The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 24
“Mapping the Margins,” by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an academic law paper that changed the world (abridged pdf here). It was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991 and makes the case for putting intersectionality into all cultural analysis. It is also more or less unambiguously the birthplace of Wokeness, as in this paper, Crenshaw indicates explicitly that, to her, intersectionality is “a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory,” that is, as Jordan Peterson has it, postmodern neo-Marxism. Crenshaw is no minor figure, by the way. She is the creator of intersectionality as well as the co-creator (with her mentor Derrick Bell) and namer of Critical Race Theory. This paper is, in all likelihood, by far her most influential.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay reads through the introduction to “Mapping the Margins” and offers his commentary on the paper and its role as the birthplace (though not gestation) of the Woke movement and, as he and Helen Pluckrose named it in Cynical Theories, applied postmodernism. It is in this paper that intersectionality became the Woke One Ring, which would bring all of the other aspects of identity politics and Critical Theory under the dominion of one mode of analysis from which they cannot deviate. Join him as he reads through the text of the paper and explains what Crenshaw means, where she is coming from, and where she intends for this idea to go.
This episode of the New Discourses podcast is the first part of a two-part series reading an abridged version of Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins.” You can find Part 2 here.
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13 comments
I think that there is a fundamental flaw in how intersectionality is interpreted. The intersection of various “axises of oppression”, at worst, might increase the possibility that a particular individual might be “oppressed” (or unfairly discriminated against) but does NOT increase the intensity of oppression/unfair discrimination. It matters little whether you do not get a particular job because you are a black, handicapped, morbidly obeses woman (4 axies of oppression) or if you are a “brown man” (only one axises) OR a white male (who need not apply), the oppression/unfair discrimination is the same.
This incredible flaw in the popular narrative should be blatantly…even painfully…obvious in the current Hamas/Isreal conflict where extreme progressives are ignoring a REAL intention of and attempts at genocide BY Hamas because they are seen as being higher in the intersectional hierarchy than the Isreali Jews they brutally slaughtered.
The forging of the Great Rings of Victimhood.
9 rings for the laborers who were unhappy with their pay.
7 rings for the feminists who were angry about being ignored.
5 rings for the black people whose distant ancestors were slaves.
3 rings for the gays who disliked morality.
They readily accepted them for in each of these rings was the power to label others oppressors and demand compensation.
But they were all of them deceived because, in secret, another ring was forged, the Ring of Intersectionality.
One ring to categorize them.
One ring to rank order them.
and in reverence for the deepest of victimhoods, bind them.
One ring to rule them all…In the Land of the Victimhood Olympics, where the shadows of oppression lie.
I read mapping the margins a while back and my memories are a bit hazy of it. But I do remember thinking that the 5 examples provided were just an unfortunate set of circumstances that happen to all types of people in life throughout history.
It doesn’t prove that certain identities intersect to make special cases which aren’t considered.
I think the NLP meta model which uses Chomsky’s transformational grammar provides the best linguistic framework for deconstructing and exposing the logical flaws in woke ideology.
I have often found an interesting coincidence (?) that most of the ideas, terms, and memes associated with Wokeness were developed in a narrow window from 1989 to 1991, the very years when most people around the world and especially most Americans believed that left-wing utopianism was coming to an end. In reality, it was merely mutating in the very land that believed that it had triumphed for freedom in those years!
An excellent insight.
A tale of two fundamentalisms from 1989 (here is the other one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn098XYE7pk&t=370s
The late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky foresaw the birth of the Successor Ideology that year.
https://mobile.twitter.com/epkaufm/status/1445780890777538560
Thank you very, very much James.
Think the abridged PDF link is gone. Found some links through semanticscholar. Interesting! Re-reading the Conclusion, especially the footnotes you pointed out.
Sorry about that. The link is now fixed.
You nailed it, previously James. These people really are psychopaths. They are completely unable to deal with reality, so they want to destroy the sense of reality in other people and replace that sense with an imaginary reality of their own in which they have complete arbitrary power.
Modernism was intersectional, James. You just haven’t done enough reading.
Compelled enough to assert this point, and not so much as a breadcrumb on the trail to help us acquire this revealed, hermetic insight. Some whisper about this codex, none dare mention the author or title. Then again talk is often cheap & filled with air.