The Covid pandemic has put a major spotlight on the UK’s inequalities as regards race, gender and class, so it was very appropriate that July’s speaker, Dr Sham Qayyum, spoke about gender and intersectionality.
Intersectionality is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage’.
Or, more simply, ‘the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression and we must consider everything and anything that can marginalise people – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.’ (Womankind Worldwide)
Sham Qayyum, Lecturer in Law at the University of Hertfordshire and a former lecturer at SOAS, is a multi-award winning academic whose expertise includes race, religion, ethnicity and the law. In recognition of his efforts to improve equality and social justice, in 2014 he was given an outstanding scholar award from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The following year he was appointed as a Winfield Fellow by the US Embassy, and in 2016 he received an award recognising his services to community leadership.
Sex versus gender
Sham began by saying that sex is a biological definition, the sexual organs or chromosomes that one is born with. Gender is a social construct. It is not something you are born with but what people label you as, the performance of roles, identities or behaviours, although its meaning has changed over time and space. Sexuality or sexual orientation refers to sexual/romantic patterns of attraction.
Men and women tend to be thought of as having different kinds of brain. The idea of gender still seems rather fixed in relation to one’s identity: as recently as 2017 the former prime minister Theresa May, admittedly at the upper end of the age range, described there being ‘boy jobs and girl jobs’. However, this is changing as a result of greater equality in the workplace and feminist movements over the last century and a half.
Feminism
There have been at least four waves of feminism. One of the earliest was in 1848 as part of the major upheavals in Europe and America. Women were able to come together and fight as a group, notably for political equality. Thomas Paine’s 1791 The Rights of Man demonstrated that there had always been tension about including women’s rights. But published just a year later, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had a profound influence on women’s rights in the 19th century.
A major feminist influence in the second wave was Simone de Beauvoir, best known for her 1949 book The Second Sex. She said, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ and ‘Men confuse their point of view with absolute truth’. She distinguished sex from gender, suggesting that gender is an aspect of identity that is gradually acquired. The problem was to understand why a woman would accept limitations imposed on her by her sex.
In the 1960s-80s era of social and economic justice the personal became political, with a focus on equality. This was epitomised by Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique, in which the woman does all the chores but is afraid to ask, even of herself, ‘Is this all?’
The third wave, 1990s – early 2000s, was when women redefined themselves. A continuation of and reaction against second wave feminism and its white middle class focus, saw a greater emphasis on interconnectional structure – race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and more. Now there was a much deeper focus on queer and post-colonial theories.
Since then there has been much overlap between gender and sex. The emphasis has expanded beyond economics to include the Me Too movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Sharing stories, protest and treatment over the internet has enabled these to have a global impact.
Religion
Liberal Christianity is rooted in secular knowledge. The Bible is a historical document which can and should be subjected to scholarly critique.
The Bible often portrays women as inherently sinful and dangerous. (St Augustine: ‘If woman was not created as a help for man in generating children, what is she for?’) But it also tells the stories of powerful women.
Is Christianity inherently and irrevocably misogynistic, or was the Jesus movement a radical egalitarian society at its roots?
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offers reconstructions of early Christian society based on the gospels and epistles of Paul. For example, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galicians).
Islam: women had a prominent place in Islamic tradition. The first person to hear the call of Islam from the Prophet Muhammad was a woman, Khadijah, and he had several renowned women followers.
According to Amina Wadud, the divine will is limitless, so the more voices and experiences we can incorporate into interpretation and worship, the more fully we will understand God. She is very critical of patriarchal readings of the Koran, which have become dominant for social/historical reasons. She openly challenges how we interpret the Koran and considers that reform must include the way in which we understand God.
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This was a very challenging, not to mention intellectually pummeling talk, but we were very grateful to Sham for opening our eyes to totally new concepts and views on how the world operates.