Introduction

Another point of frustration has to do with the continuous invocation of a narrow historical trajectory that suggests, for instance, that in response to critiques of identity politics, a “new” focus on intersectionality will automatically and necessarily end the sorts of exclusionary practices that prompted these critiques.¹ This move seems to represent a pattern that goes something like this: a new model comes out to address certain problems, and then that very same model is supplanted by something even better, and so on. Not only does this process vitiate earlier work that addresses the very same questions, but within this pattern whatever “new” term is introduced is then seen as the magical answer, or as Jennifer Nash puts it, the “remedy” that can rescue our organizations and save us from the systemic problems of racism, capitalism, and so forth that are endemic to organizing in the United States (see “On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor” in this issue). The language of intersectionality is now commonplace in activist groups, but even those organizations committed to an intersectional politic still sometimes implode over the difficulties of working across differences within the group. Even in the face of these failures, the response is often to call for “more intersectionality,” obscuring the problem(s) in the supposed solution and reinforcing cyclical stickiness.

Disrupting the progress narrative that characterizes feminist historicizing, then, can provide an impetus for opening up possibilities. In “this is what it sounds like (an ecological approach),” Alexis Pauline Gumbs addresses the tensions between past, present, and future in ways that neither suggest continual improvement nor reinscribe a romanticized reminiscence. She writes, “Something is happening here that has been happening for too long. Something new is also happening here.” This move avoids the twin problems of nostalgia and faith in progress—thinking carefully about differences and similarities without idealizing either the past or the future. For instance, while the language of “waves” has often portrayed contemporary feminist movements as more attuned to race and the complexities of difference, the evolutionary claim itself can reproduce the very exclusions it aims to address by ignoring their persistent presence, while simultaneously downplaying the participation of women of color and the willingness to embrace radical social change that characterized those movements.

We have been thinking about the metaphor of polyphony as one way (but not the ONLY way) to address our many frustrations with feminist activist movements and thinking. Polyphony is a musical term that describes the way multiple melodies can co-exist without dominance. In terms of cultural criticism, polyphony stems from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who uses it to explain how people’s ideas represent multiple truths, rather than partial truths that can work together to create a coherent whole.² In other words, rather than seeing multiple perspectives as representing various slices in a pie chart that cohere into a complete circle, he shifts the metaphor to recognizing that we need to visualize overlapping and multidimensional pictures of reality.

We first came across the concept of polyphony in a feminist context in the work of Ella Shohat, who uses it in the introduction to the anthology Talking Visions.³ (Interestingly, Mandy read this book when it was assigned in Julie’s class, an element of continuity that was not discovered until the final stages of this project.) Shohat argues, “This volume forges a polyphonic space where many critical voices engage in a dialogue in which no one voice hopefully muffles the other. Talking Visions does not force an artificial consensus; rather, it aims at a dissonant polyphony. Multicultural feminism is not an easy Muzak-like harmony but rather a polyrhythmic staging of a full-throated counterpoint where tensions are left unresolved. It does not offer a unified feminist subjectivity, or a single ideological position, or a canonical repertoire of subversive acts.”⁴ The ensuing dissonance can, we hope, push up against recurring patterns, precipitating shifts.

1. To extend this example further, a genealogical approach may allow us to destabilize intersectionality as remedy and demonstrate the above-mentioned pattern. While the concept of identity politics began as complex and multiple within feminist movements (see The Combahee River Collective Statement, for instance), it both became and became seen as contributing to the attempts to unify the subject-position “woman,” therefore marginalizing such issues as race, class, and sexuality. In response to this narrowing, feminists began emphasizing a language of “difference” and “multiculturalism.” Soon, that discourse also came under criticism by theorists such as Chandra Mohanty and Christina Crosby for reducing hierarchical imbalances to interest group pluralism (read: we are all different, so therefore we are all the same). Mohanty points to ways in which the language of multiculturalism is used to “manage” and tame systemic inequalities and suggestions for intervention (see Chandra Mohanty, “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s,” Cultural Critique 14: 179-208). Crosby goes so far as to question the process through which the language of “difference” becomes seen as providing a “solution” for problems (i.e. racism, etc.) in theory (see Christina Crosby, “Dealing with Differences,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott, New York: Routledge, 1992). Partially in response to these critiques, theorists began using the language of intersectionality, an idea that has several origins, from the Combahee River Collective’s notion of interlocking oppressions to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s important shift to the term “intersectional,” which describes the need to recognize the plurality and multiplicity of power relations that structure our lives and our worlds (see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review [1991] 43: 1241-299). Once again, then, thinkers as varied as Jasbir Puar to Jennifer Nash have questioned the term. Puar critiques the notion of intersectionality for stabilizing the very identity components it intends to complicate—it assumes that we know what race/class/gender/sexuality mean, even as we attempt to formulate more complex understandings and nuanced descriptions of the workings of power (see Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). In her essay in this journal, Nash reminds us that these terms are, in fact, metaphors, and that it is the sedimentation of the metaphorical language into fixed and rigid concepts we must be wary of. [↩]
2. See Mikail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). [↩]
3. Ella Shoat, ed. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (New York: The MIT Press, 1998). [↩]
4. Ibid, pages 2-3. [↩]