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re-thinking intersectionality

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Feminist Review

Abstract

Intersectionality has become the primary analytic tool that feminist and anti-racist scholars deploy for theorizing identity and oppression. This paper exposes and critically interrogates the assumptions underpinning intersectionality by focusing on four tensions within intersectionality scholarship: the lack of a defined intersectional methodology; the use of black women as quintessential intersectional subjects; the vague definition of intersectionality; and the empirical validity of intersectionality. Ultimately, my project does not seek to undermine intersectionality; instead, I encourage both feminist and anti-racist scholars to grapple with intersectionality's theoretical, political, and methodological murkiness to construct a more complex way of theorizing identity and oppression.

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Notes

  1. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991 to replace retired Justice Thurgood Marshall (the first black Supreme Court Justice). Later that year, Anita Hill testified at Thomas' confirmation hearing, alleging that Thomas sexually harassed her when the two worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Thomas denied the allegations, and famously declared that he was being made the victim of a ‘high-tech lynching’. Thomas was confirmed by the Senate in October 1991. The Thomas confirmation hearing has been of particular interest to black feminists, who have examined and debated the reasons for the pervasive cultural doubt surrounding Hill's allegations. For more on the Thomas confirmation hearings, see Morrison (1992).

  2. O.J. Simpson is a former professional football player accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. The Simpson trial became a cultural spectacle that implicated race from the very beginning. When Simpson's attorney, Johnnie Cochran, argued that police bias tainted evidence collection practices, the defence team was accused of ‘playing the race card’. Moreover, the Simpson case is often read as culturally significant because of the vast differences between how blacks and whites interpreted Simpson's guilt. When Simpson was acquitted, media captured pictures of celebratory blacks and distraught whites, emphasizing the trial as a racially divisive site.

  3. In 2003, Kobe Bryant, a professional basketball player, was accused of sexual assault. Bryant insisted that the sex between him and the alleged victim was consensual. When Bryant's attorneys emphasized the alleged victim's behaviour and reputation, she elected not to participate in the prosecution any longer. Later the state dropped the case.

  4. Wing is not alone in this tendency to romanticize black women's lived experience as a site of ‘strength’ and ‘transcendence’. Alice Walker's earlier definition of ‘womanism’ as: ‘A black feminist or feminist of color … A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. … Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless’ (Walker, 1983: xi–xii) has a strong resonance with Wing's interest in poetry as a tool for theorizing black women's experiences. Walker is particularly interested in drawing on black women's experiences as a locus of theory-building; it is precisely because ‘womanism’ is rooted in ‘music’, ‘dance’, ‘moon’, and ‘Spirit’, and in the experiences of the ‘Folk’ that it connects the personal, the political, and the practical, privileging experience as a significant form of knowledge.

  5. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains intersectionality noting that ‘the concept of intersectionality [is used] to denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women's employment experiences’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 1244). Yet later she notes ‘my focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 1245). Thus, the text rests on an internal paradox: intersectionality as a theory about black women's experiences and intersectionality as a theory of ‘multiple grounds of identity’.

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Nash, J. re-thinking intersectionality. Fem Rev 89, 1–15 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.4

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