Journal articles on the topic 'Interlocking oppressions'

Purpose – Desistance is increasingly conceptualised as a theoretical construct which is used to explain how offenders orient themselves away from committing crimes. Previous studies suggest that successful desistance occurs due to one or a number of factors. These factors include things such as: faith (Giordano et al., 2007); a rite of passage (Maruna, 2010); gender (Giordano et al., 2002); psychosocial processes (Healey, 2010); personal and social circumstances which are space and place specific (Flynn, 2010); ethnicity and faith (Calverley, 2013); race and racialisation (Glynn, 2014). However, to date there has been little work undertaken to examine how notions of “intersectionality” may be a more appropriate theoretical lens through which to locate and contextualise the understandings of desistance when looking at marginalised populations such as black offenders. Intersectionality is an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations. These interactions occur within a context of connected systems and structure of power. Through such processes independent forms of privilege and oppression are created. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper concludes with a perspective that envisions moving towards an “intersectional model of desistance for marginalised groups such as black offenders”. Findings – It is the author’s view that the development of a intersectional model of desistance for black offenders may begin a dialogue that further pushes the study of re-entry and desistance into an area that transcends the criminal justice system and locates itself firmly within the civil and human rights of black offenders, and indeed, offenders as a whole. It is hoped that by using intersectional approaches when conducting inquiries we will be able to lead towards eradicating multiple oppressions faced by so many sections of the offender populations and the communities they come from. Research limitations/implications – This paper is positional inasmuch as it attempts to establish some, principled arguments to advance the study of desistance. Therefore, a testing of the views expressed in the paper is required. Practical implications – It is the author’s contention that for those black offenders who desire to quit crime, there needs to be networks and activities that not only support their desire to desist, but a radical reframing of how interlocking oppressions that render them subordinate must become a key driver for the desistance project. How can/do black offenders acquire and tell their own authentic narrative when it has been shaped by a history of oppression? It is therefore right to assume that meaningful reintegration of black offenders back into communities requires a deeper commitment to culturally competent rehabilitative processes, that could lead towards a culture of desistance. Social implications – An “Intersectional Model of Desistance” also needs to challenge some white criminologists’ claims by validating the black contribution to criminological theorising. This position should embrace and include perspectives which unify theoretical positions that validate interlocking oppressions; racism, poverty, ethno-cultural group membership, etc., where the broader distribution of opportunities across society, and the ability to recognise them as such as opportunities for black men to desist are taken into consideration. As part of a process of rehabilitation, black offenders need to be engaged with intersectional institutional processes and practices that will lead to a challenge of their criminal values and behaviour, designed to increase their capacity to consider desistance. It is hoped that by using intersectional approaches when conducting inquiries we will be able to eradicate multiple oppressions faced by so many sections of the offender populations and the communities they come from. Originality/value – Understanding how the experiences of black offenders, are impacted by examining interlocking oppressions of criminal justice processes; police, courts, incarceration, probation, etc., would critically assess how these intersections enhances or impedes the desistance trajectories of black offenders, in relation to offenders as a whole. As much of black offender lived reality centres on having to contend, not just with criminal justice process, but the additional oppression of racialisation, the outcomes become more heavily context dependent and driven.

Abstract In 1977 a collective of Black Lesbian Feminists published the Combahee River Collective Statement, a manifesto that defined and described the interlocking oppressions that they and other women of color were experiencing and the deleterious impact of these oppressions upon their lives. They committed themselves to a lifelong collective process and nonhierarchical distribution of power as they struggle(d) to envision and create a just society. Twenty-nine years after the appearance of the Combahee River Collective Statement, over one hundred African Feminists met in Accra, Ghana to formulate their own manifesto and ultimately adopt the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists, which was first published in 2007 simultaneously in English and French. This paper reviews both statements and acknowledges their critical contributions to the evolution of Transnational Feminisms.

Key debates in social science and health research have centered on how to increase the inclusiveness of such research and hence its relevance for understanding the intersections of race, class, gender, and aging. This article uses gerontology as a case in point, examining the challenges of inclusivity and interlocking oppressions/intersectionality for better apprehending how broad structural factors shape and determine the experience of aging and growing old. The authors discuss alternative hypotheses being used to explore inequalities in the aging experience and the limitations of current concepts and methods. Promising new developments in sociology, epidemiology, and other fields are described in terms of their relevance for better understanding the dynamic interplay of race, class, gender, and aging.

Abstract This short essay offers reflective feminist insight into the Fees Must Fall Movement of 2015–16 that was led by students and workers at universities in South Africa. It considers the ways in which Black feminist life is negotiated and embodied in a contemporary student-worker movement that remains oriented by and toward hegemonic hypermasculinities. This text further argues that Black feminist intervention and mobilization is distinct from women's movements as they happened under apartheid. Feminist organizing is principled in particular ways, and these ways are evidenced by Black feminist interventions within the Fees Must Fall (FMF) movement. This essay demonstrates how intersectionality functions as more than a diagnostic tool. Intersectionality and how it is imagined and used in the contemporary South African feminist context does not only recognize multiple and interlocking oppressions. Intersectionality is also in itself a methodology. Intersectionality as demonstrated by feminists and the LGBTIQA community of the FMF movement is a methodological choice that requires that various forms of protest and intervention be used simultaneously to challenge systemic oppressions. Centering intersectionality as methodology works to disrupt archaic perspectives on what is and is not activism, thought, or feminist work. Relying on the intellectual work of student-activists in the movement, otherwise known as “fallists,” and memory and story-telling as methodological tools, this essay begins to imagine how we can think, research, and write in ways that memorialize and archive our lives, our histories, and our collective imaginaries.

Abstract A self-care movement for social workers is beginning to embrace mindfulness and other forms of wellness. However, self-care is often framed as merely an individualistic pursuit and may be a tool of managerialism, reinforcing the social and economic structures and culture that are causing burnout and moral injury in the first place. Particularly for people who are marginalized, the self-care movement may ignore historical trauma and the ways that interlocking oppressions contribute to stress, trauma, moral injury, and burnout. Drawing from the evidence base on East–West mind–body practices and informed by a transformative practice lens, healing justice is presented as a framework and set of practices of the whole self. The whole self includes the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, social, and ecological selves. A transformative approach to healing can be supported by enhancing the capabilities of mindfulness, compassion, curiosity, critical inquiry, effort, and equanimity. The concept of the healing justice organization is introduced as an opportunity for organizational change beginning with a set of inquiries for social work organizations to attend structurally and more purposefully to collective care.

Abstract.This paper considers why gender mainstreaming (GM), a strategy that many have claimed holds promise for transforming public policy and working towards social justice, is inherently limited and flawed. The paper begins with a brief overview of GM, specifically focusing on the Canadian context, and highlights current discussions in the literature regarding issues of implementation and best practices. It then moves on to reveal that a critical but overlooked dimension of GM is its theoretical foundation. In contextualizing GM within a contemporary feminist theory framework, the paper seeks to illuminate the problematic relationship that currently exists between GM and feminist theory and, moreover, demonstrates why the theoretical premises of GM need significant reworking. The argument put forward is that if insights of recent feminist theorizing are taken seriously, it becomes clear that GM should be replaced by an alternative and broader strategy of diversity mainstreaming. Through the use of practical examples, the paper illustrates how diversity mainstreaming is able to better capture, articulate and make visible the relationship between simultaneously interlocking forms of oppressions that include but are not limited to gender.Résumé.Cet article étudie pourquoi l'intégration d'une perspective de genre (IPG), une stratégie dans laquelle beaucoup ont vu la promesse d'une transformation de la politique publique et d'un progrès vers la justice sociale, est en soi limitée et défectueuse. L'article débute par un bref exposé sur l'IPG, s'intéressant principalement au contexte canadien, et il met en évidence les discussions actuelles dans la littérature au sujet de problèmes de mise en oeuvre et de pratiques exemplaires. Il révèle ensuite qu'une dimension critique mais négligée de l'IPG est son fondement théorique. En contextualisant l'IPG dans un cadre de théorie féministe contemporaine, l'article cherche à éclairer la relation problématique qui existe actuellement entre l'IPG et la théorie féministe et, de surcroît, démontre pourquoi les prémisses théoriques de l'IPG nécessitent une révision significative. L'argument avancé est que, si l'on prend au sérieux les conclusions des théories féministes récentes, il semble évident que l'IPG devrait être remplacée par une stratégie plus vaste d'intégration d'une perspective de diversité. S'appuyant sur des exemples pratiques, l'article montre que l'intégration d'une perspective de diversité réussit à mieux capturer, mettre en rapport et rendre visible la relation entre des formes d'oppression qui s'entrecroisent simultanément et qui incluent mais ne se limitent pas au genre.

Aim/Purpose: This qualitative study examined the racist and sexist experiences of doctoral women of color in the academy. Background: Doctoral women of color (e.g., Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Latina Americans, and Native Americans) continue to experience racism and sexism in academic spaces. While few studies have explored the experiences of doctoral students of color and doctoral women of color, with a larger emphasis on how they respond to racism, our study sought to further the knowledge and discourse surrounding the intersectionality of racism and sexism in academic contexts by examining the intersectionality of race and gender systems that impact the lived realities of doctoral women of color as women and people of color. Methodology: This qualitative study employed multiracial feminism and Mellor’s taxonomy of coping styles as theoretical foundations to explore and understand how doctoral women of color experience and navigate racist and sexist incidents. Contribution: The study contributes to research in various areas: (1) it expands our understanding of how doctoral women of color experience racism and sexism, (2) it deepens our perspective about the strategies and methods that they employ to negotiate and overcome these experiences, which can directly inform efforts to support and retain doctoral and other students of color, and (3) it encourages scholars to examine the experiences of doctoral women of color from an anti-deficit approach that acknowledges the social networks, skills, and knowledge that doctoral women of color rely on to disrupt and persist in inequitable contexts as they pursue academic success. Findings: Our findings contribute a classification system that incorporates experiences of doctoral women of color with racism and sexism. Categories in this classification include covert, overt, and physical and material experiences. Our findings also present a classification system that represents navigational strategies of doctoral women of color, or the ways they respond to and overcome racist and sexist experiences. Categories in this classification include defensive, controlled, and direct strategies. Recommendations for Practitioners: First, our findings suggest a critical need for administrators and educators to understand the experiences of women of color and recognize the impact these experiences have on their persistence and success in college. Research on doctoral women of color is limited and very little is known about the entirety of their experiences in graduate programs. This study addresses this gap by exploring how doctoral women of color persist despite the intersectionality of racist and sexist alienation and marginalization. It is important that faculty and staff engage in culturally relevant education and training in order to better understand how to support doctoral women of color as they face these situations. We need more educators who engage in culturally relevant and responsive practices and pedagogy that seek to include their students’ whole identities and lever-age these identities in the classroom. Additionally, more educators need to be trained in ways to recognize and address racist and sexist incidents in their class-rooms and dismantle systems of oppression rather than reinforce them. Specifically, we need to better equip educators to recognize the hard-to-distinguish sexist incidents, which, as our participants suggested, are well concealed within the fabric of our gendered and sexualized society. Second, this study can benefit those in program and resource development to create effective programming and strategies to engage these acts of resilience that enable women of color to succeed in graduate school. Rather than approaching the support and development of doctoral women of color from a deficit perspective of assisting them through challenges, it is more important to fully-engage with these students to recognize what coping strategies they have used that can better inform successful retention programs. Furthermore, mentorship from faculty was highlighted as an important means for participants to address and cope with their negative experiences. Thus, more mentoring relationships between faculty and the student and across student peer groups should be intentionally engaged. This is a system of support also noted in extant literature. As part of the doctoral socialization process, mentoring has many benefits for doctoral students. Specifically, for doctoral women of color, mentoring relationships can be a critical tool for supporting them in managing negative experiences, especially considering that it can minimize feelings of loneliness and isolation. Recommendation for Researchers: Our research contributes to the literature with emphasis on the ways in which doctoral women of color respond to and cope with racism and sexism. Women in this study recount racist and sexist experiences and describe their decision-making processes about how and whether to respond. There were specific reasons that shaped their responses and coping strategies, which highlight awareness and confidence in their individual abilities. The study’s findings also contribute to and expand Mellor’s taxonomy, specifically the incorporation of sexism as a system inherently interlocked with racism. Current literature on doctoral women of color mainly highlights their experience with racism; this gap reinforces our contribution to the literature, specifically, in illuminating predetermined societal roles and expectations for doctoral women of color in academia. Most importantly, our research highlights the assets and agency that doctoral women of color mobilize in the face of racism and sexism. These assets include long-term goals and aspirations, awareness of interlocking systems of oppression shaping their experience in academic environments, commitment to empowering their communities through education, and the support they find within their personal and academic networks. These assets and agency serve as foundation to challenge longstanding deficit perspectives on doctoral women of color in academic spaces and for faculty and program administrators to consider when developing support services. Impact on Society: Our findings encourage faculty, program administrators, and researchers to pay attention to racist and sexist issues as intersecting oppressions rather than distinct manifestations of prejudice to be confronted separately. Our findings also highlight the assets doctoral women of color rely on to overcome oppression and marginalization including their long-term goals and aspirations, awareness of interlocking systems of oppression shaping their experience in academic, commitment to empowering their communities through education, and the support they find within their personal and academic networks. Our hope is that this work encourages systems of higher education to create tangible ways to support doctoral women of color as they grapple with the multiple systems of domination that threaten their success in education, which is intertwined with success in other aspects of society. Future Research: Lastly, future research may explore how the matrix of domination mediates responses of doctoral women of color to racism and sexism. This philosophical inclination is linked to our decision to use Mellor’s taxonomy of coping styles as an introductory framework for our work in understanding navigational strategies. To that end, we argue that the taxonomy as it stands characterizes participants’ responses based on their immediate approach to incidents. This framing fails to include the timing someone might need to process and decide to how to respond. Mellor’s taxonomy positions participants who do not choose to respond immediately as compliant and acquiescent to racialized spaces and events. By doing so, we run the risk of oversimplifying and essentializing the complex processes individuals faced with racism and sexism undertake. At the same time, future research can examine the connection between responses or coping styles and ways that participants are internally transformed in their abilities and desires to address future incidents. There is an inordinate amount of focus on how individuals interact with oppressive incidents and yet very little is known about the ways that these interactions shape future responses. Additionally, the ways that doctoral women of color navigate situations outside the academy is not explored. For example, some of our participants shared how racist and sexist encounters empowered them or inspired them to address other incidents and to interact with family and community members.

Intersectionality is a useful approach to understand the marginalization of ethnic minority (EM) sexual assault survivors. By using this approach, we are able to recognize the interplay and complexity between gender, class, and race that give rise to the inequality and oppression that experienced by EM women in Hong Kong. Findings of the study show that rape myths, gender-role perception, religion, kinship pressure, language barriers, citizenship, and immigration policy have constituted interlocking factors that shape the victim identity of EM sexual assault survivors.

Instructors of lifespan developmental psychology courses are faced with the impossible task of covering the entire lifespan. As such, aging can get neglected. The current paper advocates for approaches that emphasize aging throughout the course. One way to emphasize aging in lifespan courses is to approach the course from an intersectional perspective. Intersectionality advocates for simultaneous consideration of multiply marginalized people. Encouraging intersectional discussions of developmental topics will enrich course discussions and students will develop the habit of critically evaluating the material. Indeed, intersectional perspectives are critical in nature. Simply examining the generalizability of concepts to intersecting subgroups leaves out examination of interlocking systems of oppression and topics of disadvantage and privilege. As such, the current paper provides suggestions for questioning whether developmental concepts and theories are complicit with forces of oppression and domination of older adults.

Abstract Research on African women and gender studies has grown substantially to a position where African-centered gender theories and praxis contribute to theorizing on global feminist scholarship. Africanist scholars in this field have explored new areas such as transnational and multiracial feminisms, both of which address the complex and interlocking conditions that impact women's lives and produce oppression, opportunity and privilege. In addition, emergent African-centered research on women and gender explores those critical areas of research frequently addressed in the global North which have historically been ignored or marginalized in the African context such as family, work, social and political movements, sexuality, health, technology, migration, and popular culture. This article examines these developments in African gender studies scholarship and highlights the contributions that new research on understudied linguistic populations, masculinity, migration, political development and social movements and the virtual world are making to global feminist discourse.

Dalit women have long occupied marginal positions and been excluded from two major Indian social movements: The Feminist Movement and the Dalit Movement. The researcher examines how Dalit women have made creative use of their marginality—their ‘outsider-within' status—and have represented their lived experiences. The study scrutinizes select life narratives of Dalit women writers: Bama's Sangati: Events (2005), Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2015), and Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (2008) to discuss and explore the sociological significance of three characteristic themes in these narratives: (1) the interlocking nature of Dalitwomen’s oppression, (2) endurance and resilience, (3) their role in the transformation of the Dalit community. Thus, the perspectives of Dalit women writers create new knowledge about their lives, families, and communities. Their perspectives may well provide a preparatory point for the development of the Dalit Feminist Standpoint.

I draw on conservative black Christians' claims regarding their co-constitutive racial, religious, class, and sexual subordination to demonstrate that intersectionality is a heuristic that can be used to advance a range of normative arguments. My research rejects traditional understandings of intersectionality as a necessarily progressive analytical framework, as well as recent discussions that suggest that intersectionality's use for conservative ends is evidence of its theoretical underdevelopment. My analysis also reveals that by positing interlocking racism, classism, heterophobia, and anti-Christian bigotry as blacks' “true” experience of oppression, conservative black Christians guide political scientists to consider 1) that intersectional analysis is central rather than antithetical to in-group policing; 2) that we can best interrogate the standards that social groups use to police their boundaries when we adopt a normative-critical conception of power, and 3) that power so defined challenges the erroneous assumption that our role is to either describe or prescribe social reality.

Roma of minority sexual and gender identities experience oppression and inequality as Roma and LGBTIQ. Moving past a frame of reference in Romani Studies that has often foregrounded ethnicity, this article utilises the lived experiences of LGBTIQ Roma in order to explore understandings of Romani identities as fluid but nonetheless informed by interlocking axes of inequality. Data were generated through participant observation, focus groups and interviews with LGBTIQ Roma, and were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings reveal that individuals who self-identify as Roma also make multiple identifications on other grounds, including sex/gender, sexuality, gender identity or class. In this article, I argue that reading intersectionality in conjunction with queer assemblages – ‘queer intersectionalities’ – benefits queer (non-normative) intersectional understandings of Romani identities as not anchored in the notion of fixed ‘groupness’ or essentialist difference while allowing us to identify and interrogate the inequitable workings of asymmetrical hegemonic power relations constitutive of binary social norm(ativitie)s.

Immigrants to the United States encounter a multitude of challenges upon arriving. This is further complicated if migrants arrive without legal status and even more so if these migrants are women. My research engages with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality to examine interlocking systems of oppression faced by undocumented migrant women living in Central Florida. I worked mainly in Apopka, Florida, with women who migrated from Mexico, Central America, and South America. I found that three broad identity factors shaped their experiences of life in the U.S.: gender, undocumented status, and Latinx identity. The last factor specifically affected women’s lives through not only their own assertions of their identity, but also outsider projections of interviewees’ race, ethnicity, and culture. My research examines how these identity factors affected my interviewees and limited their access to employment, healthcare, and education. Through a collaborative research project involving work with Central Floridian non-pro t and activist organizations, I conducted interviews and participant observation to answer my research questions. Through my research, I found that undocumented Latina migrants in Central Florida face structural vulnerabilities due to gendered and racist immigration policies and social systems, the oppressive effects of which were only partly mitigated by women’s involvement with community organizations. My research exposes fundamental and systemic failures within U.S. immigration policies and demonstrates that U.S. immigration policy must change to address intersectional oppression faced by undocumented Latina migrants.

An increase in older people coupled with growing life expectancy has created a higher demand for long-term care (LTC) services in the global North. Recruitment of staff with an immigrant background has been a solution to meet this demographic challenge. Research shows that linguistic barriers and cultural differences can influence immigrant carers’ abilities to offer adequate care, while less is known about workplace training and intra-collegial support. This article explores systems and practices of training offered to new employees with immigrant backgrounds, and how the qualification process unfolds in daily work in nursing homes in Norway through an intersectional perspective focusing on the interlocking of gender, class and migrancy. The article shows that organizational conditions together with incomplete training combined with attitudes of ‘willful ignorance’ maintain privilege and oppression in these workplaces. The increased immigrant participation and their labor trajectories indicate the emergence of a new immigrant niche in the lower tiers of the LTC sector. The article contributes to the literature of migration, gender, healthcare services and labor by exploring immigrants’ situated labor experiences within changing institutional conditions in LTC.

Media activists who are women, queer, trans, Indigenous and/or people of colour are shifting mediascapes through intersectional autonomous journalism practices. This community-based co-research project analyses data from six semi-structured focus group workshops with media activists, who identify a contradictory logic between mainstream and alternative journalism. Two distinct autonomous journalism practices emerge that complement and extend traditional horizontal prefigurative media activist practices through an attentiveness to intersectional identities and interlocking systems of oppression. In rooted direct-action journalism, grassroots autonomous journalists collectively report from a perspective rooted in the concerns of the movement, creating media as a direct-action tactic; whereas in solidarity journalism, autonomous journalists report across movements in solidarity with intersectionally marginalised groups and communities. We argue that, emphasising intersectional mutual aid, relationship building, consent, accountability and content co-creation, these value-based practices have begun to shift dominant media and cultural logics. Finally, we offer critical reflections on some of the challenges inherent in these practices, including a meta-analysis of the intersectional value practices in our activist co-research methodology.

Abstract I argue for a reconceptualization of undocumentedness, the experience of being undocumented, from an experience that is simply a result of the modern immigration regime to an experience that is a result of interlocking systems of oppression and resistance to them that has shaped Blackness and the vision for black liberation. I make this argument by defining and tracing the trope of the papers—the use of legal and extralegal documents to examine and document African Americans’ and other people of African descent’s relationship to the nation-state—in the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative. I offer a close readings of slave narratives, including Sojourner Truth’s The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, and neo-slave narratives, including Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999), to illustrate the significance of the undocumented immigrant in African American literature and demonstrate that writers of African American literature have been thinking intensely about undocumentedness, although not in the way undocumentedness is typically understood.

Intersectionality is a critical theoretical framework that emphasizes the influence of intersecting systems of oppression on the lived experiences of people marginalized by inequity. Although applications of intersectionality are increasing in public health, this framework is absent in environmental health, which has instead focused on the exposome, a paradigm that considers the totality of an individual’s environmental exposures across the life course. Despite advancements in the biological complexity of exposome models, they continue to fall short in addressing health inequities. Therefore, we highlight the need for integrating intersectionality into the exposome. We introduce key concepts and tools for environmental health scientists interested in operationalizing intersectionality in exposome studies and discuss examples of this innovative approach from our work on racial inequities in uterine fibroids. Our case studies illustrate how interlocking systems of racism and sexism may affect Black women’s exposure to environmental chemicals, their epigenetic regulation of uterine fibroids, and their clinical care. Because health relies on biological and social–structural determinants and varies across different intersectional positions, our proposed framework may be a promising approach for understanding environmental health inequities and furthering social justice.

AbstractCathy Cohen’s (1999) theory of secondary marginalization helps to explain why the needs of some members of Black communities are not prioritized on “the” Black political agenda; indeed, some groups are ignored altogether as mainstream Black public opinion shifts to the right (Tate 2010). However, the contemporary movement for Black Lives calls for an intersectional approach to Black politics. Its platform requires participants to take seriously the notion that since Black communities are diverse, so are the needs of its members. To what extent are Blacks likely to believe that those who face secondary marginalization should be prioritized on the Black political agenda? What is the role of linked fate in galvanizing support around these marginalized Blacks? To what extent does respectability politics serve to hinder a broader embrace of Blacks who face different sets of interlocking systems of oppression, such as Black women, formerly incarcerated Blacks, undocumented Black people, and Black members of LBGTQ communities in an era marked by Black social movements? We analyze data from the 2016 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to assess whether all Black lives matter to Black Americans.

Abstract In this conceptual paper, I put forward an argument about the conceptualization of science identity as a landscape of becoming by placing emphasis on recognition and emotions, as core features of identity, through an intersectionality lens. These constructs intertwined, I argue, can give meaning to the process of becoming a science person or forming a science identity, and at the same time shed light on issues related to power, inequality, racism, and exclusion. In the context of these bigger issues, I argue that forming a science identity is not only personal, but also political. The need for intersectionality as a conceptual framework for studying science identity is underscored by the dearth of theory and empirical evidence that addresses classroom inequalities, as well as the multiple and interlocking influence of systems of privilege and oppression in science, such as racism and sexism. Recognition, which refers to how individuals are recognized by others as certain kinds of people, is an ineradicable part of our social world; it is bound within sociopolitical contexts and tied to specific cultural norms, values, beliefs, and stereotypes. Hence, recognition becomes of paramount importance in science identity research. However, critical questions still remain unanswered, such as who is allowed in the world of science and who is recognized as a science person in specific contexts? Directly linked to recognition, I argue, are different types of emotions which can offer a valuable lens for studying inequalities within the process of forming a science identity. What this means for science identity research is how important it is to explore the emotionality of science identity given that emotions are not just dialectically related but inextricably bound with (mis)recognition as well as with various systems of oppression.

One goal of qualitative health research is to fully capture and understand stories of people who experience inequities shaped by complex interlocking structural and social determinants. With this social justice–oriented goal in mind, it is critical to use a methodological approach that appreciates prevailing inequities and oppression. In this article, we propose an innovative approach that joins qualitative health research methodology with critical inquiry. Specifically, we propose advancing constructive grounded theory (CGT) through applying intersectionality as an emergent critical social theory and an analytical tool. With our proposed approach being novel, minimal attempts to conceptualize and operationalize CGT with intersectionality exist. This article focuses on initiating theoretical conceptualization through focusing on demonstrating congruency. We are guided by this focus to seek connectedness and fit through analyzing historical and philosophical assumptions of CGT and intersectionality. In our article, we demonstrate congruency within four units of analysis: reflexivity, complexity, variability, and social justice. Through these units, we offer implications to applying intersectionality within CGT methodology. These include a foundation that guides researchers toward further conceptualizing and operationalizing this novel research approach. Implications also include innovatively exploring complex population groups who face structural inequities that shape their lived vulnerabilities. Our proposed research approach supports critical reflection on the research process to consider what shapes the researcher–participant relationship. This includes reflecting on analysis of power dynamics, underlying ideologies, and intermingling social locations. Thus, our conceptual paper addresses the call for evolving social justice methodologies toward inquiring into complex populations and generating knowledge that challenges and resists inequity.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.

Black women are increasingly targets of mass incarceration and reentry. Black feminist writers call attention to scholars’ need to intersectionalize analyses around how Black women interface with state systems and social institutions. This study foregrounds narratives from Black women to understand their plight while navigating reentry through a phenomenological approach. Through semi-structured interviews, narratives are analyzed using critical frameworks that authentically unearths the lived realities of participants. Themes reveal that for Black mothers, reentry can be just as criminalizing as engaging crime itself. These women face dire consequences around their mothering that induce them into tremendous bouts of trauma. Existing interlocking oppressions enflame newfound barriers due to their contact with the criminal legal system—yet they survive via divergent forms of resilience.

In this article, I argue that a holistic strategy is needed to ascertain how implicit bias, on the part of health-care providers, and structural impediments work together to produce significant barriers to access to medical assistance in dying for marginalized groups—particularly those experiencing intersecting or interlocking forms of identity-based oppressions. In doing so, I also make the case that this kind of primary, patient-centered, and institutional research could benefit from the insights of critical feminism and materialist feminist theory by highlighting and challenging inequalities, opening up debate, and exploring new forms of knowledge production. It also offers a way to shape future research of medical assistance in dying, as it relates specifically to the study of how overlapping forms of structural and interpersonal marginalization (e.g., implicit bias), inclusive of race, gender, class, ethnicity, dis/ability, sexuality, and so on are expressed and experienced.

Guided by feminist politics of reinscription and intersectionality theory, this study theorized how women entrepreneurs from China, Denmark, and the United States depicted their situated struggles to resist simultaneous interlocking oppressions in everyday entrepreneuring based on 40 in-depth interviews. Participants described that they experienced inscription whereby multiple power asymmetries of gender, age, culture, race/ethnicity, and so on emerged and entangled to prescribe social scripts that constrained their entrepreneurial agencies. Simultaneously, participants engaged in reinscription to deconstruct intersectional controls and rework hegemonic scripts in situated entrepreneurial activities. They deployed three resistance strategies: recontextualizing their intersectionalities in different discursive contexts to legitimize and elevate their entrepreneur identities; reformulating their intersectionalities by invoking privileged positions to counterbalance marginalization; and re-envisioning by transcending their intersectional subordination to create opportunities for change. Instead of focusing on pre-existing and fixed power structures and identities in intersectional resistance-control processes, we demonstrate how intersectionalities are (re)constituted in situ through complex and fluid inscription-reinscription dynamics in women’s entrepreneurship.

To analyze intersecting power relations in reproductive and immigration politics, I examine Garza v. Hargan (an appellate case regarding unaccompanied immigrant minors’ abortion rights) alongside systemic injustices in immigration detention (e.g., exposure to miscarriage risks, coerced sterilization, shackling). These injustices, I argue, emerge from conflicts and compromises over fetal citizenship within the American radical right. Although pro-life and anti-immigrant discourses assume opposing logics of citizenship, respectively interpreting immigrants’ fetuses as “fetal citizens” or “anchor babies,” these contradictions are neutralized by two techniques. Debilitation (systematic degradation of a disposable population) enables the appearance of fetal protection to coexist with de facto exposure to death, injury, and risk. Paralegality (quasi-legal policy making by enforcement agents) allows situational shifts in the meaning of fetal citizenship and adjustments to the pro-life/anti-immigrant compromise. Both obscure culpability for reproductive injustice, reinforce interlocking oppressions, and control women’s bodies in order to control the body politic’s demographic future.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership for diversity informed by intersectionality and radical politics. Surfacing the political character of intersectionality, the authors suggest that a leadership for diversity imbued with a commitment to political action is essential for the progress towards equality. Design/methodology/approach Drawing lessons from the grassroots, political organizing of the black and Indigenous activist groups Combahee River Collective and Idle No More, the authors explore how these groups relied on feminist alliances to address social justice issues. Learning from their focus on intersectionality, the authors consider the role of politically engaged leadership in advancing diversity and equality in organizations. Findings The paper finds that leadership for diversity can be developed by shifting towards a more radical and transversal politics that challenges social and political structures that enable intersectionality or interlocking oppressions. This challenge relies on critical alliances negotiated across multiple intellectual, social and political positions and enacted through flexible solidarity to foster a collective ethical responsibility and social change. These forms of alliance-based praxis are important for advancing leadership for diversity. Originality/value This paper contributes to studies of leadership and critical diversity studies by articulating an alliance-based praxis for leadership underpinned by intersectionality, radical democracy and transversal politics.

When we began drafting this issue introduction, extending from a previous introduction in which we committed “to do more and better in cultivating, sponsoring, publishing, and promoting scholarship that addresses racism and interlocking systems of oppression as public health (and/or other health or medical) issues,” we knew we wanted to continue to foster a space in which RHM scholars could ask new and newly exigent questions born out of the rupture of our current moment of swirling, interconnected crises, some longstanding and others novel.

Research has been lacking in exploring the implications of sexual identity on public leadership and in using discursive approaches to develop gender and public leadership literature. This study utilizes queer analysis to explore how six nonheterosexual public leaders in the Philippines negotiate their leadership identities and practices vis-à-vis a collectivistic, religious, and heteronormative culture. Interview accounts yield a reimagining of public leadership as a desire for intimacy with the people. Embedded in heteronormativity, this unspoken conception positions nonheterosexual subjects as unfit to participate in public leadership spaces, compelling them to make concessions to be allowed entry into the field. Such concessions, however, do not preclude the emergence of queer public leaderships that eventually enable a leadership praxis grounded on intersectionality. These findings reveal possibilities for a radical liberation of leaders and followers from interlocking structures of oppression.

The present paper responds to calls to integrate a more explicitly intersectional framework and agenda to vocational psychology. We elucidate how several matrices of domination (i.e., interlocking systems of oppression) may shape the working lives of Americans. Although vocational psychology has made limited progress in exploring two such matrices—the impact of White supremacy and Patriarchy—and expanding research, theory, and clinical work to increasingly diverse populations, we argue that other oppressive systemic forces have been largely overlooked. In response to this gap, a close analysis of how our economic system (i.e., late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism) and Christian hegemony (i.e., protestant work ethic, the prosperity gospel) have impacted the workforce is provided. Finally, to center intersectional perspectives on change, we argue that vocational psychology must pivot to a more activist stance and provide recommendations for research, training, and clinical work.

In this project, I provide a "medicinal history" (Morales 1998) of my experiences of disability, Madness, and medical abuse, offering a creative format for archiving the past in order to craft healing futures. Weaving stories together with a rag doll index of myself, I craft my own "theory in the flesh," (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015, 19) a counternarrative of resistance to interlocking systems of oppression grounded in my own lived experience as a queer, non-binary, mixed-race, desi, disabled, Mad, femme of color. By tracing white supremacist, colonial, heteropatriarchal, ableist, and saneist violence onto my body, I reimagine the ways that embodied traumas can morph to become possibilities for generative healing praxes. "Autoimmune" is a story of disabled and mad becoming, of the unspooling of the self and ableist/sanist definitions of (dis)ability and madness, and of the "re-storying" (Driskill 2016, 3) of disability and madness through a praxis of kinship.

Abstract This article examines the extent to which mainstreaming intersectionality in the Colombian Truth Commission (CEV) serves the feminist aim of producing social transformations by exposing patriarchal, racialized and class-based structures of oppression. Analysing the mainstreaming of intersectionality as a site of struggle exposes the interlocking dynamics of inequality and ontological impositions that block Indigenous and Afro-descendant women’s full participation at the CEV. Ongoing dialogues with five Indigenous and/or Afro-descendant Colombian activists centrally inform this analysis. All the activists utilize the gender, woman, family and generation approach, which is anchored in the shared cosmological reference points of Indigenous and Afro-descendant women. The peril of mainstreaming intersectionality appears when it is used in a shallow manner that severs a structural intersectional analysis from a political intersectional analysis. The promise of intersectionality can only be realized through a holistic understanding and application of both its structural and political dimensions.

While the uneven causes and impacts of climate change are widely known, it is also becoming evident that many elements of the response to the climate crisis are also reinforcing discrimination, segregation, and displacement among marginalized peoples. This is entrenching a system of climate apartheid, one that is evidenced by uneven vulnerabilities to the climate crisis, as well as inequitable implementation of climate-oriented infrastructures, policies, and programs. These efforts often secure privileged populations while harming, excluding, and criminalizing populations whose lives have been made precarious by climate change. Like previous incarnations of state-sponsored “separateness,” climate apartheid is rooted in processes of colonization, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy that render some populations expendable. In this paper, we show how these interlocking historical structures of oppression facilitate a response to climate change that is systematically promoting spatial, socio-economic, and ecological segregation in many mainstream attempts to safeguard economic and socio-political structures amidst global ecological catastrophe. We then offer frameworks and interventions intended to introduce meaningful pathways forward for climate justice that seek to render all life indispensable.

Previous intersectional research on ethnic minority women has largely focused on inequalities and disadvantages associated with the intersection between their minority gender and ethnic identities. In this study, we challenge the static and dichotomous assumption of the existing intersectionality framework (e.g. privilege versus disadvantage) and adopt Holvino’s intersectional perspective of simultaneity as a theoretical lens through which to demonstrate the importance of understanding intersectionality within various levels of contexts, or contextualising social differences. Interviews with 43 female migrant workers from China, Japan and Korea living in the UK revealed that these women perceived disadvantage in terms of gender/ethnic stereotyping and discriminatory practices at work. At the same time, however, their accounts provided evidence of contextualised privilege, namely ‘relative privilege’ (privilege in comparison to multiple reference groups), ‘assigned privilege’ (privilege assigned by their employers and the host society), and ‘ambiguous privilege’ (privilege as a double-edged sword). Based on these observations, we suggest that the location of East Asian women is not fixed within the interlocking systems of oppression in the host country; rather, this location is dynamic and fluid within interpersonal, organisational and societal contexts in the home and host countries, moving back and forth between disadvantage and (limited) privilege.

Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.) is a vegan food justice nonprofit in northern California. We focus on making a more just and sustainable food system for everyone involved. Since injustice in the food system crosses the species barrier, we work to connect the dots between the exploitation of human and nonhuman animals. We focus our efforts on four main areas: ending the use of animals in the food system, improving access to healthy foods in Black, Brown, and low-income communities, exposing the worst forms of child labor (including slavery) in the chocolate industry, and advocating for farmworker rights. These seemingly disparate areas have much in common: they are interlocking forms of oppres­sion, marginalization, and domination in the food system. We recognize that the intersecting nature of oppression necessitates a nuanced response. For example, as an organization working on both farm­worker justice and food apartheid, we cannot advocate for lowering the price of food as this would negatively impact produce workers who already suffer grave systemic injustice. Instead, we advocate for equality of access and living wages for everyone.[1] In this piece, we focus on our approach to the lack of access to healthy foods, and specifically our community-based efforts in Vallejo, California.

This article examines the significance of dialogic exploration of feminist and diversity-orientedtexts in book clubs consisting of Library and Information Science (LIS) master’s students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Through this research, I sought to achieve an understanding of how participation in book clubs that espouse a feminist or diversity ethic inspire members to create deeper, more insightful connections between these values and LIS. While the two book clubs under study began as separate entities with distinct memberships, participants’ dualmembership increased over time. The initially distinct ideals of each book club—feminism and diversity—coalesced, and a new value schema emerged in common between the two: a feminist diversity ethic. A feminist diversity ethic is a form of intersectional feminism that values experiential knowledge, the multifaceted nature of identity, respectful communication, caring, and orientation toward social justice as a means of dismantling interlocking systems of oppression. In the book clubs, this ethic encouraged the proactive search for exposure to diverse cultural and experiential paradigms through texts and stories of lived experience. Emphasis onthis ethic informed book club members’ approach to LIS in several ways: first, it challenged participants to define diversity and its importance in LIS; second, it fostered the deconstruction of the notion of the other; and third, it enabled participants to actualize a feminist diversity ethic within the structure of the book clubs, thus preparing them to continue this ethic in their future roles as LIS practitioners.

There is little research at the international level to help us understand the experiences and needs of trans people living with dementia, despite population aging and the growing numbers of trans people including the first cohort of trans older adults. There is a need to understand the widespread barriers, discrimination and mistreatment faced by trans people in the health and social service system, and the fears trans people express about aging and dementia. Anecdotal evidence from the scarce literature on the topic of LGBTQ populations and dementia suggest that cognitive changes can impact on gender identity. For example, trans older adults with dementia may forget they transitioned and reidentify with their sex/gender assigned at birth or may experience ‘gender confusion.’ This raises crucial questions, for example regarding practices related to pronouns, care to the body (shaving, hair, clothes, etc.), social gendered interactions, health care (continuing or not hormonal therapy) and so on. This article fills a gap in current literature by offering a first typology of responses offered by academics who analyzed the topic of dementia and gender identity, to trans older adults with dementia who may be experiencing ‘gender confusion,’ namely: (1) a gender neutralization approach; (2) a transaffirmative stable approach; and (3) a trans-affirmative fluid approach. After providing critical reflections regarding each approach, we articulate the foundations of a fourth paradigm, rooted in an interdisciplinary dialogue regarding the interlocking systems of oppression faced by trans older adults with dementia, namely ageism, ableism/sanism, and cisgenderism.

Objectives: African American women are disproportionately impacted by intimate partner violence (IPV)-related homicide. They reflect the second highest prevalence rates and experience the highest rates of murder resulting from IPV victimization. Although most survivors note that they have experienced rejection and anticipatory stigma as barriers to their help seeking, African American women additionally experience racism and racial discrimination as obstacles that may further preclude their help seeking. This systematic review highlights African American women’s experiences of rejection from providers and the effects that it may have upon their ability to secure urgent aid. Method: A dearth of literature examines the subtle ways that African American women survivors experience rejection resulting from the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppression. Fundamental to developing more culturally salient interventions is more fully understanding their help-seeking experiences. A systematic review was conducted to provide a critical examination of the literature to understand the intersections of IPV and help-seeking behavior among African American women. A total of 85 empirical studies were identified and 21 were included in the systematic review. The review illuminates both the formal and semiformal help-seeking pathways. Results: We recommend integrating anti-Blackness racist praxis, incorporating African American women’s ways of knowing and centralizing their needs in an effort to improve the health and well-being of this population. Conclusions: Eliminating barriers to more immediately accessing the domestic violence service provision system is key to enhance social work practice, policy, and research with African American female survivors of IPV.

Wife (1975) is a novel ostensibly about immigration, but it is also about gender, ethnicity, and power. Bharati Mukherjee's well-known essay, "An Invisible Woman" (1981), describes her experience in Canada as one that created "double vision" because her self-perception was put so utterly at odds with her social standing (39). She experienced intense and horrifying racism in Canada, particularly in Toronto, and claims that the setting of Wife, her third novel, is "in the mind of the heroine...always Toronto" (39). Mukherjee concludes the article by saying that she eventually left Toronto, and Canada, because she was unable to keep her "twin halves" together (40). In thinking about "mixing," Mukherjee’s work provides entry points into "mixed" or interlocking structures of domination; the diasporic female subject in Mukherjee’s Wife struggles to translate this powerful "mix" in her attempt to move across and within national borders, feminisms, and cultural difference. "An Invisible Woman", in many ways, illuminates the issues that are at stake in Mukherjee's Wife. The protagonist Dimple Dagsputa, like Mukherjee, experiences identity crisis through the cultural forces that powerfully shape her self-perception and deny her access to control of her own life. I want to argue that Wife is also about Dimple's ability to grasp at power through the connections that she establishes between her mind and body, despite the social forces that attempt to divide her. Through a discussion of Dimple's negotiations with Western feminisms and the methods by which she attempts to reclaim her commodified body, I will rethink Dimple's violent response as an act of agency and resistance. Diasporic Feminisms: Locating the Subject(s): Mukherjee locates Wife in two very different geographic settings: the dusty suburbs of Calcutta and the metropolis of New York City. Dimple’s experience as a diasporic subject, one who must relocate and find a new social/cultural space, is highly problematic. Mukherjee uses this diasporic position to bring Dimple’s ongoing identity formation into relief. As she crosses into the space of New York City, Dimple must negotiate the web created by gender, class, and race in her Bengali culture with an increasingly multiple grid of inseparable subject positions. Avtar Brah points out that diaspora is useful as a "conceptual grid" where "multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed" (208). Brah points to experience as the site of subject formation; a discursive space where different subject positions are inscribed, repeated, or contested. For Brah, and for Mukherjee, it is essential to ask what the "fields of signification and representation" are that contribute to the formation of differing subjects (116). Dimple’s commodification and her submission to naming in the Bengali context are challenged when she encounters Western feminisms. Yet Mukherjee suggests that these feminisms do little to "liberate" Dimple, and in fact serve as another aspect of her oppression. Wife is concerned with the processes which lead up to Dimple’s final act of murder; the interlocking subject positions which she negotiates with in an attempt to control her own life. Dimple believes that the freedom offered by immigration will give her a new identity: "She did not want to carry any relics from her old life; given another chance she could be a more exciting person, take evening classes perhaps, become a librarian" (42). She is extremely optimistic about the opportunities of her new life, but Mukherjee does not valourize the New World over the Old. In fact, she continually demonstrates the limited spaces that are offered on both sides of the globe. In New York, Dimple faces the unresolved dilemma between her desire to be a traditional Indian wife and the lure of Western feminism. Her inability to find a liveable place within the crossings of these positions contributes to her ultimate act of violence. At her first party in Manhattan, Dimple encounters the diaspora of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who provide varying examples of the ways in which being "Indian" is in conversation with being "American." She hears about Ina Mullick, the Bengali wife whose careless husband has allowed her to become "more American than the Americans" (68). Dimple quickly learns that Amit is sharply disapproving of women who go to college, wear pants, and smoke cigarettes: "with so many Indians around and a television and a child, a woman shouldn’t have time to get any crazy ideas" (69). The options of education and employment are removed from Dimple’s grasp as soon as she begins to consider them, leaving her wondering what her new role in this place will be. Mukherjee inserts Ina Mullick into Dimple’s life as a challenge to the restrictions of traditional wifehood: "Well Dimple...what do you do all day? You must be bored out of your skull" (76). Ina has adopted what Jyoti calls "women’s lib stuff" and Dimple is warned of her "dangerous" influence (76). Ina engagement with Western feminisms is a form of resistance to the confines of traditional Bengali wifehood. Mukherjee, however, uses Ina’s character to demonstrate the misfit between Western and Third World feminisms. Although the oppressions experienced in both geographies appear to be similar, Mukherjee points out that neither Ina nor Dimple can find expression through a feminism that forces them to abandon their Indianess. Western feminist discourse has been much maligned for its Eurocentric construction of a monolithic Third World subject that ignores cultural complexity. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s "Under Western Eyes" (1988) is the classic example of the interrogation of this construction. Mohanty argues that "ethnocentric universality" obliterates the differences within the varied category of female (197), and that "Western feminist writings on women in the third world subscribe to a variety of methodologies to demonstrate the universal cross-cultural operation of male dominance and female exploitation" (208-209). Mukherjee addresses these problems through Ina’s struggle; Western feminisms and their apparent "liberation" fail to provide Ina with a satisfying sense of self. Ina remains oppressed because these forms of feminism cannot adequately deal with the web of cultural and social crossings that constitute her position as simultaneously "Indian" and "American." The patriarchy that Ina and Dimple experience is not simply that of the industrialized first world; they must also grapple with the ways in which they have been named by their own specific cultural context. Mohanty argues that there is no homogenous group called "women," and Mukherjee seems to agree by demonstrating that women's subject positions are varied and multi-layered. Ina’s apparently comfortable assimilation is soon upset by desperate confessions of her unease and depression. She contrasts her "before" and "after" self in caricatures of a woman in a sari and a woman in a bikini. These drawings represent, "the great moral and physical change, and all that" (95). Mukherjee suggests, however, that the change has been less than satisfactory for Ina, "‘I think it is better to stay a Before, if you can’...’Our trouble here is that we imitate badly, and we preserve things even worse’" (95). Ina’s confession alludes to her belief that she is copying, rather than actually living, a life which might be empowering. She has been forced to give up the "before" because it clashes with the ideal that she has constructed of the liberated Western woman. In accepting the oppositions between East and West, Ina pre-empts the possibility of being both. Though Dimple is fascinated by the options that Ina represents, and begins to question her own happiness, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the absolutes that Ina insists upon. Ina’s feminist friends frighten Dimple because of their inability to understand her; they come to represent a part of the American landscape that Dimple has come to fear through her mediated experience of American culture through the television and lifestyle magazines. Leni Anspach’s naked gums, "horribly pink and shiny, like secret lips, only more lecherous and lethal, set themselves up as enemies of decent, parsimonious living" (152). Leni’s discourse threatens to obliterate any knowledge that Dimple has of herself and her only resistance to this is an ironic reversal of her subservient role: "After Leni removed her cup Dimple kept on pouring, over the rim of Leni’s cup, over the tray and the floating dentures till the pregnant-bellied tea pot was emptied" (152). Dimple’s response to the lack of accommodation that Western feminism presents is tied to her feeling that Ina and Leni live with unforgiving extremes: "that was the trouble with people like Leni and Ina who believed in frankness, happiness and freedom; they lacked tolerance, and they abhorred discussions about the weather" (161). Like Amit, Ina offers a space through her example where Dimple cannot easily learn to negotiate her options. The dynamic between these women is ultimately explosive. Ina cannot accept Dimple’s choices and Dimple is forced to simplify herself in a defence that protects her from predatory Western feminisms: I can’t keep up with you people. I haven’t read the same kinds of books or anything. You know what I mean Ina, don’t you? I just like to cook and watch TV and embroider’...’Bravo!’ cried Ina Mullick from the sofa where she was sitting cross legged. ‘And what else does our little housewife do? ‘You’re making fun of me,’ Dimple screamed. ‘Who do you think you are?’ (169-170. Dimple lacks the ability to articulate her oppression; Ina Mullick can articulate it but cannot move outside of it. Both women feel anger, depression, and helplessness, but they fail to connect and help one another. Mukherjee demonstrates that women from the Third World, specifically those who come into contact with the diaspora, are not homogenous subjects; her various representations of negotiation with processes of identity constitution show how different knowledges of self are internalized and acted out. Irene Gedalof’s recent work on bringing Indian and Western feminisms into conversation proceeds from the Foucauldian notion that these multiple discursive systems must prevail over the study of woman or women within a single (and limiting) symbolic order (26). The postcolonial condition of diaspora, Gedalof and other critics have pointed out, is an interesting position from which to begin talking about these complex processes of identity making since it breaks down the oppositions of South and North, East and West. In crossing the South/North and East/West divide, Dimple does not abandon her Indian subject position, but rather attempts to keep it intact as other social forces are presented. The opposition between Ina and Dimple, however, is dissolved by the flux that the symbol "woman" experiences. This process emphasizes differences within and between their experiences in a non-hierarchical way. Rethinking the Mind/Body Dichotomy: Dimple’s Response This section will attempt to show how Dimple’s response to her options is far more complex than the mind/body dichotomy that it appears to be upon superficial examination. Dimple’s body does not murder in an act of senseless violence that is divorced from her mental perception of the world. I want to rethink interpretations like the one offered by Emmanuel S. Nelson: "Wife describes a weak-minded Bengali woman [whose]...sensibilities become so confounded by her changing cultural roles, the insidious television factitiousness, and the tensions of feminism that, ironically, she goes mad and kill her husband" (54-55). Although her sense of reality and fantasy become blurred, Dimple acts in accordance with the few choices that remain open to her. In slowly guiding us toward Dimple’s horrifying act of violence, Mukherjee attempts to examine the social and cultural networks which condition her response. The absolutes of Western feminisms offer little space for resistance. Dimple, however, is not a victim of her circumstances. She reclaims her body as a site of inscription and commodification through methods of resistance which are inaccessible to Amit or her larger social contexts: abortion, vomiting, fantasies of mutilating her physical self, and, ultimately, through using her body as a tool, rather than an object, of violence. These actions are responses to her own lack of power over self representation; Dimple creates a private world in which she can resist the ways her body has been encoded and the ways in which she has been constructed as a divided object. In her work on the body in feminist discourse, Elizabeth Grosz argues that postructuralist feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Judith Butler conceptualize female bodies as: "crucial to understanding women’s psychical and social existence, but the body is no longer understood as an ahistorical, biologically given, acultural object. They are concerned with the lived body, the body insofar as it is represented and used in specific ways in particular cultures" (Grosz 18). In emphasizing difference within the sexes, these postructuralist thinkers reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and do much for Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s project of considering the ways in which "woman" is a heterogenously constructed and shifting category. Mukherjee presents Dimple’s body as a "social body": a "social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification and power" (Grosz 18-19). Dimple cannot control, for example, Amit’s desire to impregnate her, to impose a schema of patriarchal reproduction on her body. Yet, as I will demonstrate, Dimple resists in ways that she cannot articulate but she is strongly aware that controlling the mappings of her body gives her some kind of power. This novel demonstrates how the dualisms of patriarchal discourse operate, but I want to read Dimple’s response as a reclaiming of the uncontrollable body; her power is exercised through what Deleuze and Guattari would call the "rhizomatic" connections between her body and mind. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), provides a miscellany of theory which, "flattens out the relations between the social and the psychical," and privileges neither (Grosz 180). Deleuze and Guattari favour maps and rhizomes as conceptual models, so that all things are open, connectable, and subject to constant modification (12). I want to think of Dimple as an assemblage, a rhizomatic structure that increases in the dimensions of a multiplicity that changes as it expands its connections (8). She is able to resist precisely because her body and mind are inseparable and fluid entities. Her violence toward Amit is a bodily act but it cannot be read in isolation; Mukherjee insists that we also understand the mental processes that preface this act. Dimple’s vomit is one of the most powerful tropes in the novel. It is a rejection and a resistance; it is a means of control while paradoxically suggesting a lack of control. Julia Kristeva is concerned with bodily fluids (blood, vomit, saliva, tears, seminal fluid) as "abjections" which necessarily, "partake of both polarized terms [subject/object, inside/outside] but cannot be clearly identified with either" (Grosz 192). Vomiting, then, is the first act that Dimple uses as a means of connecting the mind and body that she has been taught to know only separately. Vomiting is an abjection that signifies Dimple's rhizomatic fluidity; it is the open and changeable path that denies the split between her mind and her body that her social experiences attempt to enforce. Mukherjee devotes large sections of the narrative to this act, bringing the reader into a private space where one is forced to see, smell, and taste Dimple’s defiance. She initially discovers her ability to control her vomit when she is pregnant. At first it is an involuntary act, but she soon takes charge of her body’s rejections: The vomit fascinated her. It was hers; she was locked in the bathroom expelling brownish liquid from her body...In her arrogance, she thrust her fingers deep inside her mouth, once jabbing a squishy organ she supposed was her tonsil, and drew her finger in and out in smooth hard strokes until she collapsed with vomiting (31) Dimple’s vomiting does contain an element of pathos which is somewhat problematic; one might read her only as a victim because her pathetic grasp at power is reduced to the pride she feels in her bodily expulsions. Mukherjee’s text, however, begs the reader to read Dimple carefully. Dimple acts through her body, often with horrible consequences, but she is resisting in the only way that she is able. In New York, as Dimple encounters an increasingly complicated sociocultural matrix, she fights to find a space between her role as a loyal Indian wife and the apparent temptations of the United States. Ina Mullick’s Western feminism asks her to abandon her Bengali self, and Amit asks her to retain it. In the face of these absolutes, Dimple continues to attempt her resistance through her body, but it is often weak and ineffectual: "But instead of the great gush Dimple had hoped for, only a thin trickle was expelled. It gravitated toward the drain, a small slimy pool full of bubbles. She was ashamed of it; it seemed more impersonal than a cooking stain" (150). Mukherjee asks us to read Dimple through her abjections--through both mind and body (not entirely distinct entities for Mukherjee)--in order to understand the murder. We must gauge Dimple's actions through the open and connectable relationships of body and mind. Her inability to vomit "pleasurably" signifies a growing inability to locate a space that is tolerable. Vomiting becomes a way for Dimple to tie her multiple subject positions together: "Vomiting could be pleasurable; thinking of all the bathrooms she had vomited in she felt nostalgic, almost middle-aged" (149). This moment at the kitchen sink occurs when Leni and Ina have fractured her sense of a stable Indian identity. In an interview, Mukherjee admits that Dimple’s movement to the United States means that she begins to ask questions about her oppression; she begins to ask herself questions about her own happiness (Hancock 44). These questions, coupled with Leni and Ina’s challenging presence, leads to Dimple to desire a reconnection and a sense of control. Undoubtedly, Dimple’s act of murder is misguided, but Mukherjee sensitively demonstrates that Dimple has very little choice left. Dimple does not simply break down into a body and mind that are unaware of their connections, rather she begins to operate on several levels of consciousness. Shen Mei Ma interprets Dimple’s condition as schizophrenic, and explores this as a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literatures. She uses R.D. Laing’s classic explanation of schizophrenia as a working definition: The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world, and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself...Moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on (Ma 43) Ma analyses this condition (which can be seen, like gender and race, as a socially constructed state of being), as a "defense mechanism" against an unbearable world; the separation in space and memory that the diasporic subject experiences results in a schizophrenic, or divisive, tendency. I agree with Ma's use of Laing's definition of schizophrenia in the sense that this understanding is certainly more useful than Emmanuel Nelson's insistence on Dimple's "madness." Reading Dimple's response with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual rhizomes, however, leads me to resist using a definition that is linked to mental illness. This may be a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literature, but it is also necessary, and perhaps more useful, to recognize that Dimple's act of violence and her debatable "madness" are ultimately less important than reading her negotiation as a means of survival and her response as an act of resistance. Many critics interpret the final act of murder as "an ironic twist of Sati, the traditional self-immolation of an Indian wife on the funeral pyre of her husband" (Ma 58). This suggestion draws up Dimple’s teenage desire to be like Sita, "the ideal wife of Hindu legends" who walks through fire for her husband (6). The violence perpetrated against women who naturalize Sita’s tradition is wrenched into an act in which Dimple is able to exercise some control over her fate. The act of murder is woven with the alternate text of industrial/commercial culture in a way that demonstrates Dimple’s desperate negotiation with the options available to her: The knife stabbed the magical circle once, twice, seven times, each time a little harder, until the milk in the bowl of cereal was a pretty pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any advertiser, and then she saw the head fall off - but of course it was her imagination because she was not sure anymore what she had seen on TV and what she had seen in the private screen of three A.M. (212-213) The tragedy of this conclusion surely lies in the events that are left unsaid: what is Dimple’s fate and how will society deal with her violent choice? Ma’s article on schizophrenia points to the most likely outcome--Dimple will be declared insane and "treated" for her illness. Yet my reading of this act has attempted to access a careful understanding of how Dimple is constructed and how this can contribute to rethinking her violent response. Dimple's mind is not an insane one; her body is not an uncontrollable, hysterical one. Murder is a choice for Dimple--albeit a choice that is exercised in a limited and oppressive space. "Mixing" is an urgent topic; as globalization and capitalist homogenization make the theorization of diaspora increasingly necessary, it is essential to consider how gendered and raced subject positions are constituted and how they are reproduced within and across geographies. This novel is important because it forces the reader to ask the difficult questions about "mixing" that precede Dimple’s act of spousal violence. I have attempted to address these questions in my discussion of Dimple’s negotiations and her resistance. Much has been written about this novel in terms of Dimple’s "split," but very few critics have tried to examine Dimple’s character in ways that penetrate our limited third person access to her. Mukherjee’s own writing in "An Invisible Woman" suggests the urgency of rethinking characters like Dimple and the particular complexities of immigration for non-English speaking housewives. Mukherjee’s relative position of privilege has given her access to far more choices than Dimple has, but notably, she avoids turning Dimple’s often suicidal violence inward. Instead, Mukherjee shows how the inward is inescapable from the outward: in murdering Amit, the violence Dimple perpetrates is, after all, a rearticulation of the violence from which her limited subject position cannot completely escape. Footnote: In thinking about Dimple's response, it is important to note that, of course, her actions and her words are always conditioned by the position that she has naturalized. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"(1988) argues that the subaltern subject cannot "speak" because no act of resistance occurs that can be separated from the dominant discourse that provides the language and the conceptual categories with which the subaltern voice speaks (Ashcroft et al 1998 217-218).The violence of Dimple's response must be seen as an ironic subversion of a television world that enforces patriarchal norms. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. Brah, Avtar.Cartographies of Diaspora - Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980. Gedalof, Irene. Against Purity - Rethinking Idenity With Indian and Western Feminisms. London: Routledge, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies - Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State U of NY P, 1998. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220. Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. Toronto: Penguin, 1975. -- "An Invisible Woman." Saturday Night 1981, 96: 36-40. Nelson, Emmanual S. Writers of the Indian Diaspora - A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220.