On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor
Intersectional conversations are often framed as very hard work or
as "difficult dialogues."[1]
While intersectionality is imagined as hard
work, it is also celebrated as good work; intersectionality has been
lionized as "the most important contribution that women's studies, in
conjunction with related fields, has made so far," and there are more
special journal issues, conferences, and edited volumes devoted to it
than ever before.[2]
The imagined laborious nature of intersectionality has led feminist
scholars and activists to view it as the remedy for simple theoretical
frameworks which attend exclusively to gender. If it is challenging to
study race/gender/sexuality, and even more challenging to study
race/gender/sexuality/class, then the latter is presumed to be more
fruitful and more inclusive, particularly if the goal is to disrupt
simplistic, essentialized theorizing.
Feminist scholarship is now filled with calls for more
intersectionality, for more complex analyses that address multiple
structures of domination, particularly those often relegated to the
periphery, like age and ability. Generally, this body of scholarship
commences by describing intersectionality's "unrealized
analytic bite"[3]
or promising "prospects."[4]
Oftentimes this scholarship addresses the
importance of bringing intersectionality into the mainstream of a
particular discipline. For example, Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree
describe "the underutilized potential in the concept of
intersectionality," and argue that a deepened engagement with
intersectionality can enhance sociological work on "institutions, power
relationships, culture, and interpersonal
interaction."[5] Their plea
for more intersectionality—a plea they share with many scholars—is
underpinned by the idea that studying increased intersections will
create a more nuanced body of scholarship, and will remedy the problems
of exclusivity and essentialism that have haunted feminist theory and
activism.
I read the trope of intersectionality's difficulty with great
suspicion, and treat the call for "more" intersectionality with analytic
skepticism. While the interdisciplinary push towards intersectionality
has led to rich scholarship on identity and power, it has also produced
an uncritical notion of intersectionality as a theoretical constant
rather than as a dynamic theoretical innovation within a terrain of
struggle. This call for more intersectionality elides how
intersectionality, which began as a kind of radical outsider knowledge
and was institutionalized in the late 1980s, has been transformed in its
various transitions from activist practice to academic theoretical
innovation. Scholars calling for more intersectionality all too rarely
ask what kind of intersectionality they are promoting, and
instead treat intersectionality as a uniform, uncontested practice.
More importantly, the fetishization of intersectionality's difficulty
suggests that the labor of theorizing intersectionally will repair
problems of feminist exclusivity. My objection to this logic is
two-fold. First, one of feminism's fundamental challenges has been to
organize across difference, a tension that will remain at the heart of
feminism as it attempts to theorize equity, and to study how gender is
necessarily bound up with other structures of domination. An attention
to more intersections, and to new intersections, will not alleviate this
"problem;" instead, feminism's renewed commitment to speaking about
multiple structures of domination will mean that organizing across
difference will likely always be foundational to feminist work.
Second, the fetishization of intersectionality suggests the existence
of a kind of feminist theoretical utopia, a promised land where the
"etc." that marks so much scholarly writing on identity ("race, gender,
class, age, ethnicity, etc.") will be replaced by an attention to
all difference. I am suspicious of the idea that an attention to
all intersections—as though that could ever happen—would undo the
problems of hegemony that have plagued feminist projects. The "etc."
stands as an important marker of the rich complexity of identities, of
the variety and heterogeneity that we always strive to capture but never
quite do. Indeed, I think the "etc." is good for our work in that it
calls attention to the limitless multiplicity of experience.
Yet the call for more intersectionality presumes that attention to
additional intersections will get us to "etc.," allowing us to
replace "etc." with an endless list of intersections (race, gender,
class, sexuality, ability, ethnicity...). Ultimately, this plea for
increased intersectionality suggests that "attending to" or naming
difference will undo hegemony and exclusivity within our own ranks.
While naming difference certainly allows feminists to bear witness to
power's operations, it does little to analyze the mechanisms by which
these systems of exclusion are replicated and re-created.
In place of reading intersectionality as the remedy for feminist
exclusivity, I advocate treating intersectionality as a metaphor which
strives to describe how identity and oppression work by conceptualizing
race and gender as intersecting streets through which discrimination,
like traffic, flows. In "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex:
A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist
Theory, and Antiracist Politics," Kimberlé Crenshaw famously analogizes
a traffic-clogged intersection to women of color's experiences of
discrimination. She writes, "Discrimination, like traffic through an
intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If
an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars
traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of
them."[6]
Her intersection metaphor reveals that the injuries multiply
marginalized subjects experience are neither exclusively the result of
racism or sexism nor simply the aggregate of racism and sexism.
Instead, multiple marginalized subjects experience oppression in the
intersection where racism and sexism collide. More recent scholarship
treats the intersection metaphor as an empirically supported
articulation of how identity and oppression operate. In fact,
intersectionality has come to be regarded as a kind of feminist truth, a
proven account of how both identity and oppression are experienced.
I advocate restoring our understanding of intersectionality to a
metaphor, and encourage treating intersectionality as one
platform from which scholars can examine the interconnections of
identity and oppression. By emphasizing intersectionality's status as
one metaphor (rather than the metaphor) we can use to better
understand identity and oppression, scholars can hold in mind that
analytical frameworks capture and describe as much as they obscure and
elide. Continued efforts to imagine identity in new ways are critical,
not to displace intersectionality, but to encourage our
transdisciplinary explorations of the messiness of subjectivity and
domination. Finally, a recognition of intersectionality's status as
one metaphor for understanding identity will disrupt the
pervasive logic that more hard intersectional work will lead us to a
feminist utopia, a promised land outside of hegemony and exclusivity.
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