Many in social justice/ feminism/ human rights spheres expect that we always take intersectionality into account. I know I do and I have gotten into arguments with people who didn’t. One such moment was quite recently when I expected someone (a White woman) to take into account the fact that racism would play a bigger role in a certain issue than sexism. That is what looking at intersectionality does.
However, I also grew up in an environment and within a language and a culture where there are a) not such a thing as gender or women’s studies and b) no concept of intersectionality as we know it in the English language. Hell, I grew up in a dictatorship that resulted in thousands of people kidnapped, tortured and “disappeared”! Talk about a dominant discourse with no room for intersecting realities.
Moreover, and this is quite amusing, the entire Wikipedia article on “interseccionalidad”, the Spanish word for intersectionality, is based on English speaking references and bibliography:
Because in Latin America (and in Spain, to some degree), we do not have a history of sociology used to examining context with intersections or within a matrix. This has been changing in the past 15 to 20 years, mainly because part of this discourse is being translated from English to Spanish and is slowly gaining acceptance and becoming mainstream.
I only learned about it through the process of colonizing my own language. And I often wonder how “real” and applicable the concept is to Latin American women. Sure, it is real in so far as there are many intersecting layers of oppression, but I also wonder if this translation business (of which I have written before) is not colonizing the lens through which these intersections are analyzed.
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