honestly you guys need to stop misapplying intersectional theory. since you base your ideas on identity politics you seem to think that each “identity” holds the same weight, but in reality our lives are determined by race, class, and gender (and also ability and nationality). but these things don’t have equal predictive effects on people’s lives. you guys seem to think that if a working-class person of color is also “neurotypical” and able-bodied and cishet that the count of “privileges” to “disprivileges” makes them “less oppressed” than a white person who is not-cis, not-straight, and not-neurotypical at the same time, but that’s absolutely not how oppression works. trying to quantify oppression “levels” means you’ve already lost. even then, we have to understand this through historical transformations and labor relations under capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
wrt to the working-class cishet poc, their cishet status doesn’t really grant them grand material benefits at the end of the day. they’re still oppressed by the state and denied access to material goods. like, cathy cohen talked about this in her pivotal essay in which she criticized queer theory for this exact dichotomy (queer vs cishet) in her essay “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens”.
whereas even if a white person is a woman and also lgbt, their race is a huge shield against certain forms of material violence that cishet men of color face despite being cishet or male.
oppression is continuous and sustained and it’s determined by labor relations/class relations. if there is no class or race in your analysis then it is faulty.
we have to analyze these things through a materialist lens. so for example, a white lgbt woman may be oppressed because she is denied access to material goods either because she’s a woman (so being denied employment bc she doesn’t wear makeup, for instance) or because she’s lgbt (so being denied housing, for instance). but is she susceptible to sustained poverty, or environmental/biological racism, or urban racism, or biometric surveillance, or state violence? probably not. class has to factor into this.
a working class cishet poc who may appear neurotypical and able-bodied (i say appear bc it’s necessary to chart the physical and mental effects of poverty onto a person and that doesn’t become immediately apparent) is not less oppressed or more privileged because they have “three” or “four” privileges (cis, het, able-bodied, neurotypical). let’s say they live in flint, michigan. they are targeted by an onslaught of environmental racism that has trickled down into the very cells of their body. so in addition to living in abject poverty, which the state ignores and even exacerbates, the environmental racism that characterized the flint water crisis affects them physically and psychologically on a daily basis. this prevents them from working, from providing for their children, from saving and investing. they have low assets and disposable income. their income probably decreases because of outrageous healthcare costs and their difficulty working due to health problems.
their supposed “neurotypical” status or their cishet status neither shield them from this violence nor gain them any benefits. on the contrary, a white lgbt woman living in a middle-class town may have “fewer” privileged identities (if you’re using the identity politics privilege chart) but her life isn’t impacted by environmental racism or police brutality or class violence, and so she can navigate her material reality with far greater ease. of course she can still be exposed to the violence of misogyny and homophobia, but that violence is quite unlikely to come from that working-class cishet poc in flint, michigan.
we can an apply a similar analysis to the dakota access pipeline and how that is an example of the settler colonial state oppressing indigenous people. it doesn’t matter if the indigenous person in question is straight or not - their people are universally targeted by environmental racism and state violence.
so when like you guys call cishet poc “heteronormative” or cishet moc “patriarchal” it makes no sense bc they aren’t oppressing you and if they are enacting homophobic or patriarchal violence it’s probably and primarily against women or LGBT people in THEIR community, not against white women or white LGBT people.
sure they can be homophobic or misogynistic. but if we’re going to analyze something such as “straight” privilege or “male” privilege in their context, we’d have to compare it against lgbt poc and women of color, not against the lgbt community or women at large. and that’s when you see like cishet moc being privileged against lgbt woc.
oppression is not a simplistic algebra equation. it’s not like “okay, i have three privileges, and you have four, so your privileges cancel out your oppression”. it’s a complicated, interconnected matrix, primarily determined by race and class (and gender).
