Sick Fest - Group Discussion
Channel: Sick Fest Oakland 2016
Date: 2016-12-06

Footage from Sick Fest in Oakland 2016. More information on sickfest.org

Full Transcript at: http://sickfest.org/#transcript-and-videos

Partial transcript follows (more at SickFest.org due to space constraints): 

Amy: So let’s have the first twenty-five minutes of our talk be just questions that you all have for people who’ve read or performed tonight, and then after that we’ll open it up to all kinds of discussion more informally with each other. Cool.

I bet someone has a question. That person!

 Audience member 1: For Johanna, but for anybody. The interesting comparison I realized between a term you used and the term, that of all people Angela Davis uses a lot in her writings and her speeches, which is intersectional. I would love to hear you expound a little more about that. She considers that to be a great failing in political movements and countercultures, that they fail to be intersectional and that’s very important, and causes them to go wrong when they are not.

Johanna: Okay, so in case for any of you didn’t hear that - it’s a question to expand on intersectional, and you referenced Angela Davis, yeah?

 Audience member 1: Yeah, she uses that and talks about it a lot.

 Johanna: Yeah, intersectionality in terms of its history being attached to feminism, and someone can probably help with this answer, was the term was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and someone who I’ve recently started to read a lot of is Silvia Winter, who has a similar process right now of trying to kind of grapple with intersectionality. “Inter,” just the word “inter” means between or across, it’s not within, which is the safety of inclusivity, right? Is that you already have to be part of the thing to be inclusive or something. Intersectionality is much more about cutting across the many different kinds of places or identities or territories or political, I would say maybe, the political “isms” that we’re all fighting against. So for me, the thing about intersectionality is just a way of not just keeping difference, but honoring it and respecting it. Does somebody else want to talk about Crenshaw specifically maybe more? She’s a scholar who coined the term in, I want to say, the late Eighties.

 Neve:  Sure.

I mean, I saw Kimberlé Crenshaw speak a couple of years ago, and specifically she was trying to talk about in a social legal sense. The intersections between blackness and womanhood, and the fact that legal oppression and things that would persecute black people, would persecute black women in a very specific way, and that experiences that black women were having were specific to black women. I think it’s really necessary to note intersectionality was specifically grounded in an understanding of womanism, and specifically black feminism, which I think gets lost a lot when people are talking about intersectional feminism in a kind of buzzword kind of way. Which is all of the social factors and the internet and I think that’s great. I love all the social factors and the internet, but I think it’s really important to say that intersectionality was created and was made to speak about the intersection of being a woman of color, and that it then necessarily applies to how we all hold intersections within in our bodies and not just across communities. That any of us cannot speak about ourselves in an isolated way, that we’re not speaking about any of our identities in a vacuum, all of our identities inside of our own bodies inform the identities that are inside of our own bodies, you know? So that’s to me what intersectionality is, it’s the principle that nothing is happening in isolation of itself.

...