Kirsten Gillibrand’s Invocation of ‘Intersectionality’ Backfires
On December 4, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted something that was consistent with her established mode of communication: It was self-serving; it helped to distance her from her former identity as a lawyer for Big Tobacco and as a Democratic congresswoman from a conservative district who had supported gun rights and opposed any form of amnesty for illegal immigrants; and it wrapped her in the banner of feminism’s most urgent positions.
The tweet—which one can imagine a young staffer enthusiastically proposing—read:
The Future is
Female
Intersectional
Powered in our belief in one another
And we’re just getting started
For people who encountered the tweet but were not familiar with the slogan about the female future—which began as in the 1970s (those were the days) and is now the kind of feel-good feminist slogan that’s printed on baby clothes and sold in posh boutiques in my Los Angeles neighborhood—it was into outer space, was by conservatives as one more sign of the feminist apocalypse, when men will divide their time between buying tampons for their female masters and writing themselves out of history.
