of the failure of antiracist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of racism and patriarchy is the fact that, to the extent they forward the interest of people of color and “women,” respectively, one analysis often implicitly denies the validity of the other. The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. These mutual elisions present a particularly difficult political dilemma for women of color. Adopting either analysis constitutes a denial of a fundamental dimension of our subordination and works to precludes the development of a political discourse that more fully empowers women of color.

The Politicization of Domestic Violence

That the political interests of women of color are obscured and sometimes jeopardized by political strategies that ignore or suppress intersectional issues is illustrated by my experiences in gathering information for this essay. I attempted to review Los Angeles Police Department statistics reflecting the rate of domestic violence interventions by district, because such statistics can provide a rough picture of arrests by racial group, given the degree of racial segregation in Los Angeles.”14 The L.A.P.D., however, would not release the information. A representative explained that one reason the information was not released was that domestic violence activists, both within and outside the department, feared that statistics reflecting the extent of domestic violence in minority communities might be selectively interpreted and publicized so as to undermine long-term efforts to force the department to address domes-tic violence as a serious problem. Apparently activists were worried that the statistics might permit opponents to dismiss domestic violence as a minority problem and, therefore, not deserving of aggressive action.

The informant also claimed that representatives from various minority communities opposed the release of these statistics. They were concerned, apparently, that the data would unfairly represent African-American and Latino communities as unusually violent, potentially reinforcing stereotypes that might be used to justify oppressive police tactics and other discriminatory practices. These misgivings are based on the familiar and not unfounded premise that certain

 

 

minorities-particularly Black men-have already been stereotyped as pathologically violent. Some worry that attempts to make domestic violence an object of political action may only serve to confirm such stereotypes and undermine efforts to combat negative beliefs about the African- American community.

Concerns about the misuse of statistics are, of course, well-founded; however, suppressing the information appears to be an easy answer to the problem only so long as the interests of women of color subject to domestic violence are not directly assessed. The effects of this political gag order” are particularly disturbing in light of the feminist imperative to “break the silence,” a value grounded in the recognition that knowledge about the extent and nature of domestic violence is an important precondition to successful efforts to mobilize against it. This suppression is also troubling given the improbability that women of color would benefit significantly from the trickle- down effects of either the feminist mobilization against domestic violence or the more community- based mobilizations against intra-racial crime in general. Thus, the mutual suppression of critical information rendered the possibility of a broad mobilization against domestic violence within communities of color less likely.

This story, although anecdotal, serves as a useful illustration to frame the more conventional ways that women of color have been sometimes erased within the political contestations between antiracism and racial hierarchy, and between feminism and patriarchy. As the discussion below suggests, these erasures are not always the direct or intended consequences of antiracism or feminism, but frequently the product of rhetorical and political strategies that fail to challenge race and gender hierarchies simultaneously.

Domestic Violence and Antiracist Politics

Within communities of color, efforts to stem the politicization of domestic violence are often grounded in attempts to maintain the integrity of the community. The articulation of this perspective takes different forms. Some critics allege that feminism has no place within communities of color, that gender issues are internally divisive, and that raising such issues within nonwhite communities represents the migration of white women’s concerns into a context in which they are not only irrelevant but also harmful. At their most extreme, critics who seek to defend their communities against this feminist assault deny that gender violence is a problem in their community, and characterize any effort to politicize gender subordination as itself a community problem. This is the position taken by Shahrazad Ali in her controversial book, The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Black Woman. In this stridently antifeminist tract, anchor for Ali draws a positive correlation between domestic violence and the liberation of African- Americans. Ali blames the deteriorating conditions within the African-American community on the insubordination of Black women and on the failure of Black men to control them (Ali 1989, pp. viii, 76). Ali goes so far as to advise Black men to physically chastise Black women when they are “disrespectful” (p. 169). While she cautions that Black men must use moderation in disciplining “their” women, she argues that Black men must sometimes resort to physical force to reestablish the authority over Black women that racism has disrupted (pp. 174, 172).

Ali’s premise is that patriarchy is beneficial for the African-American community (p. 67), and that it must be strengthened through coercive means if necessary.15 Yet the violence that accompanies this will-to-control is devastating, not only for the Black women who are victimized, but also for the entire African-American community. The recourse to violence to resolve conflicts establishes a dangerous pattern for children raised in such environments, and contributes to other pressing problems. For example, it has been estimated that nearly forty percent of A home-less women and children have fled violence in their homes, and an estimated sixty-three percent of young men between the ages of eleven and twenty who are imprisoned for homicide have killed their mothers ‘batterers (Women and Violence Hearings, 1991, pt 2, p. 142). And yet, while gang violence, homicide, and other forms of Black-on-Black crime have increasingly been discussed

 

 

within African-American politics, patriarchal ideas about gender and power preclude the recognition of domes-tic violence as yet another compelling incidence of Black-on-Black crime.

Efforts such as Ali’s to justify violence against women in the name of Black liberation are indeed extreme. The more common problem is that the political or cultural interests of the community are interpreted in away that precludes full public recognition of the problem of domestic violence. While it would be misleading to suggest that white Americans have been any more successful in coming to terms with the degree of violence in their own homes, it is nonetheless the case that race adds yet another dimension to why the problem of domestic violence is suppressed within nonwhite communities. People of color often must weigh their interests in avoiding issues that might reinforce distorted public perceptions of their communities against the need to acknowledge and address intra-community problems. Yet the cost of suppression is seldom recognized, in part because the failure to discuss the issue misshape perceptions of how serious the problem is in the first place.

The controversy over Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, can be understood as an intra- community debate about the political costs of exposing gender violence within the Black community. Some critics chastised Walker for portraying Black men as violent brutes (Early 1988, p.9; Pinckney 1987, p. 17). Others lambasted Walker for the portrayal of Celie, the emotionally and physically abused protagonist who triumphs in the end. Walker, one critic contended, had created in Celie a Black woman whom the critic could not imagine existing in any Black community she knew or could conceive of (Harris 1984, p. 155).

The claim that Celie was somehow an unauthentic character might be read as a consequence of silencing discussion of intra-community violence. Celie may be unlike any Black woman we know because the real terror experienced daily by minority women is routinely concealed in a miss- guided (though perhaps understandable) attempt to forestall racial stereotyping. Of course, it is true that representations of Black violence- whether statistical or fictional-are often written into a larger script that consistently portrays the African-American community as pathologically violent. The problem, however, is not so much the portrayal of violence itself as it is the absence of other narratives and images portraying a fuller range of Black experience. Suppression of some of these issues in the name of antiracism imposes real costs. Where information about violence in minority communities is not available, domestic violence is unlikely to be addressed as a serious issue.