User:JennyRosen/Reflections on de los Reyes Paulina (2007) Intersektionella perspektiv på etniska relationer

Paulina de los Reyes

Intersektionella perspektiv på etniska relationer

Reading the de los Reyes text gave me some insights regarding my own work especially concerning ethnicity, as I have until now avoided to use the latter as a relevant category in relation to Swedishness. My main aim with avoiding the term ethnicity has been due to the essentialist baggage of the term. However, after reading the discussions concerning the use of ethnicity from an intersectional theoretical perspective, I can see now how the use of ethnicity and, mostly, taking back and changing its understanding can benefit my work in relation to the study of language education. De los Reyes argues that two main areas of research can be identified in the intersectional perspective; the first has its roots in the feminist theory and the relation between inequalities based on gender in relation to other categories. The connection between gender and class has been a major topic among Marxist feminist scholars; a discussion that many times led to problematic attempts of creating a hierarchy among the different sources of oppression. From this perspective, intersectionality offers a new insight in gender studies, looking at other categorization in relation to gender as the theoretical foundation. The second area of research has its foundation in the anti racist and postcolonial field, going beyond the gendered outlook as its focus. Intersectionality should be understood not as an attempt to combine or make a hierarchy in regard to different categorizations or forms of oppression but instead to blur the boundaries between those and their understanding as fixed entities. Instead, it is class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity the ones that should be seen as dynamic, constructed, complex and situationally bound (2007:44).

But is it possible to conduct research in this area without resorting to these categories? And doesn’t the researcher confirm and strengthen the discourse of categories by using them? According to De los Reyes, whether the result of intersectional research will focus on the relation between different categories or, instead, focus on the question of power and inequality (while breaking free from the categorizations bound to it), remains an open question. Such analyses will not only avoid locking themselves into fixed categorization, but also open up the possibility for taking into consideration several dimensions of power and inequality. Another essential question in contemporary social science is the relation between structure and agency. From an intersectional outlook, a researcher is not only interested in analyzing how subject positions are created in the intersections of different power structures, but also in the negotiation of the individual inside this space. The question of agency is, therefore, central as well as identifying the structure that defines the space in which the individual can move. As Del los Reyes writes “Insikten om att subjektspositioner skapas intersektionellt leder enligt min mening till att de-essentialisera maktutövandet “ (2007:51).

Concerning the understanding of ethnicity, De los Reyes writes “Intersektionalitet rymmer ett intresse för etnicitet som inte i första hand är riktat till grupper eller fenomen som man kan kategorisera som “etniska” utan till etnicitetens förmåga att göra skillnader och skapa ojämlikhet” (2007:46-47). Such an understanding of ethnicity may as well be applied to my own field of study concerning the construction and negotiation of “Swedishness”. Such a change of perspective also includes shifting focus from describing something static to describing processes. Moreover, de los Reyes questions the existence of ethnic groups at all, meaning that research should try to understand how those groups are constructed and the result of defining differences in ethnic terms (2007:47). I would also add that researchers, which aim to describe ethnic groups or ethnic phenomena’s, are themselves creators of ethnic hierarchies.

Ethnicity is closely related to the question of nationalism and race. The myth of the ethnic homogenic nation is questioned in an intersectional perspective, therefore, making visible the differences in regard to gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality inside the national borders. Who are the members of the nation and which roles are given to them? Feminist research has put into light the importance of women in the national project in relation to the male white citizen (Yuval Davies….). Although these results may be of great importance, one should also bring into the analysis the difference between the tasks of women in the national project in relation to ethnicity and class. While some women were controlled and encouraged to give birth to the sons of the nation, other women were sterilized in order to “clean” the nation from undesired population. Race, as an analytical category, has been rather invisible in Swedish research and has been seen as an inconvenient term often replaced by ethnicity. Scholars focusing on intersectionality have highlighted the existence of race and racism in society. Among post colonial researchers, racism is considered to be a corner stone of European and Western cultures. The colonial heritage still influences the understanding of the world and our categorizations in terms of “the West and the rest”. Today’s hierachization in regard to labor markets, housing and other arenas follow the colonial maps. Education and knowledge production in the contemporary world are marked by the colonial heritage and, therefore, still reproduce inequalities (2007:49). A central theme in post colonial theory is the modernist construction of linear time and how societies supposedly develop and modernize in a certain pattern. According to such a view, it is possible to talk about countries and people as being “underdeveloped” and, therefore pressuring them to catch up (2007:53). This view not only reinforces a certain understanding of the world upon others, but also hides capitalism’s need for the “underdeveloped” places in order to maintain the exploitation of places and people.