Intersectionality and privilege

I'd never be told to ‘check my privilege’ before. It was an eye opener.

 

It came about because I was challenged to think about intersectionality.

 

Inter-what?? Intersectionality has several meanings, all of which include a sense that ‘just because we are all X, it doesn’t mean we experience being X the same way’. Most meanings of intersectionality also talk of stigma and oppression, and how the totality of who we are will affect how we experience oppression in relation to any characteristic. For example, most writing about Black oppression is written from a man’s perspective, but Black oppression may be experienced very differently by a woman. Most writing about oppression of women is written from a White perspective, but oppression for being a woman may be experienced very differently if you are Black. Most writing about being disabled is written from a White man’s perspective and that’s not terribly helpful if you are a disabled Black woman.

 

You see, I have a number of stigmatising characteristics.

• I'm fat.
• I'm a woman (and to make that more stigmatising, I don't even behave like one - I don't wear make up or do my hair or nails).
• I have a long term mental health condition (entertainingly my other selves reject the ‘mental health condition’ label - we rather enjoy being a collective).
• I have a number of physical health problems that interfere with everyday life.
• I don't have a career or a proper job.
• I’m over 50

But despite those stigmas, I don't seem to experience the oppression that many people with one or more of those characteristics experience.

 

It's possible I've internalised oppression (so don't see oppression for what it is). And it's possible that I am in denial or that I subconsciously use avoidance tactics to make sure in never in a situation where those characteristics are relevant.

 

But I genuinely think I have avoided being oppressed (even though I have definitely come across people/circumstances that would have oppressed me - if I'd let them).

 

Pause, think:  If I'd let them….

 

And that's why I need to check my privilege. How privileged am I if I can avoid being oppressed?

 

I have a number of non-stigmatised characteristics, some of which confer privileges in contemporary Welsh culture.

• I'm white 
• I'm middle class  
• I’m well-educated 
• I speak (some) Welsh 
• I may be a woman, but I went to a majority boys independent school where I was never encouraged to see myself as different from the boys  
• I have a comfortable income (courtesy of husband) - oh, yes, there's another, I'm married to a man. 
• I'm not a carer of young children or older or disabled family members. 
• Oh, and I'm Christian – although based on how people react when I say that, I'm not sure whether that's stigmatising or privileging these days!

 

I think three features of my life stand out as privileged characteristics that over-ride the potential oppression of my stigmatising characteristics and allow me to refuse to let others oppress me:

• I went to Oxford University.  
• I do not rely on the benefits system. 
• I face life shoulder-to-shoulder with an amazing other half.

 

The Oxford University thing is so many privileges rolled into one.

 

The one-to-one tutorial system means I was taught to think, evaluate, critique, argue and stand up for my opinion.

 

The majority male environment continued the pattern set at secondary school of seeing myself as one of the crowd rather than ‘a girl’.

 

I knocked about with people who took power and privilege for granted, and who opened doors for me to see inside the powerful elite world of the very rich and very influential. Some of that confidence and assumption that you are worthy of respect rubbed off on me.

 

While I did not consider going to Oxford made me better than others, it was a very useful status symbol to bring out casually when needed. I tried to use it very sparingly. But it meant I got to talk to a senior government official in Hong Kong to sort a problem when a friend (a Filipina maid) told me about an issue affecting her and most of her friends.

 

Not relying on benefits. That is a huge privilege for anyone with long term mental ill health.

 

[my committee are likely to shoot me if I keep saying that – we would say: ‘for anyone who is neurodiverse’ because that’s the narrative that makes sense to us. It allows us to be powerful in being different, not powerful despite being different].

 

Back to the “not relying on benefits”. Having income (albeit mostly from being married to someone with a good income) means no debilitating fights with officialdom. No need to focus on what I’m not able to do, and why I’m ‘broken’ so I can fill in interminable forms. No constant fear of something going wrong with the system and being left destitute. No media portraying me as a charity case at best, and a work-shy, cheating, scrounging, fraudster at worst. I can’t imagine the day in, day out grind of negative messages about people who rely on benefits. It was bad enough when I was a part-time wheelchair user. I confess there were times I stayed sat in my chair in public because I couldn’t face another round of explanations, stares and tuts if I stood up to reach the can of beans on the top shelf in the supermarket.

 

Facing life shoulder-to-shoulder.

 

I don’t think it actually matters that my amazing other half is a man and that we are married. I think that what matters is that I am facing life with someone by my side. We have committed to each other, and we have honoured that commitment to each other for over 25 years. That level of commitment reduces the fear. It means in the self-doubting moments (of which there are many), I am reassured by someone I trust of the wonderfulness of being who I am. 

 

Thank you to the writer on intersectionality who reminded me to ‘check my privilege’.

 

Stopping to check has made me cringe to think of the times I have glibly told other women who share my ‘committee-in-our-head’ way of life that they just need to re-frame how they see themselves (ie think in terms of neurodiversity) and their oppression and stigma will start to recede as people interact with them differently. That might work if you have my privileges. But a new narrative won’t overcome the soul-destroying weight of relying on benefits and facing life alone. I have some apologies to make.

 

As I go into the future, I will be more aware of my privilege and my responsibility to use my privileges wisely. Privileges doesn’t mean I’m better. But it certainly means I get more doors opened for me.  My task is to get my foot in that door then hold the door open for anyone else who wants to get inside.  I wonder how the PhD can help with that.

 

Mindfulness - for those mindless stigma moments

Mindfulness is a potentially powerful way to still an unruly chaotic mind, ground during dissociative or flashback phases and pull out of the "I'm useless, everything is wrong" downward spirals. And for me at least, it works (sometimes, as one of an arsenal of tools).

Looking back, it's ironic that I learned mindfulness because mental health was seen as my problem. It was certainly my life getting screwed up, so in a very real way it was my problem. But in another sense, my mental health was problematic because of other people's response to me.

I am different. I hope I will always be different. I love myself as I am. And in learning that, my life stopped being screwed up - I stopped having a mental health problem and simply had a mental health difference. It wasn't mindfulness that got me to this point - that's another story for another day.

My point is that, these days, my biggest use of mindfulness is to handle other people's reactions when I stand up as someone with a long term mental health difference.

This is Mental Health Awareness Week. It has the theme of mindfulness.

Please promote awareness.

Please promote mindfulness as one tool among many.

Most of all, please,remember that most of the disabling, screwing-lives-up side of mental health is down to attitudes to mental health, not a mental health condition.

Four lives, one body

I envy secret superheros and villains. They only have two lives. You know, the "by day he is..., but by night..."

I have at least four lives, depending on how I think of them.

• Postgraduate student
• Hub at the heart of a family/household
• Community activist
• Worker-director

Oh, make that at least five lives, because sometimes I like to flop in a corner and just be me.

So far, so normal for many older postgrad students. We often blog about balancing and juggling, and avidly read tips on how to prioritise. It's not easy, but we do it.

But I like to push the boundaries a bit further. As part of the richness of being me, I live and work as a committee within my head. This way of being brings immense strengths as long as the committee are able to function as a whole.

Living as a committee is sometimes termed a disorder and can be seen as a stigma. But that implies there's something intrinsically wrong with living this way. It is definitely a different way of living. For example, sometimes I need to switch off from engaging with the people outside my head before answering a particular question because I have to do a quick check of how we all want to answer. But it is also a supremely effective way of thinking and working. How else could I/we bring multiple, overlapping but different, perspectives on whatever I am researching? How else could I/we divide up thinking tasks within my/our head and process multiple strands of thinking at the same time? (That is the coolest aspect of being me, even if it goes with a slight tendency to forget that I only have one body, which brings me back to the importance of "me" time and looking after ourselves...).

It can be time-consuming making sure all is well within, but at least it means I avoid the standard mature postgrad challenge of prioritising "me" time. I know that if I don't, I have about six weeks before anarchy will reign within. Which, ironically, probably makes me less prone to imploding than most multi-tasking postgrad students; I simply don't have the luxury of being able to push so hard that I risk burning myself out. I know where that leads and I/we don't want to go there again.

I pulled this post just before hitting "publish" last week, because I was worried about even this minimal self-disclosure about having a mind that works differently from most peoples. But I've reflected on the risks and decided I'm willing to take them, so here we go.

There's a lot written about the risk of self-disclosure in academic life when your brain is wired differently from what's accepted as "normal". But I don't get it, at least not within a qualitative research world where "normal" is as meaningless as any other statistical term, It seems more of an asset than a problem. If there's one thing that frustrates me, it's not being able to get my head round something, that feeling that I'm missing something obvious.

I'm curious as to what you will make of what I've said - that I'm different, that I hesitated before disclosing it - and that I see it as a "disclosure" rather than casual conversation.

So if anyone feels like satisfying my curiosity, please go ahead :)

Why I pulled today's draft blog

I had a lovely blog lined up for today. And then, at the last minute, I pulled it.

I'm ambivalent about whether pulling it was the right thing to do. And I can't quite get my head round my own reasoning for why I pulled it.

I know that the reason is to do with the topic - mental health. And I think a conversation I've just had with a freelancer probably explains my ambivalence about whether or not to publish the blog I had lined  up for today.

I've been doing simultaneous translation from 'policy-conference-speak' into clear English summary. Someone asked me if I did similar work around mental health. Once I'd made a personal reference to mental health, that person then talked about their own experience - which included losing a contract when they had a short illness break related to their mental health. They suspected if they'd lied and said it was really bad flu, then they'd still have the contract.

Yep, that short exchange underlined that, even in circles that talk about equality, personal disclosure is still risky. And it's extra risky via a blog because once it is "out there", you can't take it back or control who can see it.

I can't be doing with stigma, and I find that talking casually, one to one, tends not to be stimatising or uncomfortable at all. I feel that by talking opening and casually, I am helping make a world where mental health loses its stigma. So it seemed natural to carry that into the blogosphere. But....

I think the "to publish or not" comes down to whether the best way to challenge stigma is to hit it head on and hopefully survive, or whether to quietly work away undercover. I have the luxury of being able to choose whether to talk to people about something that could lead to stigma and discrimination, or whether to remain undercover. Others don't have that luxury.

I still don't know whether I will reschedule what would have been today's blog. I still don't know whether my self-disclosure would change anything positively or negatively, either for me or as part of the wider goal of eradicating stigma.

Aaargh!! What kind of world do we live in when what felt like a bit of simple, bloggy, transparency turns into a major, value-laden, stigma-risking dilemma?