Abstract

As a US woman of color and queer-centered critique, this chapter analyses coalitionary attempts that merely list oppressions yet reproduce them in their own failure to seriously engage the thought emanating from marginalized intellectuals, even within Third World and US people-of-color communities. To take seriously knowledge from negatively racialized and gendered US women of color is to engage that important bibliography/body of thought but also to examine and transform oneself. The essay specifically argues for recognition of the historic decolonial analyses of double, triple, and multiple oppressions and the “simultaneity of oppressions” theorized by US women of color in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s critiquing discourses privileging a single “key” contradiction rather than the complex “simultaneity of oppressions” that render class, “racial,” gender, and sexuality analyses more appropriately complex and useful. I also argue for a profound solidarity based on a politics of identification with the otherness of the other as an imbricated, interdependent part of our own selves and being even as it is a recognition of the irreducible difference of the other as such.