ABSTRACT
The identity group women of color remains one of the most elusive and difficult to understand because of both its specificity and its breadth. There is an ethical and political urgency to center the experiences of women of color because the absence of such focus results in unpredictable manipulations and strategies that enforce one identifying feature while oppressing the other. Intersectionality is one of the initial concepts to articulate the experiences of women of color, but the concept has been much criticized recently. This chapter aims to salvage the notion.
To better conceptualize the intersectional identities of women of color, it will be proposed to understand experience through a phenomenological structure. The experiences of women of color illuminate such complex, strategic, and intersectional relations between different identity features; hence, experience needs better understanding. The more recent translation of intersectionality anchors it with standpoint theory as a means of coalition building. Emily S. Lee utilizes Patricia Hill Collins and Anna Carastathis’s concept of the possibility of “heterogeneous commonality,” which acknowledges both internal heterogeneity and external commonality among women of color. To better understand the possibility of heterogenous commonality and avoid foundational references to experience, this chapter presents the phenomenological understanding of the structure of experience as constituted by three distances: (1) between the subject and the world in time, (2) between undergoing and reflecting on the experience, and (3) between the experience and the language with which to understand and convey the experience. This understanding of the ontological structure of experience helpfully illustrates how women of color, through their complex and “dense” experiences but without foundational references to them are well situated to utilize their heterogenous commonality for coalition building.
