I blog at Male Submission Art, host Kink On Tap, and support KinkForAll as much as I can, among more things.
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Posts tagged: privilege
![This simple information graphic depicts various forms of privilege and oppression as a set of multiple spectra (lines) that all intersect at a central point. The ends of each line is labelled with the “privilege” on the top half of the graphic and its corresponding “oppression/resistance” on the bottom half, while the line itself is labeled with the associated “-ism”. While the graphic doesn’t use the term, it can therefore be considered a visualization of kyriarchy.
The various privileges and oppressions along with the “-ism” they relate to, respectively, depicted are as follows:
Male and masculine/Female and feminine - gender “deviant” (Genderism)
Male - Female (Androcentrism)
White - People of color (Racism)
European in origin - Non-European (Eurocentrism)
Heterosexual - Lesbian, gay, bisexual (Heterosexism)
Able-bodied - Persons with disabilities (Ableism)
Credentialed, highly literate - Nonliterate, uncredentialed (Elitism)
Young - old (Ageism)
Attractive - Unattractive (Politics of appearance/lookism)
Upper and upper-middle class - Working class, poor (Class bias/classism)
Anglophones - English as a second language (Language bias)
Light, pale - Dark (Colorism)
Majority religion - Minority religion (Religious Oppression)
Fertile - Nonfertile/Infertile (Pro-natalism)
Due to the complexity of kyriarchy, there are several glaring issues with this visualization. First and foremost, it’s incomplete, arguably inevitably so. Future versions should consider augmenting it with the following additional axes:
Neurotypical - Neuroatypical (Mentalism aka. sanism)
Dominant - Submissive (Domism)
American - Non-American (American exceptionalism/American privilege)
Coupled - Single (Couple privilege/dyadism?)
There are surely many more missing axes, which I encourage you to suggest in the comments or reblogs of this post. (The above are simply examples to showcase the diagram’s incompleteness.)
The other issue with this visualization is that it is dangerously binarist. In trying to elucidate the ways in which, as opinion8d said:
Many of us are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed. They don’t counterbalance each other. [Unsurreptitiously stolen from Crawford, 2006 - Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology.]
the graphic creates a privileged/oppressed dichotomy without acknowledging the fact that both privilege and oppression are context-dependent. For instance, in assigning youth the privileged position along the ageism axis, it makes invisible the various oppressions of adultism. This is why, in discussions of privilege, it is vital to remain cognizant of the difference between categorical and non-categorical privilege.
It is, of course, arguably impossible for anyone to design an info graphic that is 100% complete. Similarly, I think it’s foolhardy to attempt to deconstruct all this incredible complexity without appropriately scoping our conversations, defining our terms, and in the process excluding certain concepts, experiences, or identities from a given (but not every) discussion. And even if it were possible, I don’t think it would be very useful.
As I’ve said numerous times before:
Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.
Many people often get very (and I do mean very) angry at me for using tools like analogy and bisociation to make legible various forms of oppressions (“-isms”) that they do not often understand. For instance, there seems a large contingent of the trans* community (as though “the trans community” were a monolith, which is false, of course) that seems endlessly frustrated with me for my attempts to raise awareness of sexism and its intersection with domism by borrowing from trans experience.
While I understand the frustration, I feel, as I said during my Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011 seminar:
This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again.
Rather than conceptualizing privilege and oppression as a categorical dichotomy, a static and universalizing force, what if privilege were conceptualized as difference plus obligation? That is, since we are all “multiply privileged and multiply oppressed,” in those areas where we have privilege, we ought also couple it to an ethical obligation to use that privilege in the service of those who do not have it.
By the same token, what if oppression were conceptualized as difference plus creativity? Those who resist oppression are inherently creative. Even in acts of destruction, those who resist oppressions are creating spaces for difference, sometimes simply by virtue of their bold acts of survival.
Think about it: privilege is emptying. For instance, what does it mean to be “white”? It means to be not a person of color. What does it mean to be male? It means to be not female, for that would be “unmanly”!
I think that if we were able to internalize a fluid understanding of privilege and oppression, if we could queer the very concepts themselves, we could reliably gain the power to imagine people complexly, and thus treat one another far more humanely than we are often rewarded for (not) doing today.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzm8adhzZc1rnk977o1_1280.png)
This simple information graphic depicts various forms of privilege and oppression as a set of multiple spectra (lines) that all intersect at a central point. The ends of each line is labelled with the “privilege” on the top half of the graphic and its corresponding “oppression/resistance” on the bottom half, while the line itself is labeled with the associated “-ism”. While the graphic doesn’t use the term, it can therefore be considered a visualization of kyriarchy.
The various privileges and oppressions along with the “-ism” they relate to, respectively, depicted are as follows:
- Male and masculine/Female and feminine - gender “deviant” (Genderism)
- Male - Female (Androcentrism)
- White - People of color (Racism)
- European in origin - Non-European (Eurocentrism)
- Heterosexual - Lesbian, gay, bisexual (Heterosexism)
- Able-bodied - Persons with disabilities (Ableism)
- Credentialed, highly literate - Nonliterate, uncredentialed (Elitism)
- Young - old (Ageism)
- Attractive - Unattractive (Politics of appearance/lookism)
- Upper and upper-middle class - Working class, poor (Class bias/classism)
- Anglophones - English as a second language (Language bias)
- Light, pale - Dark (Colorism)
- Majority religion - Minority religion (Religious Oppression)
- Fertile - Nonfertile/Infertile (Pro-natalism)
Due to the complexity of kyriarchy, there are several glaring issues with this visualization. First and foremost, it’s incomplete, arguably inevitably so. Future versions should consider augmenting it with the following additional axes:
- Neurotypical - Neuroatypical (Mentalism aka. sanism)
- Dominant - Submissive (Domism)
- American - Non-American (American exceptionalism/American privilege)
- Coupled - Single (Couple privilege/dyadism?)
There are surely many more missing axes, which I encourage you to suggest in the comments or reblogs of this post. (The above are simply examples to showcase the diagram’s incompleteness.)
The other issue with this visualization is that it is dangerously binarist. In trying to elucidate the ways in which, as opinion8d said:
Many of us are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed. They don’t counterbalance each other. [Unsurreptitiously stolen from Crawford, 2006 - Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology.]
the graphic creates a privileged/oppressed dichotomy without acknowledging the fact that both privilege and oppression are context-dependent. For instance, in assigning youth the privileged position along the ageism axis, it makes invisible the various oppressions of adultism. This is why, in discussions of privilege, it is vital to remain cognizant of the difference between categorical and non-categorical privilege.
It is, of course, arguably impossible for anyone to design an info graphic that is 100% complete. Similarly, I think it’s foolhardy to attempt to deconstruct all this incredible complexity without appropriately scoping our conversations, defining our terms, and in the process excluding certain concepts, experiences, or identities from a given (but not every) discussion. And even if it were possible, I don’t think it would be very useful.
As I’ve said numerous times before:
Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.
Many people often get very (and I do mean very) angry at me for using tools like analogy and bisociation to make legible various forms of oppressions (“-isms”) that they do not often understand. For instance, there seems a large contingent of the trans* community (as though “the trans community” were a monolith, which is false, of course) that seems endlessly frustrated with me for my attempts to raise awareness of sexism and its intersection with domism by borrowing from trans experience.
While I understand the frustration, I feel, as I said during my Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011 seminar:
This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again.
Rather than conceptualizing privilege and oppression as a categorical dichotomy, a static and universalizing force, what if privilege were conceptualized as difference plus obligation? That is, since we are all “multiply privileged and multiply oppressed,” in those areas where we have privilege, we ought also couple it to an ethical obligation to use that privilege in the service of those who do not have it.
By the same token, what if oppression were conceptualized as difference plus creativity? Those who resist oppression are inherently creative. Even in acts of destruction, those who resist oppressions are creating spaces for difference, sometimes simply by virtue of their bold acts of survival.
Think about it: privilege is emptying. For instance, what does it mean to be “white”? It means to be not a person of color. What does it mean to be male? It means to be not female, for that would be “unmanly”!
I think that if we were able to internalize a fluid understanding of privilege and oppression, if we could queer the very concepts themselves, we could reliably gain the power to imagine people complexly, and thus treat one another far more humanely than we are often rewarded for (not) doing today.
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
This three-part Venn diagram titled “The Role of Privilege in Polyamorous Relationship Structures” is part of Franklin Veaux’s incredible sexual informatics visualizations and shows the overlap of “Male Privilege,” “Couple Privilege,” and “Entitlement”:
- At the intersection of male privilege and couple privilege is the one-penis policy (“OPP”), which is a manifestation of sexism that results in common relationship rules of the form “My partners can have other women, but not other men.”
- At the intersection of couple privilege and entitlement is the polyamory veto, which greatly contributes to systemic oppressions against “secondaries” and is typically retroactively justified by those who have “primary relationships” (and thus couple privilege) with the callous notion that “our relationship always comes first.”
- At the intersection of entitlement and male privilege is compulsory polygamy, including secular polygamous practice, and sounds like some shit-face saying things along the lines of, “I get to have a harem, but none of my women can have anyone else.”
- At the intersection of all three of male privilege, couple privilege, and entitlement are unicorn hunters, also known as Hot Bi Babe chasers, which sounds like, “We’re looking for an attractive bisexual woman to move in with us and to be with both of us exclusively. She will be lucky to share in all the love we have to offer her!”
What is too often left unsaid is that these are systemic problems within the polyamory community that the community, as a community, is heavily invested in denying (with the notable exception of Franklin’s visualizations, of course). There is also relatively little work within or directed at the polyamory community challenging these tropes in a forceful way. Franklin’s own writings, such as his recent essay Polyamory: Some Thoughts on Rules, lays a great foundation that I’d love to see advocated far more strongly than I’ve seen it been, to date.
I’m currently musing on these and similar topics in preparation for Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012, where I’ll be giving the conference’s opening keynote. I’ve been fortunate enough to be granted that remarkable opportunity, and at a time in my life when I’m struggling to unpack the effect these things have had on my personally important relationships.
Please let me know if you have any experiences to share that relate to these topics, or come across additional material that has informed your thinking on the matter.
For some of my own thought pieces on polyamory, see:
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
The difference between categorical and non-categorical privilege is that categorical privilege is based on someone belonging to a category, like their race or sex or sexual orientation and non-categorical privilege is a more individualistic concept, denoting that specific people seem to, through their speech or actions, have an easier ride in life than others in some way or another.
[…I]n a forum, the discussion would quickly turn into one of categorical privilege, where people would […] assign her categorical privileges like upper class privilege or heterosexual privilege, citing that some category she falls under is clearly the one and only explanation for her flagrant demonstration of privilege. Some less cogent forum posters devolve into rants about how non-privileged they are and all the anger they want to express no longer just at her but the entire category she falls under (upper class or heterosexual).
The irony I see in this sort of behavior and as a problem with categorical privilege itself is that it is precisely the line of thinking that keeps them non-privileged by their own system. They argue that people assume things about them because of their race or sex or socioeconomic status or sexual orientation, yet here they are working backwards from the privilege to the privileged category and claiming that the entire privileged category has some monolithic uniform experience, and that we can assume they will all act the same way because they come from that category. If we can assume all that, can you blame other people for assuming that non-privileged categories will all act the same way because of the category THEY come from? Does this not reduce to the same problem that spawned the idea of talking about privilege in the first place?
Privilege—my weird take, by Leah McKelvey.
(Very interesting take on the notion of privilege itself as a problematic concept. I think?)