Book Review: Jessica Collier and Corrina Eastwood (eds); foreword by Savneet K. Talwar, Intersectionality in the Arts Psychotherapies

Abstract

I am writing this review during the heatwave of summer of 2022, at a time when as a White European cisgendered financially secure gay woman, it has become impossible to ignore the links between the causes of climate change, racism, war, disease, sexual violence, the price of oil, monetary inflation, hunger, climate and global injustice. The facts of this matter have created a sense of urgency to do something that is on a different scale to previous political activism I have been drawn to. The modern expression ‘woke’ as originating in ‘woke up’ could not be more apt. But who is it that needs to wake up? The recent report of a survey compiled by members of the British Association of Music Therapy (BAMT) provides an invaluable snapshot of the music therapy profession in the United Kingdom during 2020 (Langford et al., 2020). The demographic information collated shows the profession as largely made up of White individuals (86%) trained in classical music (87%), who received private paid for music lessons (91.16%) and were not first-generation graduates (59.53%). The observation that the profession has historically been represented by White classical musicians and that this continues to be the case should come as no surprise to anyone currently living in the United Kingdom. The cost of this intersection of Whiteness, economic security, together with the dominance of Western classical music, means that for any number of reasons, in recent decades it is likely that the profession has lost a wide range of diverse knowledge, skills and experience beyond White culture, even before potential therapists are accepted on to a training. The problem with this state of affairs is the problem with any dominant culture, professional or otherwise; that is the tendency for insiders to stay comfortably within and to perpetuate its value systems, generally to believe its truths, and to hide from any notion of power or privilege. The impact of this tendency upon practice has begun to be challenged widely over the past two decades, and in recent years especially in music therapy literature published in North America therapy by therapists of colour. However, it must be acknowledged that change towards a widespread consciousness and acknowledgement of the impact of colour and class privilege upon the directions our profession have taken, and who this concerns, has been slow (Coombes and Tsiris, 2020; Gipson et al., 2020; Langford et al., 2020; Norris, 2020a, 2020b; Sajnani et al., 2017; Silveira, 2020; Webb, 2019). Intersectionality in the Arts Psychotherapies is a timely exploration of clinical practice and practitioners that directly addresses many of these issues and it is theoretically well informed and reflexive at every turn. The notion of intersectionality is taken from many varied sources, as Editors Jessica Collier and Corrina Eastwood write, ‘the primary concerns. . . were born of activism, and social justice work prompted by social inequalities’ (p. 21). The term was first used in the famous essay from 1989 by lawyer, academic and Black feminist writer Kimberle Crenshaw. Crenshaw (1989) used case law history to demonstrate how Black women are rendered invisible, ‘theoretically erased’, where arguments for and against anti-discrimination are predicated upon either gender or race but not both. While fully recognising Crenshaw’s contribution, Collier and Eastwood also highlight the way in which ‘intersectionality as critical inquiry’ has become distanced from ‘intersectional practice drawn from grassroots politics’ (p. 23). They write,