Topic 6 - Minority Identities, Minority Stress, and Intersectionality Theory Flashcards
what are minority groups?
It is a member of a group that is socially, politically, and/or economically subordinate. We are particularly interested in minorities who are systematically disadvantaged, marginalized, ‘othered’ by the mainstream culture. Basically, we are talking about groups who are subjected to any one of the many ‘isms’ that exist in world.
A minority can be defined on the basis of:
age
disability
appearance
income or housing situation
ethnicity, national/heritage/ancestral origin or immigrant/refugee/asylum-seeker status
sex, pregnancy, marital or relationship status
sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status.
List and describe the six stages of Vivian Cass’s model of identity development
Web Page
confusion → comparison → tolerance → acceptance → pride → synthesis
According to Cass, a minority person’s identity development often begins with an initial stage of questioning and confusion; this is followed by tolerance of their identity that develops into acceptance and eventually pride; and the process ends (in as much as anything developmental can ‘end’) in: integration of their identity with other dimensions of their identity (their minority status is normalised and is no longer the sole or primary defining feature of their identity), and living authentically according to this identity (e.g., coming out to others where it is safe to do so).
Define and distinguish between discrimination, prejudice, stigma, and internalised oppression
Discrimination:
“…happens when a person, or a group of people, is treated less favourably than another person or group because of their background or certain personal characteristics.”
Prejudice:
“…is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group”.
Stigma:
“…is the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance. The stigmatized individual is “reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one”.
Internalized oppression:
“…is the acceptance, by marginalized … populations, of the negative societal beliefs and stereotypes about themselves”
Explain what is meant by the idea that societal disparities cause stress in minority people and their communities
Minority stress is: Minority stress refers to the way that individuals from underrepresented or stigmatized groups experience a number of stressors that directly relate to a minority identity.
Mental illness of the sort catalogued in the DSM, including substance abuse, affective disorders, self-harm and suicide, and personality traits such as neuroticism
Poor educational/employment/career and wealth outcomes
Physical ill-health, injurious and risky behaviours
Meyer and his contemporaries note that, up until the 1970s, many psychiatrists and psychologists took these disparities to be signs of intrinsic problems with an LGB identity; that sexual ‘deviance’ resulted in poor psychosocial functioning. This view was very much the mainstream, even being justified for the inclusion of ‘homosexuality’ in the DSM as a mental disorder. However, Meyer and his contemporaries argued that not only was the justification for this based on tautological (circular) reasoning, it also missed the point:
“The basic issue … is not whether some or many homosexuals can be found to be neurotically disturbed. In a society like ours where homosexuals are uniformly treated with disparagement or contempt—to say nothing about outright hostility—it would be surprising indeed if substantial numbers of them did not suffer from an impaired self-image and some degree of unhappiness with their stigmatized status. … It is manifestly unwarranted and inaccurate, however, to attribute such neuroticism, when exists, to intrinsic aspects of homosexuality itself.”
Explain what is meant by ‘noxious’ social environments in the context of the minority stress model
Generally speaking, minority stress is stress is a form of social stress that is due to a social environment that is noxious for minority people. This is due to:
A fundamental mismatch between the perspective, experiences, and needs of the minority person and the majority/mainstream society within which they reside
A tendency to engage in upwards social comparisons (this is where you compare yourself to people who are more successful than you) that serve to internalize blame for disparities
Exposure to media or influential people who reinforce negative stereotypes of the minority group
Distal stressors are in the form of disadvantage due to discrimination / prejudice / stigma. Some of these stressors are objective in the sense that they do not require or rely on subjective interpretation by minority person; they are real, observable, measurable sources of inequality. Others have a subjective component, such as the anticipation of harassment. They can include:
Exposure to physical threats, violence, maltreatment, harassment
Fear, anxiety and isolation in relation to expectations of discrimination
Conflict with mainstream societal norms
Alienation from and limited access to mainstream social structures (e.g., marriage equality; cis-gender assumptions)
Disadvantage in relation to education and access to health
Family conflict / disapproval
Insecurity in relation to housing / employment
Income / financial disadvantage
Concealment due to fear of rejection (e.g., fear of coming out at home; at work; to friends)
Distal stressors can also take the form of Identity hierarchies within (and criticisms from) one’s own minority group or conflict with other minority groups. We’ll revisit this issue later in the context of intersectionality theory.
Proximal stressors are those that are stem in large part from a person’s minority identity. These stressors are related to one’s cultural self-esteem v self-loathing, one’s identity as a minority person, one’s level of acceptance of stereotypes directed at one’s minority group, one’s relationship with one’s cultural group. Thinking back to Cass’s model of minority identity development, proximal stressors are those associated with poorly or incompletely formed minority identities.
According to Meyer, the following serve as vulnerability factors for minority stress:
Negative valence of identity – this refers to how negative their minority identity is; how strongly they have accepted negative stereotypes about themselves and their group; how severe their negative self-image is, etc.
Prominence (or salience) of minority identity – this refers to how important their minority identity is to them; how invested they are in their identity (the more invested, the more impactful the distal stressors can be)
Simplistic/stereotypic identities – this refers to minority identities that are not fully and positively integrated with their other dimensions of self (referring to Cass’s model, this is the opposite of identity synthesis).
Explain how intersectionality theory expands the concept of minority stress to include multiple minority identities
Also called intersectionality theory, intersectional theory. the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual (often used attributively): Her paper uses a queer intersectionality approach.
US feminism was the first place where intersectionality perspectives gained traction. African American feminists became increasingly frustrated by being represented by white women; with a feminist agenda defined by white women; with the implicit assumption being that once gender rights had been addressed that the ‘struggle’ would be over for women, etc. These implicit assumptions of the feminist cause – taken as a given by many feminists – was problematic for African American feminists for whom gender discrimination was only one facet of their lived experience of oppression.
People experience “identity” as a feature of the individual self but, as intersectionality theory reminds us, social group memberships also reflect power relations among groups. By drawing attention to the collected social groups a person belongs to (i.e., their intersectional position), intersectionality makes visible categories that typically are ignored (e.g., White as a racial social group membership) or totalised (e.g., heteronormativity). By bringing to light these invisible aspects of social group membership, intersectionality reveals the systemic inequalities that create and sustain disparities, showing that intersectional positions are constituted of structural relations of power reflected in tensions between domination/privilege/advantage and subordination/ oppression/disadvantage.”
The danger is that our failure to recognise the existence of and psychosocial consequences of these “interlocking forms of power and privilege” (Shin et al., 2017) in the context of multiple minority identities and cultures has potentially limited the impact of our interventions.
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