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I was about twelve at the time and I didn’t know the Spanish word for condemned. Hernández remembers her mother asking her what the official said in Spanish, but she does not tell her. While scribbling notes about the structure and integrity of the house, he muttered “this house should be condemned” (xi). She tells a short story about how a town official came to her childhood home in New Jersey. Hernández starts her book by revealing her writing process and her need to testify her experience. She offers a nuanced and complex story of her upbringing and education, her family and cultural heritage, and her experiences as a writer. In her debut memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernández addresses biphobia, classism, racism and sexism. In essence, Hernández and Gay are asking us to remember their names and stories, forging a link between the reader and intersections of oppression that are often overlooked. Although she does not explicitly discuss memoir writing, her points about oral story-telling and media coverage are applicable to discussing intersectional writers. All she asked of her audience to do was simply remember the names of the women impacted by this violence. Crenshaw posits the importance of story-telling as the difference between life and death there is so much power in the words and recognition of these women’s deaths and the political and social repercussions of them. Crenshaw’s Ted Talk is an extremely powerful and thought-provoking meditation on how Black women’s stories are forgotten, their names hidden from the public discourse, and their lives lost in the shadows of systemic racism and sexism. The framework of intersectionality enables us to look at racism and sexism, not as two entirely divorced concepts, but concepts that can overlay and complicate one another. Police brutality against women and African-American men does not necessarily encompass the intersection of simultaneous oppressions that women of color face when they are threatened with violence. Crenshaw talks about the concept of intersectionality as a framing in which we can view the world. She draws our attention to the exorbitant amount of Black women who are murdered by the police, pointing out how although police brutality against African-American men is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed, the media often overlooks how many African-American women, who stand within the intersection of gender and race discrimination, are killed by the police. In her Ted Talk entitled “The Urgency of Intersectionality” Kimberle Crenshaw discusses two poignant themes: intersectionality and storytelling. Their lives and experiences are linked to the multiplicity of their identities, and they derive meaning from their memories with trauma and discrimination to create a powerful, compelling and cathartic form of activism that values the voices of those who stand within these intersections.
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Gay is also a woman of color, and her experiences are dictated not only by being a Black woman, but by being a Black woman whose body takes up space and is subjected to public ridicule. That feeling of not being able to fit into any one box, whether it is just ‘woman’ or ‘person of color,’ enables them to recontextualize their lives within the framework of intersectionality Hernández is not just a woman, but a woman of color, and she is not just a woman of color, but the daughter of working class immigrants. Their queerness comes not only from their sexualities, but also from their intersectionality as a whole–they are between worlds, culturally and socially. Both writers’ identities set them apart from their white and often male heterosexual counterparts in academia and the workplace. Her Haitan parents and middle-class upbringing play a significant role in her grapplings with her body and her trauma. Likewise, in her memoir, Hunger, Roxane Gay discusses her intersectionality in being an overweight, bisexual, woman of color. In A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernández writes about her experiences growing up in a Cuban-Colombian family from New Jersey, tracking her life through the ways in which her identities weave together: she is a bisexual, bilingual, second generation immigant who finds herself caught between her family’s cultural heritage and her life as a queer feminist writer.