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NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion
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What happened with the New Atheists?
My notion is that intersectionality allowed people to bring more of their identity into a discussion than previously-- for example, allowing that a person could be both black and homosexual rather than having to choose one.
If the process is allowed to go to its logical conclusion (not something you should count on with human beings), then a person's whole experience becomes relevant.
I have a notion that one of the things that goes wrong in social justice movements is that they don't allow enough for specialization-- everyone is supposed to care equally about a huge list of injustices.
I've wondered about the history of the acceptance of the idea of intersectionality. This seems like a safe place to ask.
As far as I can tell, some of the leading New Atheists decided to expand their identity to include certain political stances, as well as certain political labels. By doing so they formed a distinct in-group, and immediately became embroiled in an escalating series of in-group vs. out-group skirmishes. At present, as far as I can tell, New Atheists in both groups spend more time on inter-group fighting than on advancing their original goals.
The New Atheists: this is just my perspective: Started out with becoming aware that New Atheists should cooperate with other social issues, and should try to appeal to people outside of white, educated, ex-Christians, combined with (correct) realization of problems within community: Elevatorgate, skeptics uninterested in actually useful applications of skepticism to social issues, Dawkin's Islamophobia, etc. Meanwhile, New Atheism ceased to be lonely dissent. Bunch of talk happened, some factions adopted intersectionality and kind of just merged with the rest of modern quasiradical/moderate Social Justice, others went contrarian on other stuff and became (un-thoughtful) reactionaries, etc.
My (somewhat fuzzy) criticism of intersectionality is basically that it discourages keeping ones identity small, specifically on stuff that is usual Social Justice fare, and tends to encourage the congealment of a big body of politics where somebody can always spam 'but that doesn't include _' or 'but that wouldn't work for _' whenever they run into an idea they disagree with.
That said, I do think that the basic concept is important and needs to be understood.