Intersectionality

Though it has been nearly thirty years since the inception of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality, the depth of her intersectional critique has yet to be fully mined. Two main lines of inquiry have emerged. On the one hand, there is an abundance of work identifying and operationalizing “intersectionality” as a representationalist theory of identity wherein the addition of multiple social markers generates an “intersectional identity” that had hitherto been ignored or foreclosed. On the other hand, much work has critiqued intersectionality by claiming that it merely reproduces, via additive logics, the conception of identities as discrete, which “intersectionality” ought to contest. Roderick Ferguson describes this dichotomy within research trends as the “dominant affirmation” of and the “dominant objection” to intersectionality.1 As he states, “The affirmation designates intersectionality as the occasion for a positivism that will grant us authentic and true knowledge” via “an assemblage of social relations that can be observed as empirical truths.”2 The dominant objection “characterizes [intersectionality] as preserv[ing] ideologies of discreteness, identity politics, and so forth.”3 Both, he argues, are problematically invested in a “will to truth” and a “belief that intersectionality as a signifier is destined toward a meaning of discreteness, truth, and legibility.”4 If the dominant affirmation and objection exhaust the field of intersectionality, it appears we have reached a serious impasse. Yet, there are those who claim the work of intersectionality is far from over and that its import lies not in a definitive reading–as either the achievement of inclusive feminism or the failure of identity politics—but in its generative impulse and orientating capacity.Anna Carastathis is one such reader. In Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, she offers a route outside the current impasse, expertly tracing the concomitant celebration and dismissal of intersectionality, yet exercising neither “complacency with intersectionality (as feminism's postracial telos) ... [nor] its rejection in a premature attempt to ‘go beyond’ intersectionality” (4–5). Rather, Carastathis poses intersectionality as “an analytic sensibility, a disposition, or a way of thinking ... into which most of us have not yet become habituated ... [constituting] a profound challenge, as opposed to a determinate resolution of cognitive essentialism, binary categorization, and conceptual exclusion” (3–4). In this way, intersectionality has not even arrived (and may never in any absolutist sense), making both calls for its celebration and “overcoming” likewise premature. It is the stakes of liberatory theory that Intersectionality understands best—for, if the challenge of “intersectionality” (or any heuristic aimed at advancing liberatory practices) is to penetrate our deepest ideas regarding logic, perception, sociality, epistemology, and politics, then we ought to be very clear in outlining those aims, without assuming we could understand what it would mean to achieve them as this would require that we have already transformed our habits of thought.In what follows, I focus on how Carastathis's intervention in the field of intersectionality studies in particular and liberatory theory in general helps orient theorists to the task at hand. Her conceptual revisioning of identity as coalition (via Crenshaw), with its emphasis on instability and dynamism as constitutive of identity is especially promising. In the spirit of intersectionality as a provisional and hence, provocative concept, I build on Carastathis's account to suggest that instead of an ultimate articulation of identity as a “unity,” however complex or dynamic, we ought to figure identity via logics of dispersal. Starting from the insight of liberatory theorists that identities are ongoing sociopolitical projects structuring patterns of relations and not something that one “is” or “has” or even a “where” that locates or is located, I examine what it would mean to position identity as movement itself, rather than informed by it.Intersectionality follows a clear theoretical arc and stages multiple interventions throughout, making it a resource for one well versed in the field or encountering it for the first time. While it is in part a corrective to some engagements with intersectionality, it is not a corrective in the sense of settling, once and for all, what intersectionality is. Rather, through the process of imminent critique, Carastathis offers the “analytic clarity, contextual rigor” and “politicized, historicized understanding of the trajectory of [intersectionality]” (5) that is sorely needed within the field today, clearing a path for and engaging in new and exciting scholarship that neither foregoes intersectionality's roots nor forecloses its possibilities.Carastathis identifies three crucial, yet overlooked ideas in Crenshaw's early work: (1) the companion “basement” metaphor, (2) Crenshaw's intention for intersectionality to be read as a provisional concept, and (3) the normative conclusion of understanding identities as coalitions. Carastathis devotes a specific chapter to each of these ideas, creating a framework for rethinking intersectionality as primarily a generative conceptual tool of epistemic-political transformation, rather than a remedial exercise in liberatory thought or the final task of academic feminists wishing to overcome exclusionary practices. She concludes by way of exploring the theoretical and practical potential of a decolonial-intersectional feminist coalition.Carastathis's main critique is aimed at what has paradoxically become “predominant usages of ‘intersectionality’” that “invert the theoretical aims of Crenshaw's intersection metaphor” (104) by producing representationalist theories of identity that “[preserve] the integrity of categories of “race,” “gender,” and other “axes” of oppression, [conjoining] them in order to “get at” the experience of “multiply oppressed” groups” (5) This move, she argues, mistakenly takes for granted the very categories Crenshaw aims to trouble. Crenshaw's work points primarily to an invisibility or a gap produced by current legal antidiscrimination remedies in their focus on either black men or white women, which makes invisible the qualitative difference of black women's experiences. This, Carastathis contends, ought to lead us to consider the inability of achieving racial and gender justice given the way our current categorial social markers are conceived and deployed. The main takeaway is this: the qualitative difference of black women's experiences cannot be articulated within the conceptual schema informing this problem of invisibility in the first place.Crenshaw's initial critique thus goes much deeper than identifying a gap and overcoming it through a description of the social location currently “missing”—and this is what the dominant affirmation of intersectionality fails to recognize. We ought to emphasize how our concepts themselves—of “‘race’ and ‘racism’ and of ‘gender’ and ‘misogyny’” are distorted through “the simultaneous marginalization and continuous erasure of Black woman in each ‘kind’ of discourse (antiracist and antisexist discourses)” such that “if this is true, then the abstract convergence of categories of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ to describe Black women's lived experiences reproduces their categorial invisibility” (53; emphasis mine). The problem then is much more insidious, requiring social-epistemic and conceptual transformation of these signifiers themselves and the social-political field in which they are used. It requires nothing short of a radical reorientation of the conceptual structure of identity and concomitant understandings of the processes of justice and liberation.Rather than a theory of identity that is understood as the final achievement of the feminist project, Carastathis and Crenshaw position intersectionality as a sensibility or disposition, calling forth that which it cannot yet name/describe. As a provisional concept, intersectionality seeks to disrupt status quo understandings of race and sex as separable and exclusive. Carastathis proposes that we understand intersectionality as a generative or transformative impulse “that can help disorient our entrenched, naturalized cognitive habits” (108). In provoking settled understandings, intersectionality works to disengage from “dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories” and suggests a methodology to that end, but the accomplishment of this is not intersectionality as such. Rather, as a concept that illuminates the problem of invisibility and the inability of our dominant conceptual schema to confront this, it shows us what is at stake in building liberatory practices of identity/identifying: at base, a radically different conceptual, epistemological, ontological schema.One such conceptual transformation offered by liberatory theory has been the understanding that oppressions and their concomitant naming practices are sociopolitical projects; they are projects with a particular political-conceptual structure. This structure, above all, works to conceal itself as such and instead instantiate a particular understanding of the social world as encompassing “natural” and “given” divisions along various registers—sexual, gendered, racial, ability, and others. It is, in effect, as Michael Monahan states in regards to racism: “An understanding of human existence ... that fundamentally misunderstands what it is to be human in the first place ... [by posing] an interpretation that attempts to preclude any further interpretation.”5 Oppression thus entails a certain orientation to social categories of identity; they insist on them being fixed and given, coherent, homogenous, and self-evident, as if one could neutrally observe the social categorization of individuals as a simple fact about the world. But identities, as sociopolitical projects and sets of relations, are anything but neutral. However, because they are ongoing sets of relations informed by human meaning making practices, we cannot will them away. The question therefore is not: is identity oppressive or liberatory? But what vision of identity lends itself to liberatory patterns of relationality?From the outset, intersectionality has been keen to recognize both the violence of categorization and hierarchy. For it is not just the power to categorize, but also the power to have that categorization manifest in oppressive social and material relations that matters when it comes to liberatory theorizing. As Crenshaw notes, “While the former power facilitates the latter, the political implications of challenging one over the other matter greatly.”6 It matters that one emphasize the ways in which certain groups have been “systematically subordinated.” This isn't to say that categorization and hierarchy are not intimately related; they are. And indeed, both must be contested, and together. But Crenshaw is keen to point out what is missing from a politics that privileges the process of social categorization itself. When recognition of the naturalization of hierarchy rather than a naturalization of categories is underscored, we broaden our frame for understanding politics and identity by inquiring into the ways exclusion and oppression are manifest within categorization. Additionally, we open up paths to challenge hierarchy through practices of identity. Therefore, the question posed by intersectionality in regards to identity is not whether identities were liberatory but how they could be. What would be required of our conceptual and political schemas and ongoing sociopolitical relations for this to be the case? In a world where the names we use and the language with which we think cannot be separated from the ongoing manifestation of forms of oppression,7 these are the questions that demand answering.The height of Carastathis's theoretical contribution to a body of literature that overwhelmingly seems to either accept representationalist versions of identity or reject identity wholesale comes in her revisioning of identities as coalitions or potential coalitions. Carastathis draws our attention to an often-neglected line in Crenshaw's landmark “Mapping the Margins” essay wherein identities are described as coalitions or coalitions waiting to be formed. As Crenshaw suggests, we might consider “race as a coalition between men and women of color” or “race ... as a coalition of straight and gay people of color.”8 She posits that our understanding of the terms by which social identities are proffered can serve as a basis for critique of a naturalizing politics of categorial separation as well as a means of sociopolitical intervention. For example, in understanding “race” as a “coalition of men and women of color,” it becomes “in the interest of the community” to address rather than to suppress confronting intraracial rape.9 In claiming “race” as a coalition of various other previously separated terms of identity (race, class, sex, etc.), we begin the work of challenging oppressive conceptual structures in the deployment of identity. be this is not We might for this to a politics in which a could the which various identities and in this way, merely an additive on a different But the import of Crenshaw's conceptual challenge comes in currently identity as at the In this identities are not as something that can be and (or and neutrally for that the way we and identity can be that challenge to oppressive takes the lead from Crenshaw and further out a of identity as She describes intersectionality as that which that this between and an focus on between to consider within groups” this she identities as complex by their and and by as well as relations of to political that identity categories” and a liberatory politics of in the The is that this intersectional critique illuminates within groups (and within such that the normative of any identity understood as and are as Crenshaw states, politics us ... it is not primarily because those politics as certain categories that are but because the of those categories and the which they are have some experiences and be the naturalization of categories is an of oppressions and their But because this attempt to as a given or a is a requiring the of human and challenging this requires and thus a of identity that radically what we think of when we think of at the and sociopolitical In the stakes of liberatory a radically different to and as coalition assumptions about identity as homogenous, and challenging within practices of identity and it may us to the dynamism and transformative of I that identity on both an and (and the that we can or a the various of we about a of identity that any of (and without into a of questions Carastathis's of identity to her emphasis on as an of and the of and of In identity as a complex its dynamism is to a I suggest that this of identity to understandings of identity as and Though identity may not be conceived as a categorial given, whether or it is as something a a a complex by a and seems to for at the of political movement as well as Carastathis describes the as of as a to with of and as of for those who are by their as and While the language of may work on a movement when it comes to the of I in how we might of as something that we never or as something we fully or but as the movement other In this way, I the and over of identities conceived wherein one identity might into the not by way of into the but by the ways in which the of oppressions already on a of identities that is a oppressive of social identities on a of sense that to its on human social and political practices of and meaning identities have been as if one is the of that without of their (and and in the Yet, identities through the of their and them as ongoing practices. 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• Discrimination at the Intersections

  Gene Lim, Belinda Hewitt•Journal of Bisexuality•2018

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