Last week, Kate talked about an activity she developed to help make the idea of intersectionality more concrete for her students. I’ve love this since the first time I heard about this from her, but I don’t have a kitchen handy for cake making and baking, so I’ve adapted it to fit a more traditional classroom setting.
First, I assign some quick videos and simple readings to students to help them prepare for our discussion of this topic. I often have them read the “Intersectionality for Beginners” post from the Everyday Sociology Blog. Kate has also recommended a post from Everyday Feminism called “Privilege 101”. I also tend to assign a few short video introductions to the topic. Three of my favorite are Kimberlé Crenshaw defining intersectionality, an overview of intersectionality produced by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a video called “Intersectionality 101” from Learning for Justice.
Second, I do a mini-lecture about what intersectionality is and isn’t. This leads to me talking about the beaded necklace and cake analogies that Kate covered last week. Rather than have students actually string beads and mix cake ingredients, I just talk through the two analogies.
The key focus here is helping them understand that from an intersectional perspective you can’t just look at one aspect of identity as people can’t pull one of the “beads” off the strand and just have a gender or a nationality. Instead, people are the cakes where you can never again separate out the ingredients, you have to consider them all in relation to each other.
At this point, however, we’re still talking about things at an individual level. So this is where the oven comes in. I ask them what temperature is generally used to bake a cake. Usually someone comes up with 350 degrees, so I use that as my starting point. I ask them to imagine what a cake is like when baked for the appropriate amount of time (I usually use 30 minutes as our time frame). They usually talk about it in positive ways, and if there’s a baker in the room, you usually get some really great descriptions. I then ask them to think about a cake baked for 30 minutes at 500 degrees. When I ask them to describe that cake, they universally agree that it’s likely to be burned and unappetizing. I then ask them to imagine a cake backed for 30 minutes as 200 degrees. When they describe this one, they talk about it being undercooked, still liquid in the middle, etc.
I then connect the oven and it’s varying times and temperatures to the social forced that impact people’s experiences of the world. The forces that cook a cake(e.g., heat, time) are analogous to the forces that we content with every day: sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, racism, ableism, etc. This then leads into a discussion of those social forces, how people may experience them differently, which are more visible and which are more hidden, and so one.
Admittedly, things aren’t as concrete as in Kate’s classroom where they can actually play a role in the making of the cake, but it still ends up being very memorable. Students bring this up throughout the semester, and I’ve had more than one student tell me they continued to think about and use this analogy outside of the semester when the took the course with me where this was covered.
If like me, you loved the idea of Kate’s activity but weren’t sure how you’d be able to execute it at your school, try my less hands on approach. I think it can still be very memorable and effective! It’s also more adaptable and can be used in smaller and larger classes, online and in-person classes, and discussion-based and lecture-based classes.