There is a peculiar kind of exhaustion in asking for something ordinary and discovering that, before the conversation can begin, you must explain what sort of person you are. Then explain why the answer usually offered will not work. Then start again with somebody else.
Consider a woman with a disability trying to resolve a problem at work. It is possible for the conversation about disability to overlook how she is treated as a woman, while the conversation about women’s experiences assumes circumstances that do not fit hers. Each discussion may be well intentioned. She is still left doing the work of bringing them together.
The Centro di Ateneo per i Diritti Umani reports new UN guidelines concerning intersectional discrimination against women with disabilities. The supplied report does not establish the guidelines’ detailed provisions or what their practical effects will be. But the subject deserves attention beyond the language of international institutions.
“Intersectional” can sound remote from ordinary life. The difficulty it names is quite immediate: a person’s circumstances do not arrive separately, ready for the appropriate department.
There is a reasonable complication here. Institutions need categories. Without them, it becomes harder to identify patterns, assign responsibilities or decide what provision is needed. Simply asking everyone to recognise everyone else’s uniqueness offers little help to the person trying to organise a service with limited time and money.
Yet categories ought to help us notice more. When they become reasons to disregard whatever falls outside them, their usefulness has turned into an obstacle.
For ordinary life, this suggests a fairly demanding responsibility. When someone says an arrangement does not work for her, can we stay with the explanation long enough to understand the difficulty? At work, or within a family, familiarity can make us surprisingly incurious. We think we already know what someone needs.
Listening alone will not resolve discrimination. Sometimes a decision, an arrangement or a distribution of responsibility has to change. The consequential moment comes after the explanation, when those who have heard it decide whether the inconvenience of changing something will remain theirs, or be handed straight back to the woman who asked.