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'Guilty as charged': Intersectionality and accountability in lay talk on discrimination and violence
Abstract
Although intersectionality is gaining ground in social psychological research, most approaches fail to capture the historically and interactionally contingent nature of intersecting identities and the implications of their mobilization. This study, aiming at addressing this lacuna, focuses on the intersection of identities as lay actors' resource, used to account for the murder of Zak Kostopoulos, a young LGBTQI+ activist in Greece. Data are derived from 4 focus group discussions in which 25 young people, aged between 19 and 25 years old, participated. Using concepts provided by discursive/rhetorical psychology, analysis indicated that the rhetorical occasioning of intersecting identities is oriented to social accountability concerns and accomplishes important positioning work for the speakers. Specifically, by underscoring the intersecting (sexual/class) identities of the victim, speakers accentuated the moral charge against the perpetrators, distancing themselves from the (constructed as prototypically Greek) image of the un-enlightened and servile bigot. However, although participants explained ZK's murder through recourse to his intersecting identities, they grounded claims for justice on a common human identity (independent of class and sexuality). Findings are discussed in relation to the need to advance a critical agenda for social psychology research on intersectionality and to processes of ideological reproduction in the context of LGBTQΙ+ politics.
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This article surveys the ways in which contemporary Greek poetry unveils human rights abuses in Greek society in order to push for law and social policy reforms that protect gender identity, expression, and freedom as well as holding governments and institutions accountable for their enforcement. In the context of feminist, anti-fascist, and queer rights activism in Greek culture and society, this analysis discusses how poetry that exposes femicide and queer violence challenges the provisions of both Greek law and the universality of human rights. Stemming from post-human feminist and queer critiques of dominant ethno-patriarchal structures, poetry becomes a medium of collective mourning, public commemoration, and justice-seeking for victims of hate crime, homophobia, racism, and misogyny. For the past decade, such interventions have reinforced the formation of a counter-archive of poetry responding to the aftermath of violence and hatred levelled at LGBTQ communities, women, and immigrants in Greece. Aiming at rendering visible the lives and deaths of victims of gender-based violence such as Zak Kostopoulos/ Zackie Oh, Eleni Topaloudi, and Vaggelis Giakoumakis, this article seeks also to examine how the horizon of poetry can be reformulated as one of social sustainability that interrogates the crisis of biopolitical survival.
This article focuses on the ways in which LGBT+ flag raising in a university at the Republic of Cyprus was debated in a social media environment. It aims to examine the ways in which discourses around sexuality intersect with discourses around the nation in a postcolonial, ethnically divided, European context. One hundred four comments posted on the university Facebook page were analysed through Thematic and Rhetorical analysis. Analysis revealed three main ways of accounting for the flag incident in which sexuality and LGBT+ issues are represented as (a) inferior to national issues, (b) symbolic and/or tangible threat to the nation and (c) personal (instead of collective) identity that should not be waved in public. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the findings differentiate from literature on homonationalism and on their implications for constructing collectiveness and understanding citizenship.
Written in the midst of a courageous collective response to antiblack police brutality in the US, this text tackles the figure of breathing as a performative embodiment of grammar and time through which the ongoingness of racialized breathlessness is articulated, dis-remembered, and dismantled. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the text seeks to account for repeated and immeasurable (un)breathability in its particular implications in the histories of racial capitalism, and in multiform sites, geographies, and temporalities that underwrite the global present. In this sense, breathing is addressed through its differential and differentiating conditions of possibility induced and regulated by suffocating spatio-temporalities, as a way to attend to the question whether and how the biopolitical contingencies of vulnerability, weariness, and brokenness are taken up as situated knowledges of courage, critical response-ability, and radical political imagination.
Faculty of color experience a number of challenges within academia, including tokenism, marginalization, racial microaggressions, and a disconnect between their racial/ethnic culture and the culture within academia. The present study examined epistemic exclusion as another challenge in which formal institutional systems of evaluation combine with individual biases toward faculty of color to devalue their scholarship and deem them illegitimate as scholars. Using data from interviews with 118 faculty of color from a single predominantly White, research-intensive institution, we found that epistemic exclusion occurs through formal hierarchies that determine how scholarship is valued and the metrics used to assess quality, and through informal processes that further convey to faculty of color that they and their scholarship are devalued. In addition, there was variability in reporting these experiences by race, gender, nationality, and discipline. We found that faculty of color coped with epistemic exclusion by being assertive and by seeking validation and support outside the institution. Finally, participants described a number of negative work-related and psychological consequences of their epistemic exclusion. We discuss epistemic exclusion as a form of academic gatekeeping that impedes the recruitment, advancement, and retention of faculty of color and offer strategies to address this barrier.
Keywords: epistemic exclusion; faculty of color; diversity; higher education; gatekeeping
This chapter studies Cypriot LGBTIQs’ intersectional politics amidst the socio-political environment within which these are articulated, marked by strong nationalistic discourses as well as tensions with European identity and belonging. Specifically, it examines the ways in which local and EU discourses about nationhood, gender, and sexuality shape dynamics of intersectionality. It does so by analysing how gender and sexual identities are formed and by questioning how these formations inform LGBTIQ movement politics in contentious contexts. The chapter employs a qualitative research design and thematically analyses empirical ethnographic data that includes interviews with Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot LGBTIQ participants. It marks intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic dynamics of in-group exclusions. The research argues that these exclusions are reinforced by local notions about ‘Europe,’ expressed through the ‘Europe/West-versus-the-Rest’ dichotomy. Nonetheless, it also finds that the successes of the Cypriot LGBTIQ movement have been based on opportunities afforded by ‘Europe’ and Europeanisation. Therefore, this chapter builds a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding the implications of understandings of nationhood, gender, and sexuality on LGBTIQ politics when the ‘Rest’ meets the ‘West/Europe.’
Stereotyping plays an important role in how we perceive the members of social groups. Yet stereotyping is complicated by the fact that every individual simultaneously belongs to multiple social groups. For example, the stereotypes that are called to mind about a Black individual can vary depending on that person’s age, gender, and sexual orientation. This phenomenon—termed intersectional stereotyping—has recently inspired a variety of intriguing research findings. But these research findings pose challenges for prevalent theories of stereotyping. These prevalent theories tend to argue either that a) perceivers inevitably attend to certain social identities (e.g., gender) when stereotyping intersectional targets, or that b) perceivers inevitably attend to all detectable social identities at once. In contrast to these perspectives, we argue that perceivers generally attend to just one social identity (or one intersection of identities) at a time when stereotyping intersectional targets, as a function of the social context. For example, gay Black men can be alternately stereotyped as gay people, as Black people, as men, or as gay Black men specifically. The approach described here can account for a diverse array of findings emerging from research on intersectional stereotyping. Moreover, by specifying the factors that render particular identities salient in the minds of social perceivers, this approach offers clear and falsifiable predictions regarding the situated stereotyping of multifaceted individuals.
Using intersectionality to change how psychologists think about the demographic profile of their participants is one readily available change that psychologists across the discipline can implement to improve psychological science. In this paper, we aim to provide a guide for psychologists who are not already engaged with feminist practices and/or are unsure of how an intersectional approach to participants applies to their research. We argue that by engaging with four perspective shifts of intersectional thinking: multidimensionality, dynamic construction, structural power, and outcomes of systemic disadvantage and advantage, psychologists can more accurately represent the “person” that psychology, as a discipline, seeks to understand. We suggest changes at the researcher, journal, and grant-making agency levels to support an intersectional reconceptualization of participants. As psychology continues to change in order to foster reproducible science practices and research with relevance to real-world problems, there is opportunity to promote discipline-level change that would take intersectionality seriously.
Sexual stereotypes may adversely affect the health of Black men who have sex with men (MSM). Greater understanding of the nature and nuances of these stereotypes is needed. This online, survey-based study used an inductive, intersectional approach to characterize the sexual stereotypes ascribed to Black MSM by the U.S. general public, their distinctiveness from those ascribed to Black men and MSM in general, and their relative prototypicality as compared to dominant subgroups. Members of the public, recruited in 2014–2015, were randomly assigned to survey conditions that varied systematically by race (Black, White, or unspecified) and sexual orientation (gay, heterosexual, or unspecified) of a designated social group. Participants (n = 285) reported stereotypes of their assigned group that they perceived to exist in U.S. culture in an open-response format. Cross-condition comparisons revealed that, overall, Black gay male stereotypes were non-prototypical of Black men or gay men. Rather, stereotypes of Black men were more similar to Black heterosexual men and stereotypes of gay men were more similar to White gay men. Nonetheless, 11 of the 15 most frequently reported Black gay male stereotypes overlapped with stereotypes of Black men (e.g., large penis), gay men (e.g., deviant), or both (e.g., promiscuous). Four stereotypes were unique relative to both Black men and gay men: down low, diseased, loud, and dirty. Findings suggest that Black MSM face multiple derogatory sexual stereotypes, several of which are group-specific. These stereotypes are consistent with cultural (mis)representations of Black MSM and suggest a need for more accurate portrayals of existing sexual diversity within this group.
In this paper, we analyse discourses about Europe in Greek debates about immigration and citizenship and highlight the complexities of ‘Europeanness’ as a symbolic resource for argumentation in these debates. Our data consist of lay discourses from two rounds of online public deliberation (2009/2010 and 2015) about a controversial new citizenship law in Greece. Our analysis shows that Europe is an ambivalent category. On the one hand, Europe symbolises progress, but, on the other hand, it is also constructed in terms of decline and ‘contamination’ by multiculturalism. Further, our analysis shows that the category of Europe can be mobilised in contradictory ways, in order to support arguments for and against citizenship rights for migrants. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which constructions of Europe are implicated in processes of othering and inclusion in the context of current immigration debates.
In the wake of Billig's thesis on banal nationalism, numerous social psychology studies have been produced documenting on the explicit manifestation or implicit indexicalisation of variants of national identity within text and talk. Within this strand of work, some attention has been paid to ways in which the banal manifestation of national referents may be further interrogated from a critical perspective focusing on Occidentalism. Drawing on this emerging line of research, an analysis is presented here of a travelogue on 'the Greek crisis', published in a globally circulating magazine (Vanity Fair). Using tools and concepts from the discursive turn in social psychology, the analysis highlights ways in which Occidentalist assumptions claim rhetorical and ideological legitimacy within a text that advances a 'culturalist' explanation of the financial crisis in which Greece has been entangled since 2009. The analysis focuses on ways in which the authorial voice others Greece culturally, while at the same time, manages its own accountability and (re-) affirms its Occidental credentials.
As a book with ‘discourse’ in the title, it is not surprising that we have used many different kinds of textual data in it: website materials, Internet message boards, conversations between friends, radio and television interviews and talk shows, telephone talk, talk in institutional settings, interview and focus group data, magazine advertisements, and street signs. By and large, the data are our own, which are either transcribed orthographically (verbatim) or using Jefferson's (2004a) system for conversation analysis (see below). Other data are quoted from existing published sources, for which we had no control over the transcription system used and have simply used it exactly as originally written. A variety of transcription systems have therefore been used. Except in the case of some of the media data, we have anonymised each piece of data used, in accordance with academic codes of ethical conduct. The personal names, place names and all other identifiers used throughout the book are pseudonyms. Where there is no source mentioned in the Extracts, the material has been collected and transcribed by the authors. The Internet message board data used in Chapter 7 were taken from a public site with unrestricted access. Despite this free access, there is some debate among Internet researchers about the use of such materials. Some argue that researchers should make themselves known to ‘users’ in ‘chatrooms’ and explicitly seek permission to use the data (e.g. Cherny 1999).
This article identifies a set of power relations within contemporary feminist academic debates on intersectionality that work to “depoliticizing intersectionality,” neutralizing the critical potential of intersectionality for social justice-oriented change. At a time when intersectionality has received unprecedented international acclaim within feminist academic circles, a specifically disciplinary academic feminism in tune with the neoliberal knowledge economy engages in argumentative practices that reframe and undermine it. This article analyzes several specific trends in debate that neutralize the political potential of intersectionality, such as confining intersectionality to an academic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation, as well as “whitening intersectionality” through claims that intersectionality is “the brainchild of feminism” and requires a reformulated “broader genealogy of intersectionality.”
This paper offers a critique of the theory of homonationalism, which has become virtually hegemonic in contemporary queer thought and activism. Some theorists have tried to distance homonationalism from its popular/activist manifestation of “pinkwatching”, which refers to the increasingly vocal efforts of queer anti-occupation activists to expose the Israeli government's efforts to “pinkwash” its treatment of Palestinians by touting its record on gay rights. The paper argues, however, that both suffer from fundamental conceptual flaws and ultimately have more to do with the contexts in which they circulate—“gay” cities in the US and Europe—than Israel–Palestine. The paper suggests a political and analytical shift away from the totalizing theory of homonationalism—and the simplistic critiques of pinkwashing inspired by it—to a more complex and contextualized focus on the ways in which ordinary bodies are regulated in their movements through time and space.
The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.
We compared perceived cultural stereotypes of diverse groups varying by gender and ethnicity. Using a free-response procedure, we asked 627 U.S. undergraduates to generate 10 attributes for 1 of 17 groups: Asian Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Middle Eastern Americans, or Whites; men or women; or 10 gender-by-ethnic groups (e.g., Black men or Latina women). Based on intersectionality theory and social dominance theory, we developed and tested three hypotheses. First, consistent with the intersectionality hypothesis, gender-by-ethnic stereotypes contained unique elements that were not the result of adding gender stereotypes to ethnic stereotypes. Second, in support of an ethnicity hypothesis, stereotypes of ethnic groups were generally more similar to stereotypes of the men than of the women in each group. Third, a gender hypothesis postulated that stereotypes of men and women will be most similar to stereotypes of White men and White women, less similar to ethnic minority men and ethnic minority women, and least similar to Black men and Black women. This hypothesis was confirmed for target women, but results for target men were mixed. Collectively, our results contribute to research, theory, and practice by demonstrating that ethnic and gender stereotypes are complex and that the intersections of these social categories produce meaningful differences in the way groups are perceived.
In recent years, constructionist methodologies such as discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992) have begun to be used in sport research. This paper provides a practical guide to applying a discursive psychological approach to sport data. It discusses the assumptions and principles of discursive psychology and outlines the stages of a discursive study from choice of data through to transcription and analysis. Finally, the paper demonstrates a discursive psychological analysis on sport data where athletes are accounting for success and failure in competition. The analysis demonstrates that for both success and failure, there is an apparent dilution of personal agency, to either maintain their modesty in the case of success or to manage blame when talking about failure. It is concluded that discursive psychology has much to offer sport research as it provides a methodology for in-depth studies of supporting interactions.
Drawing upon the notion of occidentalism, developed within cultural theory and critical ethnography, this article explores ways in which explicit and/or implicit assumptions about the West and Western self are implicated, in their conversational mobilization, to accountability management. The data analysed come from a study in Western Thrace (Greece), which included interviews and focus group with majority Greek educators about the Muslim minority historically residing in the region. The analysis presented employs tools from critical discursive social psychology. Building upon discourse analytic treatments within social psychology on the mobilization of national categories and accountability management in talk, it is argued that the banal indexicalization of national categories in talk opens the space for a critical interrogation of the banal indexicalization of an occidentalist cultural imagery that posits a hierarchical distinction between cultures of the West and the Rest.
The concept of prejudice has profoundly influenced how we have investigated, explained and tried to change intergroup relations of discrimination and inequality. But what has this concept contributed to our knowledge of relations between groups and what has it obscured or misrepresented? How has it expanded or narrowed the horizons of psychological inquiry? How effective or ineffective has it been in guiding our attempts to transform social relations and institutions? In this book, a team of internationally renowned psychologists re-evaluate the concept of prejudice, in an attempt to move beyond conventional approaches to the subject and to help the reader gain a clearer understanding of relations within and between groups. This fresh look at prejudice will appeal to scholars and students of social psychology, sociology, political science and peace studies.
The unexpected transformations produced by the conjunction of COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter highlight the importance of social psychological understandings and the need for a step change in theorization of the social. This paper focuses on racialization. It considers issues that social psychology needs to address in order to reduce inequalities and promote social justice. It draws on theoretical resources of intersectionality and hauntology to illuminate the ways in which social psychological research frequently makes black people visible in ways that exclude them from normative constructions. The final main part of the paper presents an analysis of an interview with the racing driver Lewis Hamilton to illustrate possible ways of humanizing racialization by giving recognition to the multiplicity and historical location of racialized positioning. The paper argues that, while social psychology has made vital contributions to the understanding of group processes and of racisms, there remains a need to humanize racialization by conducting holistic analyses of black people's (and others') intersectional identities.
This study explores ways in which diverse LGBTQI+ claim frames are sedimented in Greek everyday discourse. Specifically, it is interested in the identification of the argumentative resources that inform lay constructions of LGBTQI+ claims and rights, as well as of their potential social implications. The research data are drawn from seven focus groups, conducted in Thessaloniki, Greece and analysed by the conceptual tools of Critical Discursive Social Psychology. According to the analysis, liberal dilemmas over difference, visibility, and equality are mobilized. In particular, when accounting for violence and discriminations against LGBTQI+ community members, participants construct a normative hierarchy of exclusion, based on alleged differences between sexual and gender‐related categories. Notably, in the context of arguing over different claim‐making practices, participants prioritize the projection of uniformity – instead of difference – through non‐provocative, consensual claiming actions. While liberal concepts and subsequent dilemmas inform these constructions, “liberalism” is also represented as the rhetorical other, when participants prioritize intersectional claims over (sexual and gender‐related) identity politics. Finally, participants' discourse is informed by tensions between oriental and occidental ideological patterns. A juxtaposition between Western/European liberalism and Eastern backwardness is used to challenge homonormative perceptions, which are constructed as a means of de‐radicalization.
Despite having emerged in the heyday of a dominant Europe, of which Ancient Greece is the hallowed spiritual and intellectual ancestor, anthropology has paradoxically shown relatively little interest in contemporary Greek culture. In this innovative and ambitious book, Michael Herzfeld moves Greek Ethnography from the margins to the centre of anthropological theory, revealing the theoretical insights that can be gained by so doing. He shows that the ideology that originally led to the creation of anthropology also played a large part in the growth of the modern Greek nation-state, and that Greek ethnography can therefore serve as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself. He further demonstrates the role that scholarly fields, including anthropology, have played in the construction of contemporary Greek culture and Greek identity.
Decades of research indicate that the traits we ascribe to people often depend on their race. Yet, the bulk of this research has not considered how racial stereotypes might also depend on other aspects of targets’ identities. To address this, researchers have begun to ask intersectional questions about racial stereotypes, such as whether they are applied in similar ways to men and women, or to children and adults. In the present studies, we examine whether men who are described as gay (vs. not) become de-racialized in the minds of perceivers. That is, we test whether gay (vs. non-gay) men are perceived as less stereotypic of their own racial or ethnic groups. Results consistently support the de-racialization hypothesis, regardless of whether targets are Black, White, Asian, or Hispanic. Moreover, when Black and Hispanic men are described as gay (vs. not), they become stereotypically “Whitened” in addition to seeming less stereotypic of their own racial groups. This “Whitening” effect is explained by Black and Hispanic men’s seeming more affluent when described as gay (vs. when not), an effect that holds even when controlling for changes in these men’s stereotypic femininity. Collectively, these findings underscore the point that race and sexual orientation are not orthogonal in the minds of perceivers. A minority sexual orientation can alter the racial characteristics ascribed to men, reducing the perceived presence of race-typical traits and, for low-SES men, increasing their perceived “Whiteness.”
Participants (N = 602; having 0, 1, 2 or 3 stigmatized identities based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and social class) completed a survey on their feelings of invisibility and expectations of receiving unfair treatment (i.e., experiencing discrimination) and being stereotyped due to their group memberships. The results were consistent with the model of intersectional invisibility, with multiply‐stigmatized individuals reporting feeling more invisible than individuals who had one or zero stigmatized identities. In addition, multiply‐stigmatized individuals reported more unfair treatment and greater stereotype concerns than individuals with one stigmatized identity, with both reporting more unfair treatment/stereotype concerns than individuals without stigmatized identities. Thus, the present data suggest that multiply‐stigmatized individuals are keenly aware of their invisibility and that invisibility represents a source of perceived discrimination and stereotyping for multiply‐stigmatized individuals.
The framework of intersectionality is a powerful analytical tool for making sense of how interlocking systems of privilege and oppression are experienced by individuals and groups. Despite the long history of the concept, intersectionality has only recently gained attention in psychology. We conducted a content analysis to assess counseling psychology’s engagement with an intersectional perspective. All articles published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (n = 4,800) and The Counseling Psychologist (n = 1,915) from their first issues until July 2016 were reviewed to identify conceptual and empirical work focused on intersectionality. A total of 40 articles were identified and examined for themes. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
Easily perceived identities (e.g., race) may interact with perceptually ambiguous identities (e.g., sexual orientation) in meaningful but elusive ways. Here, we investigated how intersecting identities impact impressions of leadership. People perceived gay Black men as better leaders than members of either single-minority group (i.e., gay or Black). Yet, different traits supported judgments of the leadership abilities of Black and White targets; for instance, warmth positively predicted leadership judgments for Black men but dominance positively predicted leadership judgments for White men. These differences partly occurred because of different perceptions of masculinity across the intersection of race and sexual orientation. Indeed, both categorical (race and sex) and noncategorical (trait) social information contributed to leadership judgments. These findings highlight differences in the traits associated with leadership in Black and White men, as well as the importance of considering how intersecting cues associated with obvious and ambiguous groups moderate perceptions.
Identity as an Achievement and as a Tool - Charles Antaki and Sue Widdicombe PART ONE: SALIENCE AND THE BUSINESS OF IDENTITY The Relevant Thing about Her - Derek Edwards Social Identity Categories in Use How Gun Owners Accomplish Being Deadly Average - Andy McKinlay and Anne Dunnett 'But You Don't Class Yourself' - Sue Widdicombe The Interactional Management of Category Membership and Non-Membership Identity Ascriptions in Their Time and Place - Charles Antaki 'Fagin' and 'The Terminally Dim' PART TWO: DISCOURSE IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL IDENTITIES Identity, Context and Interaction - Don Zimmerman Mobilizing Discourse and Social Identities in Knowledge Talk - Robin Wooffitt and Colin Clark Talk and Identity in Divorce Mediation - David Greatbatch and Robert Dingwall PART THREE: MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES AND THEIR PRACTICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL RELEVANCE Describing 'Deviance' in School - Stephen Hester Recognizably Educational Psychological Problems Being Ascribed, and Resisting, Membership of an Ethnic Group - Dennis Day Handling 'Incoherence' According to the Speaker's On-Sight Categorization - Isabella Paoletti PART FOUR: EPILOGUE Identity as an Analysts' and a Participants' Resource - Sue Widdicombe
This article introduces the ‘Pink Agenda’ as a set of judicial, social and political instruments employed by both nation-states and international human rights institutions, such as the Council of Europe, to achieve some socio-political goals: on the one hand, the proactive promotion of specific lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities beyond Europe; on the other, the creation of a dichotomy between tolerant and intolerant countries within the borders of Europe. The successful enactment of the ‘Pink Agenda’ is achieved by building and reinforcing a concept of European Sexual Citizenship that is strongly homonationalist in nature. Through an analysis of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, the article emphasises the way in which the homonationalist paradigm of sexual citizenship is applied to strengthen the divide between tolerant and intolerant member states and to suggest the existence of a difference between a queer-friendly ‘West’ and homophobic and transphobic non-western countries.
How do marginalized social categories, such as being black and gay, combine with one another in the production of discrimination? While much extant research assumes that combining marginalized social categories results in a "double disadvantage," I argue that in the case of race and sexual orientation the opposite may be true. This article posits that stereotypes about gay men as effeminate and weak will counteract common negative stereotypes held by whites that black men are threatening and criminal. Thus, I argue that being gay will have negative consequences for white men in the job application process, but that being gay will actually have positive consequences for black men in this realm. This hypothesis is tested using data from a survey experiment in which respondents were asked to evaluate resumes for a job opening where the race and sexual orientation of the applicants were experimentally manipulated. The findings contribute to important theoretical debates about stereotypes, discrimination, and intersecting social identities.
Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. The tendency to shy away from using the term “epistemic oppression” may follow from an assumption that epistemic forms of oppression are generally reducible to social and political forms of oppression. While I agree that many exclusions that compromise one’s ability to contribute to the production of knowledge can be reducible to social and political forms of oppression, there still exists distinctly irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. In this paper, I claim that a major point of distinction between reducible and irreducible epistemic oppression is the major source of difficulty one faces in addressing each kind of oppression, i.e. epistemic power or features of epistemological systems. Distinguishing between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression can offer a better understanding of what is at stake in deploying the term and when such deployment is apt.
Discrimination is commonly experienced among adolescents. However, little is known about the intersection of multiple attributes of discrimination and bullying. We used a latent class analysis (LCA) to illustrate the intersections of discrimination attributes and bullying, and to assess the associations of LCA membership to depressive symptoms, deliberate self harm and suicidal ideation among a sample of ethnically diverse adolescents. The data come from the 2006 Boston Youth Survey where students were asked whether they had experienced discrimination based on four attributes: race/ethnicity, immigration status, perceived sexual orientation and weight. They were also asked whether they had been bullied or assaulted for these attributes. A total of 965 (78 %) students contributed to the LCA analytic sample (45 % Non-Hispanic Black, 29 % Hispanic, 58 % Female). The LCA revealed that a 4-class solution had adequate relative and absolute fit. The 4-classes were characterized as: low discrimination (51 %); racial discrimination (33 %); sexual orientation discrimination (7 %); racial and weight discrimination with high bullying (intersectional class) (7 %). In multivariate models, compared to the low discrimination class, individuals in the sexual orientation discrimination class and the intersectional class had higher odds of engaging in deliberate self-harm. Students in the intersectional class also had higher odds of suicidal ideation. All three discrimination latent classes had significantly higher depressive symptoms compared to the low discrimination class. Multiple attributes of discrimination and bullying co-occur among adolescents. Research should consider the co-occurrence of bullying and discrimination.
This article uses a study of the life-story narratives of former classmates of Dutch and Moluccan descent to argue that the constructionist approach to intersectionality, with its account of identity as a narrative construction rather than a practice of naming, offers better tools for answering questions concerning intersectional identity formation than a more systemic intersectional approach. The case study also highlights the importance of the quest for origins in narratives. It demonstrates that theories of intersectionality are not justified in subsuming the issue of belonging under the identity marker of ethnicity, when all identities are performatively produced in and through narrative enactments that include the precarious achievement of belonging. The case study demonstrates that if narrative accounts of a (singular or collective) life fail to achieve narrative closure regarding roots, attempts to trace routes are seriously hampered.
How do perceivers combine information about perceptually obvious categories (e.g., Black) with information about perceptually ambiguous categories (e.g., gay) during impression formation? Given that gay stereotypes are activated automatically, we predicted that positive gay stereotypes confer evaluative benefits to Black gay targets, even when perceivers are unaware of targets' sexual orientations. Participants in Study 1 rated faces of White straight men as more likable than White gay men, but rated Black men in the opposite manner: gays were liked more than straights. In Study 2, participants approaching Whites during an approach–avoidance task responded faster to straights than gays, whereas participants approaching Blacks responded faster to gays than straights. These findings highlight the striking extent to which less visible categories, like sexual orientation, subtly influence person perception and determine the explicit and implicit evaluations individuals form about others.
