“Here, take a look at this” the activist brusquely instructed me. It was 2009 and I hadn’t been on Twitter for five minutes and already I was stuck in one of the endless storms systems that circulate around the place. I clicked through and met with a privilege checklist. Was I white? Tick. Was I a man? Yep. Well, the strong implication of her tone was, because my pale, privileged carcass did not bear the scars of multiple oppressions I had very little worthwhile to say. Not the best way to greet someone expressing solidarity with and arguing for trans rights activism, but there you go.

I had encountered something similar during my forays into postmodern feminist literature. With the dissolution of ‘woman’ as a unified theoretical subject of the women’s movement, the epistemological hunt was on for a new philosophical foundation. For some comrades, this became the hunt for an ever-purer revolutionary subject. Are you a white woman? Well, black women have it worse than you. Are you a black woman? Well, lesbian black women deal with a whole load of additional crap. And so on. It rests on an idea of situated knowledge, that the more you are oppressed along multiple axes, the more your perspective reveals society as a patriarchal, racist, unjust mess. Or, the more you suffer, the more valid your views and, by extension, the better suited it is to act as epistemological grounds for critiquing society and culture as a whole. Continue reading →