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Regional secretary with the National Education Union
What is ‘intersectionality?’
Although originally pitched against inequality, intersectionality theory eventually lays the groundwork for 'diversity' to become the watchword of corporate ethics, not a way of uniting oppressed identities against capitalism explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

AN EARLIER Q&A on identity politics argued that there’s a sense in which all politics are to do with identity.

We all have multiple “identities,” some of them in tension. Some — our sex, ethnicity, family background — we’re born with. Others — job, hobbies, parenthood, age — we acquire in life.

Many of us suffer disability of some sort. For each of us, such identities interact to create a whole which is richer and more complex than each of its component parts. No one of them totally defines an individual.

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