Last month, I gave a talk called ‘Digital Intersectional Feminism’ at a summer school for PhDs, at the Technical University in Vienna. The group had a good gender and disciplinary balance, and many participants from the Global South. During the discussion, an older, white, male professor of computer science insisted on jumping in, even though a young woman had patiently been waiting her turn. He wanted me – personally – to stop the English-speaking world from using the term ‘intersectionality’ because in German it sounds like ‘sex with dead people’.
I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve given many talks and lectures, over many years of teaching and attending academic conferences and workshops. Student questions always have to be taken seriously, and the adage ‘no such thing as a stupid question’ applies. This is not always true of one’s peers. Some don’t really ask questions as such, but use the opportunity to tell the audience about their own brilliant work, implicitly or explicitly reproaching the speaker for not referring to it. Dutch people have clearly been trained to begin with something positive, which often sounds formulaic. In the case of the English, the more positive they are with their opening words, the more devastating their question will be. There are also disciplinary differences. Philosophers will cheerfully explain why your assumptions are completely wrong, and equally cheerfully buy you a drink after the session.
Sometimes it’s hard to read an audience, especially in an international and multidisciplinary context. Concepts and jargon don’t always travel easily between academic disciplines or spoken languages. But intersectionality is really not difficult. Instead of focusing on a single feature, we need to look at everything that makes up who we are, including gender, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, dis/ability, education and more. These operate in combination to form different experiences of oppression or privilege.
After my talk in Vienna, other German speakers told me that intersectionality really doesn’t sound like what this older man suggested. It’s a long word, seven syllables, but German has lots of long words. Given Vienna is the birthplace of Freud and psychoanalysis, maybe I should look for some other explanation.
Sally Wyatt, professor of Digital Cultures