- Intersectionality is the way that different social categorizations apply to groups or individuals, creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. Everybody falls into more than one category, making our identities complex. “Crenshaw explains intersectionality literally. Imagine an intersection, she says. Imagine that traffic flows through it from all four directions. Imagine being a person standing in the middle of that intersection. Danger can hit you from any side.” (Stamper, 2018)
The subject positions I choose to focus on are gender, sexuality, class, culture, education and occupation. For each one I decided to use a photo of myself because I thought that it would represent each concept and how it relates to myself in an accurate way. I’m originally from Indiana where it is not accepted by everyone to be gay. I came out when I was 10 and throughout middle and high school I loved to wear makeup and dresses and things not associated with the male gender to school. This made many people, including my parents (who were very accepting of me being gay), very uncomfortable. I liked provoking the people around me and starting a conversation about what society deems acceptable for gender and our daily dress practices. During this time I was hyper aware of my body and the clothes I was wearing and the way that people looked at me. When I would get dressed it felt like I was putting on armor and school was the battleground.
The photos I used have all been taken within the past year and I believe are good representations of the subject positions paired with them and how they relate to me now. We will start with gender, I identify as a male but I really enjoy playing with what that means when it comes to dress, this crosses over into sexuality and culture. I’m a gay male and the picture I used for sexuality is of my ex boyfriend and I at world pride this past year, which brings us to culture and lgbt+ culture. Culture’s pic is taken with a project I did for my sustainable systems class, I think that the trash is a good equivalent for my view of culture (wish I could elaborate). In the pic for class I’m wearing a fur coat and costume jewelry, I can’t afford real diamonds so I wear fake ones, but I’m trying to represent myself as having more than I really do. In reality I’m a middle class mid-western boy from a working family. I’ve been working since I was 14, which brings us to occupation. I currently work at Mood Fabrics and working there it is acceptable for me to present myself in any fashion as long as I’m not wearing shorts or a tank top. This is really freeing because in the past I’ve been subjected to wearing scrubs (ew). For education, please refer to above paragraph.
Bibliography
Stamper, Kory. “A Brief, Convoluted History of the Word ‘Intersectionality’.” The Cut. The Cut, March 9, 2018. https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/a-brief-convoluted-history-of-the-word-intersectionality.html.
