Jennifer C. Nash, "On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor"
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Finally, my hope is that new explorations will invite us to interrogate difficulty more generally. Difficulty has long stood at the heart of academic enterprises. One of the great insights of feminist theory has been disrupting the idea that theory is necessarily abstract, removed from the experiential. Yet our work on intersectionality is increasingly invested in complexity and celebrated for its difficulty.

It seems to me it is worth asking how intersectionality's institutionalization has led to its "complexity." When the Combahee River Collective, Frances Beale, Deborah King, and others articulated their own versions of intersectionality in the 1970s and 1980s, complexity was not the virtue they were celebrating. Instead, they were invested in giving a name to subject positions that had long been unnamed. Theory-making isn't an exercise in opacity, or at least it needn't be, nor does it need to be a celebration of complexity for complexity's sake. As we continue to imagine intersectionality, it is worth asking how the fetishization of intersectionality's difficulty and complexity can operate as a pernicious tool of exclusion, one which silences the very voices it intends to project.

Endnotes

1. Difficult Dialogues was the name of the 2009 National Women's Studies Association Conference which focused on intersectionality. [Return to text]

2. Leslie McCall, "The Complexity of Intersectionality," Signs 30.3 (2005): 1771. [Return to text]

3. Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree, "Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities," Sociological Theory 28.2 (June 2010): 129. [Return to text]

4. Ange-Marie Hancock, "Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm," Politics & Gender 3.2 (2007): 250. [Return to text]

5. Choo and Ferree, 130. [Return to text]

6. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 149. [Return to text]

7. Peter Kwan, "Complicity and Complexity: Cosynthesis and Praxis," Depaul Law Review 49 (2009): 687. See also Dorthe Staunaes, "Where Have All the Subjects Gone? Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification," NORA 11.2 (August 2003). [Return to text]

8. Staunaes, 103. [Return to text]

9. Hancock, 251. [Return to text]

10. Joan Acker, "The Missing Feminist Revolution Symposium," Social Problems 53.4 (Nov. 2006): 446. [Return to text]

11. Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986). [Return to text]

12. Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, "Am I a Black Woman or a Woman Who Is Black? A Few Thoughts on the Meaning of Intersectionality," Politics and Gender 3.2 (2007): 258. [Return to text]

13. Gill Valentine, "Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography," Professional Geographer 59.1 (2007): 14. [Return to text]

14. While Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality," black feminists have long been interested in studying the interplay of structures of domination. See, for example, Deborah K. King, "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology," Signs 14.1 (Autumn 1988): 42-72; Frances Beale, "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female," Black Women's Manifesto (New York: Third World Women's Alliance, 1975); The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement" in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). [Return to text]

15. Darren Rosenblum, "Queer Intersectionality and the Failure of Recent Lesbian and Gay Victories," Law and Sexuality 4 (1994): 89. [Return to text]

16. Darren Hutchinson, "Identity Crisis: 'Intersectionality,' 'Multidimensionality,' and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination," Michigan Journal of Race and the Law (2001): 311. [Return to text]

17. Jerome Chang and Robert Culp, "After Intersectionality," University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 71 (2002): 485. [Return to text]

18. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991), 1244 n.9, emphasis is mine. [Return to text]

19. Zine Magubane, "Which Bodies Matter? Feminist Post-Structuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the Hottentot Venus," Gender and Society 15.6 (December 2001): 817. [Return to text]

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