Intersectionality as a feminist social critique of oppression, power, and agency.

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the issue of women’s empowerment and try to reconceptualize in a feminist perspective the issues of oppression, power, and agency through the methodology of intersectionality and of the analysis of the matrix of domination. According to the intersectionality approach, each woman is embedded in a matrix of domination made of laws and institutions (structural domain), bureaucracy (disciplinary domain), cultural and ideological (hegemonic domain) and influenced by everyday interactions (interpersonal domain). However, a woman’s capacity to resist, accommodate, act independently, or become an accomplice to it depends also on the factors characterizing her singular being: her class, race, religion, marital status, age, nationality, etc. Within this perspective there are few pure victims or oppressors for each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which form everyone’s lives. This creates the potential for both multiple and conflicting experiences of subordination and power that requires a wider-ranging and complex terrain of analysis. This paper tries to understand how oppression, power, and agency are related as well as investigating woman's ability to oppose it, make accommodations, take independent action, or collaborate with it. The matrix envisaged within an intersectional analysis builds upon an expanded Foucauldian understanding of power, whose exercise is deeply connected to the production of discourses of truth and moves the theoretical analysis away from a binary conception of power (dominant-subordinate), questioning, at the same time, dominant universalizing truth claims. Keywords: Intersectionality, Power; Oppression, Agency, Foucault.