“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” – Audre Lorde
Intersectional approaches to policy analysis help us understand the glaring reality that lies ahead. An intersectional approach is one that considers the fault lines that connect race, gender and class. Applying that approach to policy analysis means foregrounding the role those fault lines play in social policy generally. In particular, an intersectional approach to policy analysis imagines those fault lines as forming a nexus of vulnerability characteristic of industrial and post-industrial capitalism.
Pioneering examples of intersectional approaches were theoretical, but they have since gathered empirical momentum within the social sciences. This is particularly true of disciplines such as economics, sociology and development studies, where conflict and crisis loom large in social policy. More recently, intersectional approaches have also been at the forefront of thinking about the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic and climate poverty.
To those concerned about social inequality, intersectional approaches highlight emerging and existing hierarchies in political economies. The underlying logic is that, in a system that produces winners and losers, the price of losing is sharply rising. What’s more, the rising cost is evident in both the digital political economy and climate change. As a result, those most vulnerable bear the consequences and costs of climate change. Nowhere are those vulnerabilities clearer than in people’s varying abilities to cope and respond to climate change according to their income levels, age, country and gender. An intersectional framework for social policy analysis helps expose the complex and overlapping experiences that spur those different vulnerabilities.
Take three examples: climate policy, labour policy, and education policy.
First, climate-conscious behaviour depends on human adaptation to the climate crisis. Cultivating that climate-consciousness, however, means that consideration of the vulnerable needs to extend beyond token identification of risk groups. Intersectional approaches stress the distributive effects of policies according to the fault lines between assorted types and sites of vulnerability.
Second, the very notion of intersectionality originates in the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who highlighted how the interactions of gender and race frustrated Black women’s access to the American labour market. The policy failure that results in Black women’s invisibility extends to domestic violence, too, bell hooks, for example, focused on racist and classist oppression as an integral part of the feminist struggle. Thus, there is a pressing need to define feminism using an intersectional lens and recognise that oppression is not privileged: sex oppression, race oppression and class oppression are all interrelated.
Third, COVID-19 widens educational inequalities due to school shutdowns and exacerbates achievement gaps. The problem appears to persist and worsen. Poverty alone does not account for the gaps in educational performance. Instead, intersectional factors — such as race, class, and gender — also have long-term negative impacts on students, wherein the resulting learning loss is predicted to be higher among the minority groups. An intersectional framework that appreciates how race, class, caste, and gender relate complicates the structural inequalities manifest in digital technologies’ disparate impact.
Intersectionality is a crucial tool for understanding the entanglement of privilege and oppression. Ultimately, policymakers must respond quickly to these new challenges by designing policies that empower people who have been marginalised. Structural and political intersectionality still needs further development. The future promises that the relationship between humans and technology will become more intersectional and pronounced than ever. Taking stock of the dramatic change underway demands an answer to the question: Are we ready to be intersectional?
