Unit 2: Inclusive Practices: Blog Post 2: Intersectionality and Faith
Intersectionality LGBTQ and Faith:
Choudrey’s text Supporting BAME Trans People was an interesting and thought provoking read and raised several important points:
- A lack of BAME representatives in the trans community. In part due to worries about “the consequences of being outed”1
- The need for trans communities to implement a “BAME positive representation policy”2 to ensure visibility and representation.
- The need for an increased awareness of differing religious faith views on LGBTQ and Trans communities.
This shows how Faith, Race and Religion intersect with one another and the multi layered difficulties that BAME Trans person must navigate and be supported through to find how they want to be part of their communities.
A few thoughts on this could be to allow for roles in Trans communities to not be public facing to allow for a person to keep their identities private.
To ensure that marketing and advertising material from LGBTQ and Trans groups shows BAME individuals as this help boost connection with these communities.
On the other side of that if an event is being live streamed or broadcast in some way, it is important to have permission from people who can be seen in the recording.
I also really loved this simple idea:
“A great way to celebrate different cultures and faiths would be to celebrate religious holidays or days of cultural significance. Create a cultural calendar and share this with the team, regularly checking upcoming events and incorporating this into discussions or activities.”3
It feels like a great way to increase awareness of each other’s cultures and faiths. I think this is something which could be simply added to our UAL calendar and would be a simple step towards increasing staff awareness.
Inclusive Mosque Initiative
I thought the Inclusive Mosque Initiative is an exemplary example of a religious community opening to and caring for all of members of it’s community with or without faith. It is written and a very clear. It offers it’s own initiatives like the Raise Your Gaze campaign whilst also putting on events and pointing visitors to other relevant and useful resources.
Intersectionality: Feminism and Racism
Razia Aziz’s text Feminism and the challenge of racism: Deviance or Difference discusses the difference and the marginalisation of black women in feminist discourse. I first came across the term difference when reading Luce Irigaray’s writing on my BA. Her writing has been instructive in my own practice as an artist and has helped shape the conceptual framework around why I use the format of the multiple in my painting practice. As such I felt aligned and familiar with some of the concepts in the text.
I felt Aziz’s text was an excellent example of unpicking the layers that make up an individual and their intersectionality. Aziz shows how intersectionality is imperial/colonial and historical and how class, education and other factors affect different people of the same race and gender:
“The issue of identity is one which best crsytallises this dilemma. Rooted as it is in complex layers of struggles and contexts, identity is not neat and coherent, but fragmented and fluid” 4
I felt that Aziz’s text was very open and to me read as interesting grapple with ‘identity politics’ “the cost of a ‘home’ in any identity is the exercise of a power to include the chosen and exclude the Other…this can lead to an inwards looking politics where identities are added and subtracted”5. For me this quote seems to question if asserting differences in identity raises more borders and separations between people than it connects?
In many ways I feel this is a text that has given me language for some of my niggly feelings around identity politics. I feel that when taken to an extreme this de-humanises the individual and does not offer the best template for a person centered or intersectional approach to how we connect and communicate with each other.
And at the same time, like Aziz I feel, particularly for marginalised communities, there is immense importance and agency in asserting one’s identity and finding connection through it “the assertion of identity is a process people can relate to because it gives them agency and makes them power-full”6. Only though this can the power imbalances that weaved into every facet of our society be held up to the light.
I feel that Aziz’s person-centered approach to moving away from ‘identity politics’ is the end goal but that we are very, very far away from being in a position to be able to do that.
I do fundamentally agree with and feel that a post-modernist way of thinking is in fact a useful and apt tool for our current time as it allows us to both assert and deconstruct simultaneously. And that perhaps we can do both at the same time.
“Post-modernism is deconstructive: it sees subjectivity as a product of power rather that it’s author and agency as power’s way of acting through the individual…it proposes that the selves we think are fixed are actually unstable, fragmented and contradictory”7.
I would offer the analogy that building a positionality that is set in one’s identity could make one strong like a brick and allow one to build robust foundations from. But that perhaps creating a self-identity that is more like water would allow us to be porous, to connect with and move side by side with one another more easily and cohesively.
References:
1. Choudrey, S, Inclusivity – Supporting BAME Trans People [Online]. Gender Identity Research & Education Society, page 21:
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://www.gires.org.uk/inclusivity-supporting-bame-trans-people/
2.Choudrey, S, Inclusivity – Supporting BAME Trans People [Online]. Gender Identity Research & Education Society, page 22
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://www.gires.org.uk/inclusivity-supporting-bame-trans-people/
3. Choudrey, S, Inclusivity – Supporting BAME Trans People [Online]. Gender Identity Research & Education Society, page 23
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://www.gires.org.uk/inclusivity-supporting-bame-trans-people/
4. Aziz, Razia, Feminism and the challenge of racism: Deviance or Difference. Black British Feminism: A Reader: Page 74
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GdSqaz6NBMIC&pg=PA70&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
5. Aziz, Razia, Feminism and the challenge of racism: Deviance or Difference. Black British Feminism: A Reader: Page 75
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GdSqaz6NBMIC&pg=PA70&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
6. Aziz, Razia, Feminism and the challenge of racism: Deviance or Difference. Black British Feminism: A Reader: Page 75
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GdSqaz6NBMIC&pg=PA70&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
7. Aziz, Razia, Feminism and the challenge of racism: Deviance or Difference. Black British Feminism: A Reader: Page 77
Accessed from on 7 May 2024: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GdSqaz6NBMIC&pg=PA70&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Simple ideas seconded…
The point you make about “A lack of BAME representatives in the trans community. In part due to worries about “the consequences of being outed” is something I have been made aware of during this unit and is a key result of intersectionality. I feel it’s really important when we implement changes in teaching, that we hope will be positive, that we are conscious of how students with intersectional identities might have specific needs, and vulnerability that we need to be sensitive of. Essentially a broad-brush approach to change is not necessarily a good thing, however well-intended it is on the part of the teacher. The privilege walk is a good example of how not to do it publicly.
I agree that the Cultural Calendar idea is a great one, that it gives an equal hierarchy to all religious holidays, in the minds and actions of the group at least. These ideas that begin in the classroom will hopefully be taken foreward by students into “the real world” and eventually affect change in government policy / national holidays.
I was also really interested in your mentioning of the term “difference” and the writing of Luce Irigaray. I’d love to talk more about this.
There were three quotes specifically from Razia Aziz that seemed to chime with things I have been wrestling with and themes I’ve been considering when planning my intervention:
“The issue of identity is one which best crsytallises this dilemma. Rooted as it is in complex layers of struggles and contexts, identity is not neat and coherent, but fragmented and fluid” (Aziz, 1997)
A really interesting and insightful way to think about intersectionality too, that it doesn’t fit into neat categories, that we need to consider the complexity of the situation.
You also talked about this quote:
“the assertion of identity is a process people can relate to because it gives them agency and makes them power-full” (Aziz, 1997)
I really liked what you said “there is immense importance and agency in asserting one’s identity and finding connection through it” as my intervention is about connecting with one’s own identity through language and typography, so this really helped back up my idea.
Also interesting you were talking about postmodernism:
“Post-modernism is deconstructive: it sees subjectivity as a product of power rather that it’s author and agency as power’s way of acting through the individual…it proposes that the selves we think are fixed are actually unstable, fragmented and contradictory”(Aziz, 1997)
This was something that came up in a workshop I attended recently about decolonialism and there’s a connection to typography too, in challenging hierarchy, modernist neutrality etc.
I can’t help but feel some of the most useful things put forward here relate to action based practices designed to bring people closer together. Theory is critical to furthering discourse and is a worthy agent of change but how long does it take to affect it in the masses? The immediacy and efficacy of action based interventions you mention- ‘cultural calendar’ and ‘inclusive mosque’ events have profound and tangible effects on participants. Try for example to ignore the delicious flavours of a different nationality or be numb to something as convivial and essential as sharing food. Do we need to act more and write less?