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Argument, Think Autism Melbourne 2026
The politics of exceptionalism and the limits of intersectionality
In short
Maria Dimopoulos asked whether intersectionality was being turned into a new hierarchy. Dr Kim Gordon answered with a critique of Western either or thinking and a call to collective action.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
The hardest question at the identity and intersectionality panel at Think Autism Melbourne on 30 May 2026 came from the audience. Maria Dimopoulos, chief executive of the Settlement Council of Australia, spoke after the panel had spent more than half an hour on how autism frameworks miss people at the margins and asked whether the language of intersectionality itself was being bent back into the hierarchy it was meant to expose.
She began by citing a scholar she said had been incredibly influential on her own thinking. Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson, she said, would tell her that intersectionality is a post colonial concept, one that emerged only because white people cannot work out the value of human difference, and so attach a hierarchy to it that creates inequity and is then embedded in systems. Dimopoulos thanked the panel for centring First Peoples’ world views, and said non-Indigenous people could learn a great deal from what had been said about the ranking of human value.
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Sources the story draws on
- Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism (20th anniversary edition) (opens in a new tab), Australian Human Rights Commission, It Stops With Me resource hub (book listing)
- Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (U Minnesota Press, 2015) (opens in a new tab), New Books Network
- Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics (opens in a new tab), University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, p. 139 (Kimberlé W. Crenshaw); record in Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive
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