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Essay / Analysis of intersectionality in terms of gender discrimination
Table of contentsIntroductionThe evolution of intersectionalityThe relationship between intersectionality and developmentConclusion“There is no single-issue struggle because we do not Let's not live a life focused on a single problem. Audre LordeSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay IntroductionIn this essay, I will write about intersectionality. Although intersectionality can be used to analyze privilege, areas such as men, masculinity, and human rights, and it can be applied to other groups of people, I will discuss the intersectionality in relation to the oppression experienced by women with an example of trafficking/migration of Ethiopians. women in the Middle East as an aspect of social injustice. The illustration will briefly describe the causes of trafficking and the resulting oppressions that Ethiopian domestic workers face from an intersectional perspective. Before coming to ISS, I had no exposure to the idea of intersectionality. I wondered why Ethiopian women had not reached the potential to compete on equal terms with their male counterparts, despite all the efforts made by the government, women's associations and other stakeholders, especially since 1991. Among other things, the government is putting in place positive measures to compensate for what is happening. they have lost in the past in socio-economic and political policies and helped them to face men in education, politics and other aspects. However, progress in giving women influence at family, community and national decision-making levels in all aspects of their lives is unsatisfactory or almost non-existent in rural areas. This motivates me to focus on intersectionality in this essay. This document contains four parts. The first part discusses the rationale for choosing intersectionality, followed by the historical evolution of intersectionality, and the third part highlights the relationship between intersectionality and development with a brief presentation of causes and effects of trafficking in women. The last part presents a brief concluding remark. I now realize that many gender analysis tools used by various development agents, including government, focus only on gender relations. Thus, certain factors and experiences become invisible or the oppressions specific to a certain group of women (for example Falasha women) have not received attention. However, intersectionality opens the way to the analysis of other sources of oppression by questioning gender supremacy. Intersectionality is about examining different sources of oppression simultaneously and understanding that various sources of oppression influence each other. Furthermore, Nash (2008: 4) argues that intersectionality is also a theory of privilege and analyzes the contradictions of domination and privilege (for example, a woman can be dominated because of her gender but privileged because she is white). In other words, women of the same race and color may be subject to various forms of discrimination and advantages. An intersectional analysis of poverty, for example, is not only about concluding that there are a disproportionate number of poor women, but it also requires going further to examine which group of women are poor and exploring whether Historical processes and past policies have had an impact oncertain groups of women. Evolution of Intersectionality The term intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s from critical race studies, a movement of American law scholars challenging "colorblindness, neutrality, and objectivity » of the law then in force. Intersectionality arose as a counterargument by black feminists to refute the fact that women fall into the same category and to show the idea that identity constitutes different interconnected forms of social relations such as race, sexuality, gender. gender, class.and to oppose the attempt by white feminists to treat race as insignificant in feminist research. From the outset, intersectionality challenges the analysis of gender and race as mutually exclusive and independent sources of oppression used by anti-racist and feminist leaders. Rather, she sought to analyze the multiple ways in which gender and race intersect to form the different aspects. experiences of black women. For Crenshaw, intersectionality is a "metaphor" and indicates that black women face gender discrimination from one direction and racial discrimination from another direction and collide in their lives. 'a way we don't expect or anticipate. According to Nash (2011), the concept of intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and social theorist, in 1989 in the United States, during which she clearly argued that the attempt to examine the marginalization of women Black people should include intersections that are intertwined and mutually reinforcing instead of understanding it by considering their color and gender in isolation. Crenshaw further argues that black women face discrimination that is not clearly addressed by then-legal categories of sexism or racism. However, the existing legal system viewed sexism as an injustice faced by both black and white women and used racism to imply injustice inflicted on all, i.e. black women and other people of color , including men. This understanding made the marginalization of black women invisible and prevented them from obtaining legal assistance. This was clearly seen when five black women sued General Motors for refusing to hire black women before 1964 and when the company fired all black women hired before 1970 on the basis of seniority following the recession . The meaning and practice of intersectionality has changed with the advent of different historical periods. Jennifer Nash discusses three periods in her attempt to highlight black feminism's relationship with intersectionality. The first period extends from 1968 to 1987 and is characterized by the promotion of various marginalizations by black feminist organizations. This period was followed by what Nash called the "pivotal years", covering the period 1988–1990 during which the concept of intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. The third moment, which witnessed the mutual interchangeability of intersectionality and black feminism, is called the "hip-hop feminist era" and covers the period from 1999 to the present. Intersectionality became more famous thanks to social activist Gloria J. Watkins (or through her pen). name bell hooks) and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins in the 1990s during their study of black feminism. Collins notably used the term intersectionality to replace his former idea of "black feminist thought" and shared Crenshaw's ideathat the analysis of marginalization should take into account intersectionality instead of using gender as the sole lens for understanding social relations. Intersectionality and developmentMany agree that development activities are highly gendered and that men receive the greatest proportion of the participation and fruits of development. Heteronormativity, androcentrism and the way activities are perceived within households lead to gender inequalities, especially in developing countries, and expose women to different oppressions such as trafficking. Bastia adds that inequalities due to intersecting factors contribute to the persistence of gender-based inequalities and that these intertwined identities are rarely considered in development discourse or practice. Furthermore, traditional development analysis overlooks the links between gender-based inequalities and inequalities due to class, race, poverty, ethnicity and other social relations. Although women are now included in development narratives and practices and the principle that "investing in women is smart economics", mainstream development overlooks other sources of difference and operates on the basis of a universalist understanding of “women, men and gender relations” (Cornwall et al. 2008: 6). Migration is an important development issue today. Migrants send a substantial amount of money that represents a significant portion of the home country's GDP and helps lift family members out of poverty. Furthermore, migration is considered an influential driver of social change and contributes to the economy of host countries. However, migration studies remained "gender blind" until the 1970s and skewed in favor of men. Despite feminist efforts to criticize this trend and the focus on gender, mainstream migration studies resist and continue to be gender blind and many researchers focus almost entirely on gender while ignoring other interacting factors. such as race, class and nationality. This is true in Ethiopia. The number of migrant women victims of trafficking is increasing. For example, in its 2016 report, Human Rights Watch found that there were 32,986 domestic workers in Oman alone. Ethiopian women are easy prey for trafficking networks and face exploitation/violence at the hands of their employers due to various intersecting factors such as poverty, gender, violence, illegality, race and other cultural factors such as early marriage. For example, many employers in Oman call their domestic workers, including Ethiopians, “abid,” meaning slaves, and are oppressed because they are black, foreign, illegal, and female (Beydoun 2006:9 ). In Ethiopia, gender, early marriage and poverty place women at a disadvantage and limit their employment opportunities. Ethiopia is characterized by clearly demarcated gender roles between men and women, where men are seen as the breadwinners while women are confined to household activities which the community places less value on. As a result, women migrate to the Middle East to work as domestic workers, which is seen as an extension of the housework they do at home. Furthermore, women constitute the largest part of the poor sectors of Ethiopian society. According to Beydoun (2006), due to limited educational training, domestic work and daily work.