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create 4 questions and answer

DQ’s should follow the format of a proposed question, followed by a personal paragraph response. DQ’s receiving full credit (1) pose questions warranting a paragraph response related to week’s topic(s) and pull on key concepts presented in class to supply a relevant response I will return DQ’s the following section with, any necessary feedback at that time.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible
Knapsack

by Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials
from Women’s Studies into the rest of
the curriculum, I have often noticed
men’s unwillingness to grant that they
are over-privileged, even though they
may grant that women are
disadvantaged. They may say that they
will work to improve women’s status,
in the society, the university, or the
curriculum, but they can’t or won’t
support the idea of lessening men’s.
Denials which amount to taboos
surround the subject of advantages
which men gain from women’s
disadvantages. These denials protect
male privilege from being fully
acknowledged, lessened or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged
male privilege as a phenomenon, I
realized that since hierarchies in our
society are interlocking, there was
most likely a phenomenon of white
privilege which was similarly denied
and protected. As a white person, I
realized I had been taught about racism
as something which puts others at a
disadvantage, but had been taught not
to see one of its corollary aspects,
white privilege, which puts me at an
advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not
to recognize white privilege, as males
are taught not to recognize

Peace and Freedom July/August 1989

Peggy McIntosh is Associate Director of
the Wellesley College Center for Research
on Women. This essay is excerpted from
her working pager, “White Privilege and
Male Privilege: A Personal Account of
Coming to See Correspondences Through
Work in Women’s Studies,” copyright ©
1988 by Peggy McIntosh. Available for
$4.oo from address below. The paper
includes a longer list of privileges.
Permission to excerpt or reprint must be
obtained from Peggy McIntosh, Wellesley
College Center for Research on Women,
Wellesley, MA 02181; (617) 283-2520; Fax
(617) 283-2504

male privilege. So I have begun in an
un-tutored way to ask what it is like to
have white privilege. I have come to
see white privilege as an invisible
package of unearned assets which I can
count on cashing in each day, but about
which I was ‘meant’ to remain
oblivious. White privilege is like an
invisible weightless knapsack of
special provisions, maps, passports,
codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and
blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes
one newly accountable. As we in
Women’s Studies work to reveal male
privilege and ask men to give up some
of their power, so one who writes
about having white privilege must ask,
“Having described it, what will I do to
lessen or end it?”
After I realized the extent to which
men work from a base of
unacknowledged privilege, I
understood that much of their
oppressiveness was unconscious. Then
I remembered the frequent charges
from women of color that white
women whom they encounter are
oppressive. I began to understand why
we are justly seen as oppressive, even
when we don’t see ourselves that way.
I began to count the ways in which I
enjoy unearned skin privilege and have
been conditioned into oblivion about
its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in
seeing myself as an oppressor, as an
unfairly advantaged person, or as a
participant in a damaged culture. I was
taught to see myself as an individual
whose moral state depended on her
individual moral will. My schooling
followed the pattern my colleague
Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out:
whites are taught to think of their lives
as morally neutral, normative, and
average, and also ideal, so that when
we work to benefit others, this is seen
as work which will allow “them” to be
more like “us.”
I decided to try to work on myself at
least by identifying some of the daily

I was taught to see racism
only in individual acts of
meanness, not in invisible
systems conferring dominance
on my group.

effects of white privilege in my life. I
have chosen those conditions which I
think in my case attach somewhat
more to skin-color privilege than to
class, religion, ethnic status, or
geographical location, though of
course all these other factors are
intricately intertwined. As far as I can
see, my African American co[workers,
friends and acquaintances with whom I
come into daily or frequent contact in
this particular time, place, and line of
work cannot count on most of these
conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the
company of people of my race most of
the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be
pretty sure of renting or purchasing
housing in an area which I can afford
and in which I want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my
neighbors in such a location will be
neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the
time, pretty well assured that I will not
be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open
to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national
heritage or about “civilization,” I am
shown that people of my color made it
what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will
be given curricular materials that
testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of
finding a publisher for this piece on
white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and
count on finding the music of my race
represented, into a supermarket and
find the staple foods which fit with my
cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s
shop and find someone who can cut
my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards,
or cash, I can count on my skin color
not to work against the appearance of
financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my
children most of the time from people
who might not like them.

12. I can sear, or dress in second hand
clothes, or not answer letters, without
having people attribute these choices to
the bad morals, the poverty, or the
illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful
male group without putting my race on
trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging
situation without being called a credit
to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all
the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the
language and customs of persons of
color who constitute the world’s
majority without feeling in my culture
any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and
talk about how much I fear its policies
and behavior without being seen as a
cultural outsider.

18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to
talk to “the person in charge,” I will be
facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if
the IRS audits my tax return, I can be
sure I haven’t been singled out because
of my race

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards,
picture books, greeting cards, dolls,
toys, and children’s magazines
featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings
of organizations I belong to feeling
somewhat tied in, rather than isolated,
out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard,
held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative
action employer without having co-
workers on the job suspect that I got it
because of race.

23. I can choose public
accommodation without fearing that
people of my race cannot get in or will
be mistreated in the places I have
chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or
medical help, my race will not work
against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going
badly, I need not ask of each negative
episode or situation whether it has
racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or
bandages in “flesh” color and have
them more or less match my skin.

I repeatedly forgot each of the
realizations on this list until I wrote it
down. For me white privilege has
turned out to be an elusive and fugitive
subject. The pressure to avoid it is
great, for in facing it I must give up the
myth of meritocracy. If these things
are true, this is not such a free country;
one’s life is not what one makes it;
many doors open for certain people
through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible knapsack
of white privilege, I have listed
conditions of daily experience which I
once took for granted. Nor did I think
of any of these prerequisites as bad for
the holder. I now think that we need a
more finely differentiated taxonomy of

privilege, for some of these varieties
are only what one would want for
everyone in a just society, and others
give license to be ignorant, oblivious,
arrogant and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the
matrix of white privilege, a pattern of
assumptions which were passed on to
me as a white person. There was one
main piece of cultural turf; it was my
own turf, and I was among those who
could control the turf. My skin color
was an asset for any move I was
educated to want to make. I could
think of myself as belonging in major
ways, and of making social systems
work for me. I could freely disparage,
fear, neglect, or be oblivious to
anything outside of the dominant
cultural forms. Being of the main
culture, I could also criticize it fairly
freely.
In proportion as my racial group was
being made confident, comfortable,
and oblivious, other groups were likely
being made unconfident,
uncomfortable, and alienated.
Whiteness protected me from many
kinds of hostility, distress and
violence, which I was being subtly
trained to visit in turn upon people of
color.
For this reason, the word “privilege”
now seems to me misleading. We
usually think of privilege as being a
favored state, whether earned or
conferred by birth or luck. Yes some
of the conditions I have described here
work to systematically over empower
certain groups. Such privilege simply
confers dominance because of one’s
race or sex.
I want, then, to distinguish between
earned strength and unearned power
conferred systemically. Power from
unearned privilege can look like
strength when it is in fact permission to
escape or to dominate. But not all of
the privileges on my list are inevitably
damaging. Some, like the expectation
that neighbors will be decent to you, or
that your race will not count against
you in court, should be the norm in a
just society. Others, like the privilege
to ignore less powerful people, distort
the humanity of the holders as well as
the ignored groups.

Peace and Freedom July/August 1989

We might at least start by
distinguishing between positive
advantages which we can work to
spread, and negative types of
advantages which unless rejected will
always reinforce our present
hierarchies. For example, the feeling
that one belongs within the human
circle, as Native Americans say, should
not be seen as privilege for a few.
Ideally it is an unearned entitlement.
At present, since only a few have it, it
is an unearned advantage for them.
This paper results from a process of
coming to see that some of the power
which I originally saw as attendant on
being a human being in the U.S.
consisted in unearned advantage and
conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who are
truly distressed about systemic,
unearned male advantage and
conferred dominance. And so one
question for me and others like me is
whether we will get truly distressed,
even outraged about unearned race
advantage and conferred dominance
and if so, what we will do to lessen
them. In any case, we need to do more
work in identifying how they actually
affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps
most, of our white students in the U.S.
think that racism doesn’t affect them
because they are not people of color;
they do not see “whiteness” as a racial
identity. In addition, since race and
sex are not the only advantaging
systems at work, we need similarly to
examine the daily experience of having
age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or
physical ability, or advantage related to
nationality, religion, or sexual
orientation.
Difficulties and dangers surrounding
the task of finding parallels are many.
Since racism, sexism, and
heterosexism are not the same, the
advantaging associated with them
should not be seen as the same. In
addition, it is hard to disentangle
aspects of unearned advantage which
rest more on social class, economic
class, race, religion, sex and ethnic
identity than on other factors. Still, all
of the oppressions are interlocking, as
the Combahee River Collective
Statement of 1977 continues to remind
us eloquently.

One factor seems clear about all of
the interlocking oppressions. They
take both active forms which we can
see and embedded forms which as a
member of the dominant group one is
taught not to see. In my class and
place, I did not see myself as a racist
because I was taught to recognize
racism only in individual acts of
meanness by members of my group,
never in invisible systems conferring
unsought racial dominance on my
group from birth.
Disapproving of the systems won’t
be enough to change them. I was
taught to think that racism could end if
white individuals hanged their
attitudes. [But] a “white” skin in the
United States opens many doors for
whites whether or not we approve of
the way dominance has been conferred
on us. Individual acts can palliate, but
cannot end, these problems.
To redesign social systems we need
first to acknowledge their colossal
unseen dimensions. The silences and
denials surrounding privilege are the
key political tool here. They keep the
thinking about equality or equity
incomplete, protecting unearned
advantage and conferred dominance by
making these taboo subjects. Most talk
by whites about equal opportunity
seems to me now to be about equal
opportunity to try to get into a position
of dominance while denying that
systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness
about white advantage, like
obliviousness about male advantage, is
kept strongly inculturated in the United
States so as to maintain the myth of
meritocracy, the myth that all
democratic choice is equally available
to all. Keeping most people unaware
that freedom of confident action is
there for just a small number of people
props up those in power, and serves to
keep power in the hands of the same
groups that have most of it already.
Though systematic change takes
many decades, there are pressing
questions for me and I imagine for
some others like me if we raise our
daily consciousness on the perquisites
of being light-skinned. What will we
do with such knowledge? As we know
from watching men, it is an open

The question is: “Having
described white privilege,
what will I do to end it?”

question whether we will choose to use
unearned advantage to weaken hidden
systems of advantage, and whether we
will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded
power to try to reconstruct power
systems on a broader base.

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Love No Limit

: Towards a Black Feminist Future (In
Theory)

Brittney C. Cooper

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Theory), The Black Scholar, 45:4, 7-21, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2015.1080912

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Love No Limit: Towards a
Black Feminist Future
(In Theory)

BRITTNEY C. COOPER

“We can be, but someone else gets to tell us

what we mean.”
– Anne DuCille (1994)1

Ihave decided to start with the past in thisinquiry because it is not at all clear to me
that Black feminism has a future. Despite the
“citational ubiquity”2 of intersectionality in
fields and disciplines across the humanities
and social sciences and despite the prolifer-
ation of vibrant cultures of Black feminisms
on the interwebs, academic Black feminisms
still confront a “culture of justification,” in
which one is always asked to prove that the
study of Black women’s lives, histories, litera-
ture, cultural production and theory is suffi-
ciently academic, and sufficiently “rigorous”
to merit academic resources.3 The pressures
wrought by this culture of justification have
only increased in the institutional culture of
the neoliberal university, where scholars of
ethnic and gender studies are always asked
to prove the institutional value of their
various forms of intellectual labor. Traditional
academic strictures themselves require a “dis-
placing and supplanting of previous knowl-
edge” to prove what is new, novel, and
useful about one’s contributions.4 Incessant
demands that Black feminist work prove its
rigor on one hand and its timeliness and rel-
evance on the other place enormous
demands on Black feminist scholars to say

something new, even if we haven’t suffi-
ciently said everything there is to be said
about the “old.”

Frequently, when I am asked in academic
contexts to describe my work, I respond by
saying, “I am a Black feminist theorist.”
Almost without fail, my response is met with
looks of confusion, eyebrows crinkling into
question marks, and long awkward pauses,
as colleagues wait for me to clarify. While it
may seem that they are merely asking me to
clarify the kinds of questions I theorize
about, the telltale signs of confusion about
where I place a period suggest more troub-
lingly that they are not sure that being a
“Black feminist theorist” is actually a thing.
This kind of ambivalence does not usually
attend to my white feminist colleagues
declarations that they are “feminist theorists,”
or that they “do feminist theory.” Even if they
have to give specifics, feminist theory names a
universe of possibility that Black feminist
theory apparently does not. Not with a little
resentment, I do eventually clarify, but often
I let the pause linger. The affective goal of
my lingering pause compels other academics
to feel, even if fleetingly, the discomfort in
learning that the faulty assumption lays with
them and not with me. It also gives me a
moment to get my mind right.

Despite my own sense that these aca-
demic habits of thought largely work in
service of silencing Black women, I do want
to suggest that Black feminism over the last
two decades has fallen into a state of deep
inertia around critical political and philoso-
phical questions that we have failed to theo-
rize. While Black feminist theorists have
been bold and diligent in theorizing critical
sexualities and representations of race and

Vol. 45, No. 4, 7–21, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1080912

KimberlySoriano
Highlight

gender within popular culture, Black Femin-
ism writ large has failed to think through
critically more basic questions like our con-
ceptions of freedom and justice. We have
failed to fully lay out our own accounts of
race and gender, of blackness and woman-
hood. We have also failed to attend to some
of the underlying philosophical questions
raised by Black feminist theorists in the
1980s, such as whether Black feminism
needs its own metaphysics. In this essay, I
return to some of the questions Black feminist
scholars were asking, just as Black feminism
entered formally into the academy, to
suggest that there is still a significant
amount of theoretical and intellectual
terrain, that we have not sufficiently tilled. I
hope returning to the past reminds us that
we have a foundation that is both broad
and deep in terms of the kinds of questions
Black feminist theory has always asked and
that it should be asking today. I don’t seek
to offer answers to all of these questions but
rather to raise them as a way to map some
possibilities for the future of Black feminist
theorizing, and to point out some of the
habits of thought that we encounter in aca-
demic environs that make asking these
kinds of questions seem like an untenable
and retrograde move. The failure of Black
feminist scholars to be vigilant in the work
of theory-building in these key areas has con-
tributed to our own precarious status in an
academic environment, where folks ain’t
never really loved us. But these failures are
less about a kind of neglect and more about
a range of troubling academic habits among
colleagues who populate other modes of
feminist and gender analysis that create bar-
riers for the work of Black feminist theory

production to go forth. In this essay, I look
backward, forward, and side-to-side (or
back, front, back, and side-to-side as a favor-
ite song quips) to assess possibilities for the
past, present, and future of Black feminist
theorizing.

Let Me Clear My Throat

In the spring of 1987, Black feminist literary
critic Barbara Christian published a now
classic essay called “The Race for Theory.”
She conceived of the piece as an “occasion
to break the silence among those of us,
critics, as we are now called, who have been
intimidated, devalued” by the “race for
theory.” She lamented the increasing popular-
ity of a certain brand of literary criticism rooted
in Western philosophy, whose currency was
contained in notions of abstraction, inaccess-
ible language, and supposed notions of uni-
versality, that were really quite particular.
She argued in the wake of this academic
shift that “people of color have always
theorized––but in forms quite different from
the Western form of abstract logic.”5 “Our the-
orizing,” she wrote, “is often in narrative
forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and
proverbs, in the play with language, since
dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more
to our liking.” Moreover, she argued that
Black women’s theorizing was preoccupied
with a specific question namely, “how else
have we managed to survive with such spirit-
edness the assault on our bodies, social insti-
tutions, countries, our very humanity?” And
she affirmed that “the women [she] grew up
around continuously speculated about the
nature of life through pithy language that
unmasked the power relations of their

TBS • Volume 45 • Number 4 • Winter 20158

KimberlySoriano
Highlight

world.” The displacement and devaluing of
Black women’s “theorizing” constituted a
brand of what Christian called “academic
hegemony.”6

Christian’s ambivalence about the role of
Theory, as opposed to “theorizing” which
she embraced, was not hers alone but was
also expressed by other Black women aca-
demics at the time. In these now classic
debates about the role of critical theory in
the study of Black literature, the most infa-
mous of which occurred between Joyce
Joyce and Henry Louis Gates in the Winter
of 1987 in the pages of New Literary
History, there was a real struggle to situate
the study of both Black identity and Black
feminist politics in relationship to the increas-
ing stature of poststructuralism in academic
contexts. Echoing this growing anxiety
among Black women scholars, Christian
wrote:

Because I went to a Catholic Mission school

in the West Indies I must confess that I

cannot hear the word “canon” without smel-

ling incense, that the word “text” immedi-

ately brings back agonizing memories of

Biblical exegesis, that “discourse” reeks for

me of metaphysics forced down my throat

in those courses that traced world philos-

ophy from Aristotle through Thomas

Aquinas to Heidegger … . As I lived among

folk for whom language was an absolutely

necessary way of validating our existence, I

was told that the minds of the world lived

only on a small continent of Europe. The

metaphysical language of the New Philos-

ophy, then, I must admit, is repulsive to me

and is one reason why I raced from philos-

ophy to literature, since the latter seemed

to me to have the possibilities of rendering

the world as large and as complicated as I

experienced it, as sensual as I knew it was.7

A native of the US Virgin Islands, Christian’s
critique of “new philosophy” as at odds with
her educational experiences in the West
Indies pointed to the ways that the advent of
Theory (capital T) in the academy was
rooted in European and American forms of
imperialist knowledge production. Alexander
Weheliye points similarly to what he calls the
“deracination of post-structuralism” that
became “annexed by the U.S. academy in
the 1970s and rechristened as ‘theory.’”8

Though in this essay, Christian does not fully
develop this idea, she does make space for
us to think about the differences between
Theory and theorizing and to think Black fem-
inism beyond the bounds of the contiguous
US nation-state.

Christian considered philosophy so inhos-
pitable to notions of Black women’s experi-
ence that she defected to literature. This
observation is important when we consider
the terms upon which Black feminist thought
enters formally into the academy in the late
1970s and early 1980s. To date, there are
fewer than 10 Black women in the United
States who do professional philosophy from
a Black feminist/Black women-centered
lens.9 In responding to Christian, Black femin-
ist philosopher Donna-Dale Marcano, affirms
that, despite the fact that she and others like
Dotson and V. Denise James are now three
decades later, making space for Black
women in the realm of academic philosophy,
Christian’s work importantly “elucidates the
way theoretical frameworks have often
worked against Black women in both feminist

Brittney C. Cooper 9

KimberlySoriano
Highlight

and black literature. Black women become
forced to participate in a discourse but
always only to the extent that they exercise
language and expression of often alien theor-
etical frameworks.”10

Given 30 years of hindsight, it is fairly clear
which side “won” the race for theory. Indeed,
the stakes were high. At the time, Black femin-
ist literary critic Hazel Carby observed that
“Black feminist criticism has its source and
its primary motivation in academic legitima-
tion, placement within a framework of bour-
geois humanistic discourse.”11 She goes on
in what amounts to a damning critique to
suggest that

Black feminist criticism for the main part

accepts the predominant paradigms prevail-

ing in the academy, as has women’s studies

and Afro-American Studies, and seeks to

organize itself as a discipline in the same

way. Also, it is overwhelmingly defensive

in its posture, attempting to discover,

prove, and legitimate the intellectual worthi-

ness of black women so that they may claim

their rightful placement as both subject and

creators of the curriculum.

Patricia Hill Collins’ groundbreaking text
Black Feminist Thought in many ways con-
firms Carby’s assertion, because Collins
argued that her primary objective was to
“describe, analyze, explain the significance
of, and contribute to the development of
Black feminist thought as critical social
theory.”12 And the signal influence of that
text on creating space for Black feminist
theory/thought as a field of inquiry in the
academy simply cannot be overstated. But it
largely rests on the ways that Collins sought

to resolve the supposed antagonism between
Black feminist politics and theory. Nearly 30
years later, it is also clear that Black feminism
still holds a largely defensive position, one that
seems necessitated by the pressure to maintain
academic and institutional legitimacy.13

To be clear, I am not suggesting that there
have been no substantive developments in
Black feminist theorizing in the last three
decades. Particularly in the area of critical sex-
ualities studies and representations of race and
gender in popular culture, scholars like L.H.
Stallings, Kara Keeling, Jennifer Nash, Mireille
Miller-Young and a range of other thinkers in
Black queer studies and Black sexuality
studies have greatly expanded our thinking
about Black queer identities, pornography,
and the range of ways that Black people
perform,understandandnegotiate sexual iden-
tities and sexualities as systems of power.14

However, I return to the moment of the 1980s
and early 1990s, because that is the moment
that the discussion about Black feminism(s)’
relationship to questions of Theory were most
visible. I wholeheartedly concur with Christian
and subsequent scholars that we should not
accept Theory as the only acceptable currency
by which to do Black feminist work. Because of
Black feminism, I understand the theorizing
that my mother and grandmother taught me to
do as being critical and crucial to my survival
as a Black woman of Southern, semi-rural,
working-class origins now navigating a
middle class, urban, academic life. But I do
believe that within academic environs Theory
has an important role to play in building fields
of inquiry. So while I seek to do theory (lower
case t) in other venues like the hip hop feminist
blog that I helped to create, in this essay, I’m
concerned with how contemporary Black

TBS • Volume 45 • Number 4 • Winter 201510

KimberlySoriano
Highlight

feminist academics negotiate Theoretical
debates that are foundational to our insti-
tutional legitimacy.

For instance, Barbara Christian pointed to a
real dilemma when she described her aversion
to the metaphysics of what she called the “new
philosophy.” She rejected a white-male cen-
tered Western philosophical account of the
metaphysical world, namely what is real. To
articulate it the way Ntozake Shange did,
“bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored
is a metaphysical dilemma/ i haven’t con-
quered yet.”15 If Black women do not accept
Western philosophy’s white male understand-
ing of reality (metaphysics), then how does
Black feminist theory ever articulate its own
metaphysics? And does it need to?

Donna-Dale Marcano gets at one of the key
metaphysical challenges Black feminists face
by considering how the social construction
thesis which, for instance, undergirds an
ironic rhetorical claim like “all the women
are white and all the Blacks are men,” acts dif-
ferentially upon categories of race and gender.
Unlike in the case of gender, wherein the
social construction thesis produces a notion
of complexity, because it disrupts the false
unity of categories like woman or sex or
gender, in the case of race, we are left

not with a description of a complex reality but

rather [with] an insistence upon nonreality. As

such, ambiguities, revelations of exclusions,

and the disruption of race have led to the non-

reality of race where ambiguity of sex or

gender leads to a complex reality that must

be confronted.16

This leads to the long-standing poststructural-
ist conclusion that “race” does not exist,

which means “one is left merely to do battle
within the metaphysical realm over exactly
what reality or battles there are.”17

Many scholars over the years have called
out the problem of putting “race” in scare
quotes and acting as though its lack of biologi-
cal basis means that the ideology of race and
racism does not have real material effects.
How, then, does Black feminism embrace
this complex account of gender identity, in a
world where similar social constructionist
logics delimit certain forms of complex
accounts of Blackness? I say “blackness”
because much of the attempt to complicate
and complexify “race,” is rooted in forms of
antiblackness that often emerge from the
work of both white thinkers and other thinkers
of color. These thinkers evince a certain
“glee,” as Holland characterizes it, about the
possibility of “leaving behind” or “getting
beyond” the black/white binary.18 What
does a Black feminist account of race look
like? Is it possible to embrace a materialist
account of race, that acknowledges that
while race “may not be on the body, [it] cer-
tainly is ‘in’ it” without reinscribing proble-
matic biologically rooted notions of race?19 I
am also thinking here of emerging research
in the field of social epigenetics about the
ways that prolonged exposure to stress and
trauma alters health outcomes for Black
people, and perhaps even in extreme cases
changes the expression of genes within
DNA. This work does not argue that race
has a biological basis, but rather that racism
has a physiological and genetic effect,
meaning that bodies become materially
raced because of persistent health and struc-
tural inequities.20 Perhaps this is the kind of
analysis to which the indefatigable materiality

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of the black female body points, that it
demands. How, in fact, can Black feminism
continue to love Black women’s bodies,
whatever their sex, among theorists for
whom Black women’s bodies present such a
challenge?

What is the most effective method for dis-
lodging a force-fed metaphysics? I don’t
have answers to all of these questions, but I
recognize their import to a twenty-first-
century Black feminist theoretical project.
Working out an account of race that accounts
for the material lives of Black people is just
one way that new Black feminist theorizing
can help us dislodge a metaphysics forced
down our throats. We must clear our throats
of a metaphysics that is alien to how the vast
majority of Black women in the global north
and south are structurally positioned regard-
less of their relative degrees of jeopardy
within those structures. Regurgitation of unin-
terrogated social constructionist logics is
clearly not the answer if the curious case of
Rachel Dolezal, a white woman passing for
Black, is to teach us anything.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That: Black
Feminism Interruptus

Black feminist theorists have left many open-
ended questions and theoretical provocations
from our feminist foremothers unanswered
and strewn about on our theoretical land-
scape. In addition to thinking through Chris-
tian’s metaphysics dilemma, we must also
interrogate Hazel Carby’s assertion that
“black feminist criticism be regarded critically
as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that
should be interrogated, a locus of contradic-
tions.”21 How does or should Carby’s

rejection of Black feminism as the teleological
end of Black women’s intellectual inquiry
shape the kind of theorizing we have done,
might do, and might need to do?

With someone like Patricia Hill Collins,
who has written three groundbreaking works
of Black feminist theory, in addition to
several other books and articles, few scholars
actually spend any time attending to, building
upon, disagreeing with, critiquing or expand-
ing Collins’ work.22 Instead, for instance,
Black Feminist Thought is primarily cited in
discussions of race and gender in popular
culture with regard to the persistence of “con-
trolling images” like “mammies, jezebels and
sapphires.” That those formulations have real
limitations particularly for Black women’s
representation in popular culture in the
second decade of the twenty-first century
seems to escape notice among all but a very
select few Black feminist scholars. We have
become complicit in a set of processes that
allows one group of scholars to place us on
a pedestal, styling black feminism as a foun-
dational stepping stone to other more exciting
sites of inquiry while another group reduces
our contributions to the status of the interven-
tion, allowing them to engage in liberal acts of
incorporation and inclusion, and then moving
on, in the name of progress. But we literally
don’t have time for that. There is a significant
intellectual cost to not tending to our theoreti-
cal ground.

Alexander Weheliye’s recent book Habeas
Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitcs,
and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
attempts a kind of rescue mission for Black
feminism, drawing Black feminist theorists
into the debate he constructs between
Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille

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Mbembe and himself about the operations of
Black life within the realms of bare life and bio-
politics. Weheliye notes that he draws on
“[Sylvia] Wynter’s and [Hortense] Spiller’s
work in order to highlight and impede the pre-
carious status of black feminism in the
academy and beyond, since black feminism
has sustained African American cultural
theory at the same time as it has grounded
the institutional existence of black studies for
the last few decades but is nevertheless conti-
nually disavowed.”23 He later notes that
“because minority discourses seemingly
cannot inhabit the space of proper theoretical
reflection, [thinkers] like Foucault and
Agamben need not reference the long tra-
ditions of thought in this domain that are
directly relevant” to the work they do.24 The
refusal of others to concede that Black femin-
ism as a “minority discourse” occupies the
space of Theory allows for acts of historical
erasure by those with more power.25

Moreover, while Weheliye’s invocation of
Black feminism and calling out of Foucault
and Agamben is laudable and important,
even the language he uses to describe Black
feminism as the “sustaining” force of Black
academic communities invokes the imagery
of Black women being the “backbone” of
the Black community. For a Black man to
acknowledge this social, institutional, and
intellectual positionality matters as an act of
solidarity. Yet this move––in placing black
feminism on a pedestal––also unintentionally
relegates it to the past. Weheliye’s use of Spil-
lers and Wynter makes the implicit argument
that, in fact, there are Black feminist theorists
who are “Theoretical” enough to tangle with
the big boys. While I have been deeply influ-
enced by Spillers’ work, in particular,

Weheliye’s choice has the perhaps uninten-
tional effect of elevating these two women
to the status of signature and model Black
feminist theorists, largely because they speak
most clearly in the languages of psychoanaly-
sis and poststructuralism. We should ask
whether this is the kind of rescue mission
that Black feminism needs.

Another example of placing Black femin-
ism on a pedestal-as-foundation can be
found in Roderick Ferguson’s formulation of
queer of color analysis and critique in his
book Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer
of Color Critique. Ferguson writes,

Queer of color analysis interrogates social

formations as the intersections of race,

gender, sexuality and class, with particular

interest in how those formations correspond

with and diverge from nationalist ideals and

practices. Queer of color analysis is a hetero-

geneous enterprise made up of women of

color feminism, materialist analysis, post-

structuralist theory, and queer critique.26

In Ferguson’s formulation of “queer of color
critique,” women of color feminisms—and in
particular Black lesbian feminism—become
the building block of a new mode of critical
analysis rather than a critical site from which
questions of materialism and capital, ques-
tions about nationalisms and state formation,
questions about poststructuralism, and ques-
tions about non-normative sexual and
gender formation can be interrogated.

Other queer of color critics, like José
Esteban Muñoz make similar moves. In his
book Disidentifications, the late Muñoz
writes, “If queer discourse is to supersede
the limits of feminism, it must be able to

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calculate multiple antagonisms that index
issues of class, gender, and race, as well as
sexuality.”27 Pointing to this moment in
Muñoz’s work, Sharon Patricia Holland
observes that, “by this time in the theoretical
game, feminism has solidified as a project
that should be superseded, which gives it
the status of a relic and simultaneously
excises the very contributions of women of
color to the production of the very diverse dis-
course that queer of color critique is poised to
commit itself to.”28 Muñoz’s language of
supersession marked a broader move in
queer theory “away from feminism [because
it] cast feminist ‘ethics’ as moral regulation.”
Thus now attempts to speak to the “ethical”
are “perceived as being attached to a back-
ward feminism.”29 Not only is feminism cast
as retrograde because of its particular ethical
commitments, but “race and racist practice
mire an unfettered feminism in the materiality
of the body and the idea of its limit.” More-
over, an insistence upon talking about race
or Blackness, “is excoriated for its crippling
backwardness, since it is embedded in
notions of the biological that do not help
make the case for better racial feeling.”30

Thus queer theory sees itself as “taking a
break from feminism.”31

Ferguson and Muñoz cannot rightly be
blamed for antagonisms toward race and fem-
inism that are endemic to queer theory. But
their work should be called to account for arti-
ficially proscribing the limits of Black and
women of color feminisms, such that the
very questions women of color feminist
inquiry has raised for decades about social
and cultural formation, nationalisms, political
economy and the limits of liberalism are best
developed in another arena of critique and

then named something else. To situate Black
feminism on the pedestal of foundation
serves to render it visible but static, denying
it the dynamism of change, growth, argument,
and possibility. Black feminism is fixed in
time, and in the temporal logics of academic
knowledge production, that becomes a
death sentence. Certainly, one could argue
that the use of Black feminism as a critical
building block of queer color analysis
proves that Black feminism is a generative
site of Theoretical production. However,
Muñoz’s use of the word “supercede”
suggests that women of color feminisms are
a mode of inquiry to be surpassed. It is also
legitimate to use the conceptual frameworks
of women of color feminism to animate
other modes of inquiry, but this cannot be
done at the expensive the original projects
themselves.

While men of color place Black feminism
on a pedestal, non-Black feminists reduce
Black feminist knowledge production to the
status of an intervention in the broader
project of feminism. The current debate over
the continued utility of intersectionality is
instructive. Writing about the continued cen-
trality of Black women to questions of inter-
sectionality, Robyn Wiegman argues that
“the particularity of black women’s identity
position functions as the formative ground
for a critical practice aimed at infinite
inclusion.” She rhetorically asks: “How can
particularity retain the specificity it invokes
when the destination it inscribes is to render
critical practice not simply coherent but com-
prehensive in its analytic capacity and
scope?” Wiegman suggests that her questions
name “the tension between intersectionality
as a commitment to the particularity of black

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ask for clarification.

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women’s minoritization and its redeployment
as the means to claim paradigmatic mastery
over both the experiences of women of
color and identity’s historical, social, politi-
cal, and psychic complexity as a whole.”32

Here Wiegman poses a false question,
propped up by a false assumption. For her
question assumes that all work that has
already been ascribed to the status of the
theoretical, is not also deeply particular. But
what feminist theory (as undertaken by white
women) has done is to expose the particularity
of white male western accounts of knowledge
and experience, otherwise known as philos-
ophy. Yet, Wiegman charges particularity as
a kind of indictment of the theoretical reach
of intersectionality. Her cautions about inter-
sectional scope-creep pivot on the claim that
intersectionality seeks mastery over the
account of experience among women of
color and of the theoretical account of iden-
tity. That kind of rhetoric is shot through with
a kind of colonizing, imperial logic, that it is
simply unfair to ascribe to the intellectual pro-
ducts of Black feminism, particularly since
Black feminism’s broader resistance to femin-
ism is all about a resistance to being “mas-
tered” by a set of frameworks that are not
imagined with Black female bodies or (cis
and trans) Black women’s lives anywhere in
their purview.

To accuse Black feminist paradigms of
attempting to “master” everyone else’s experi-
ence rather than of attempting to make visible
and name our own is to severely misrepresent
institutional logics of power. When Black
women’s theoretical contributions achieve
institutional legitimacy, even if that legitimacy
is about exposing institutional logics of vio-
lence and power, suddenly, Black women

(the intersectional paradigm) now become
“masters.” Or are we accused of doing vio-
lence to other women of color?33

Black feminism pays a hefty price in the few
places where our theoretical work receives
the status of broad applicability. M.T. Nguyen
cautions that the “affirmative incorporation
of women of color feminisms as a necessary
intervention … might also be a problematic
teleology for feminist futures.”34 She explains
that

interventions are best staged before it is “too

late” and someone is lost beyond rehabilita-

tion. Interventions then must be opportune,

timed to occur within a brief window

during which an intervention is efficacious,

beneficial. Interventions are thus both irrup-

tions of a progressive time and also course

corrections that, incorporated, allow for a

return to it.35

Wiegman’s handwringing about the ways in
which Black women have become the
central figures of intersectional discourse,
even while she acknowledges the import of
intersectionality, bare all the marks of a
desire to move on from a discussion of Black
women, a desire to get past the irruption.36

Black women who point to the continuing
problem of racism within feminist analysis––
the most visible of these schisms now occur
in online venues––are called divisive and dis-
ruptive, and are censured for hindering femin-
ist progress.37

It is almost as if intersectional Black femin-
ism is treated like those annoying emergency
broadcast announcements on radio and tele-
vision. “We interrupt your regularly sched-
uled programming to bring you this breaking

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news. Your work is racist.” When those emer-
gency broadcasts occur, at first, there is
annoyance. Then there is alarm. Then a
course of action is decided based on how
legitimate the cause for concern is. But at
the end, the view is always that, barring a
real emergency, the announcement was dis-
ruptive and temporary and that, at worst, the
emergency should be assessed and responded
to in order to facilitate a swift return to the reg-
ularly scheduled progression of events. Treat-
ing Black feminism as primarily an anti-racist
intervention within feminism continues to
render it as a disruptive and temporary
event, to be addressed, responded to, and
moved on from, back to the regularly sched-
uled course of things. We must resist this
framing because it leaves Black feminism in
its own suspended state of interruptus
wherein our sole contribution to feminist dis-
course is reduced to the theorization of inter-
sectionality. This leaves Black feminism in a
suspended state of animation, there always
as a reference of where the field has been,
rather than as a guidepost for where we
should go.

It’s Our Prerogative. We Can Do What
We Wanna Do.

In 1986, Deborah King declared that within
Black feminism, “Black women are empow-
ered with the right to interpret our reality
and define our objectives,” to “continually
establish and reestablish our own priorities,”
and to “decide for ourselves the relative sal-
ience of any and all identities and oppres-
sions, and how and the extent to which
these features inform our politics.”38 King’s
positioning of Black women as the subjects

of Black feminist knowledge production is
an important move meant to ascribe to
Black women the epistemic authority to
name and define Black women’s experiences
both within and beyond the frames of oppres-
sion. However, in certain debates we have
relinquished and indeed outsourced the
power to determine the salience of the identi-
ties and oppressions that define Black
women’s varied realities to the broader more
nebulous field of feminist theory. We allow
others to create categories of salience, and
we allow others to define what is salient
about our categories. I use “we” advisedly
here. Certainly Black feminism does not
move with one voice or only one agenda. It
never has. But within academic Black
feminism(s), the ambivalence about intersec-
tionality in newer scholarship and the
embrace of the push to always be saying
something new, even when it is clear that
we have not fully mined our traditions or thin-
kers suggests that we are caught in the aca-
demic push for relevance which requires a
turn to the new and innovative.39 This
places us in the dubious and unenviable pos-
ition of being at the whim and fancy of neolib-
eral academic notions of progress. That is to
say, when those of us who value and work
within Black feminist frameworks don’t
control the terms of the debate, others deter-
mine the value and salience of categories
that matter, leaving valuable parts of our
work vulnerable to being devalued and dis-
carded. For instance, Black feminism must
continue to insist that “race is real” in its
material effects despite its status as a social
construct. We must continue to suggest, as
intersectionality originally did, that power
matters as much as identity.

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The foundational work of queer Black fem-
inist theorists demonstrates what it means for
Black feminists to control the terms of the
debate. Black feminist scholarship has been
progressive in embracing shifting ideas
about gender non-conformity and trans* iden-
tity, because queer Black feminists like Pauli
Murray in the 1940s and the women of Com-
bahee in the 1970s laid the groundwork for
such a view by challenging the essential
nature of these categories. Black feminism
presumes that Black womanhood and Black
femininity are a co-constitutive project under-
taken by a range of female, male, trans*, inter-
sex, and gender non-conforming bodies along
the gender spectrum. We acknowledge trans*
black identities, wherein female bodiedness
can constitute a range of gendered subject
positions, even as we also acknowledge that
female bodiedness is not a prerequisite for
womanhood. How do we create a set of theor-
etical frameworks expansive enough to theo-
rize the structural precarity and political
possibility of all Black women’s lives, cis
and trans* alike? Continuing to prioritize an
explicitly queer framework in future Black
feminist inquiry acknowledges that radical
Black feminism is a queer enterprise. It does
not exist without the intellectual and political
labor of Black lesbians and Black gender non-
conforming people. A queer Black feminism
includes a continuing inquiry into the lives of
cisgender, hetero Black women, but forces
those women to acknowledge the clear
limits of a cis-heteropatriarchal project in
their own lives. In other words a queer Black
feminism makes space for a range of desires
and gender performances, but refuses the
power-laden, normativizing imperatives of
heteropatriarchy.

The burgeoning Black Lives Matter move-
ment that has emerged in the wake of the
police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown,
Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014
and the recent police killings of Rekia Boyd
in Chicago, Eric Garner in Staten Island,
Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Tanisha Anderson
also in Cleveland, John Crawford in Beaver
Creek, Ohio, Sheneque Proctor in Bessemer,
Alabama, and Walter Scott in North Charles-
ton, South Carolina, among many others,
raises a number of questions that should also
shape our theoretical inquiry. What, for
instance, is a Black feminist account of
freedom? What is a Black feminist account
of justice? What is a Black feminist account
of Black life? And given the ways in which
queer identity informs the guiding assump-
tions of Black feminist theory, how does
Black feminism account for questions of
reproduction and reproductive justice
without rehearsing heteropatriachal notions
of productivity? Despite the variety of repro-
ductive technologies that enable the con-
ception of Black life, Holland reminds us
that “racism turns us toward the bare life of
procreation.”40 Black feminism, as a place
that accounts for the lives of Black people
with wombs (whatever their gender identity),
must give an account of reproductive justice
and the conditions under which Black life
can and should exist.

How does Black feminism theorize the
configuration of the nation-state, particularly
when Black people exist in what nineteenth-
century Black feminist theorists might call a
“peculiar” relationship to the state? How can
US Black feminists respect, attend thoroughly
to, and engage Black feminist theoretical
work arising from other national and

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transnational locations, works which often
critique US imperialism, without obscuring
the operations of internal colonial logics that
are particularly violent to Black and Indigen-
ous people in the settler-colonial US?41

Black feminists accounts of nation must
figure out how to decenter the US nation-
state, while acknowledging that Black femin-
ists both within the US and outside of it, can
and should participate in that project. At the
same time, US Black feminists cannot theo-
rize as though black feminist theorization is
unidirectional, but must acknowledge and
be guided by the multiple sites of Black femin-
ist knowledge production happening through-
out the globe.

We must also ask what our intellectual
relationship will be with queer of color cri-
tique, since as I have shown above, what is
now considered the intellectual province of
QOCC, might just as “naturally” have pro-
ceeded under the rubric of Black feminist
inquiry, under other circumstances. To be
clear, I am not constructing Black feminism
in opposition to queer of color critique, as
there are many scholars who find homes in
both places. But I am saying that if inherent
to queer theory, even queer of color critique,
is an account of Black or women of color fem-
inism(s) as too morally regulatory and retro-
grade, this has implications for the future of
Black feminism. If Black feminism is con-
structed as the foundation upon which queer
of color critique is built, this still constructs
Black feminist theory as a discourse of the
past, rather than one that helps to map and
mark the future. Thus, if queer of color cri-
tique is positioned on a continuum in which
it constitutes the site of progress beyond the
putatively retrograde Black female bodies

that anchor a Black feminist project, then
the stakes are too high to cede this territory
willingly.

Love No Limit

Black feminists must stop defending our intel-
lectual territory. We must stop letting others
make us think ours is territory to be defended,
and we must make them defend why it is
reasonable to encroach upon, dismantle, or
otherwise do violence to the space we
occupy. Perhaps, we have spent so much
time defending the house from demolition
by others who have been intent on condemn-
ing the house and declaring it unsafe or unfit
for habitation that we have not attended to
generational wear and tear, ignoring for too
long a crumbling foundation, a wobbly struc-
ture, and various creaks, leaks and fissures.
We must begin to affirm that Black feminism
is “a brick house. She’s mighty, mighty.”
Still, we can acknowledge when our foun-
dation needs work and our structure needs
reinforcing. And I hope here, that this work
will be seen as an invitation to till new
ground, re-fertilize old ground, and shore up
and secure wobbly foundations.

We must name acts of intellectual coloni-
zation and then stop ceding the terms of the
debate to the colonizers. We must no longer
concede the logic that demands that our intel-
lectual real estate be mowed down and swept
up in the linear march of academic and “intel-
lectual” progress. We must, in short, stop
letting others fuck with our future. I said it,
and I mean it. In order to guard against the
conditions Ann DuCille named in 1994,
where “we can be, but others get to tell us
what we mean,” we need to begin to say

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what we mean and mean what we say. We
keep losing arguments that we should be
winning because we have allowed others to
set the agenda. We have allowed others to
artificially proscribe the limits of Black femin-
ist inquiry, telling us where we have been and
where we are, while suggesting that there is
nowhere else for us to go. This must change.

Let us love none of these limits. Black fem-
inism can and should retain what Abena
Busia, Stanlie James, and later Patricia Hill
Collins termed “visionary pragmatism,”
which at base level constitutes our ethical
commitment to liberatory world-making.
Denise James argues that “theory as social
hope is an identifying marker of Black femin-
ism.”42 Because Black feminism rejects the
“fundamentality assumption”43 that theory is
more fundamental than politics, our range of
ethically driven political commitments
should continue to inform the theoretical
pushes we make. For instance, questions of
ethics, history, and politics are frequently
cast as excluding questions of pleasure and
desire. But if Black feminism sets as a priority
an ethical and political commitment to plea-
sure, as many scholars like Joan Morgan are
doing, then that commitment should inform
the sources of our theoretical investigation.

Theory-building has to be part and parcel
of our world-making. And the language of
“building” and “making” is important
because it marks the limits of critique. It is
high time we rethought our wholesale invest-
ment in the poststructuralist project of decon-
struction. Black feminism insists that what we
build is far more important than what we
destroy. Institutionally, we should look to
new work emerging from Black women’s
intellectual history and from Black feminist

philosophy as key places to reinvigorate our
knowledge production. Finally, a focus on
ethics, which should not be equated with
moral regulation, keeps us focused on the
world we are trying to build, and joins us to
a multi-generational project of dismantling
systems of white supremacy, heteropatriar-
chy, and capitalism. Moreover, an ethical
commitment to seeing political and theoreti-
cal possibility in Black women’s lives respects
the time Black women have spent in service
of changing the world and changing insti-
tutions. It refuses to let the logics of progress-
ive time now come along and do violence to
us by situating us in the past, but instead
acknowledges the ways that Black women’s
visionary pragmatism always encoded a
view of Black people as a people of the
future. Let us reinvigorate and reanimate
Black feminist theory. Let us stop interrupting
Black feminism in the process of performing
its various sustaining, intimate, political, intel-
lectually orgiastic acts of love toward us. Let
us remove the artificial limits so that Black
feminism can continue loving and seeing
value in the lives of Black women and all
Black people with no bounds. This is the
only kind of future in which we get to live.

Notes

1. DuCille, Anne, “The Occult of True Black
Womanhood,” Signs 19, no. 3 (1994): 606.

2. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (New York
& London: Duke University Press, 2011), 240.

3. Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philos-
ophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2012): 6.

4. Barbara Tomlinson, “To Tell the Truth and
Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and

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Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no.
4 (2013): 997.

5. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,”
Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 52.

6. Ibid., 52 and 53.
7. Ibid., 55–6.
8. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus:

Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human (New York:
Duke University Press, 2014), 9.

9. See Kristie Dotson, “Between Rocks and
Hard Places: Introducing Black Feminist
Professional Philosophy” The Black Scholar
(forthcoming).

10. Donna-Dale Marcano, “The Difference
that Difference Makes: Black Feminism and Philos-
ophy,” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Con-
tinental Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 2010)
Kindle edition.

11. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Woman-
hood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 15–16.

12. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Poli-
tics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routle-
dge, 2000), 17.

13. While it is true that most fields and disci-
plines in the humanities are asked to quantify
their academic value and prove their institutional
legitimacy, Black feminism and its rootedness in
Black communities means that it is far more vulner-
able to acts of cooptation and dismantling, because
it has never fully moved from the state of precarity.

14. L.H. Stallings, Mutha’ is Half A Word: Inter-
sections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth and Queer-
ness in Black Female Culture (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2007). See also Kara
Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the
Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jennifer
C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading

Race, Reading Pornography (London: Duke
University Press, 2014); Mireille Miller-Young, A
Taste of Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornogra-
phy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

15. Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who
Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is
Enuf, (New York: Scribner, 1975), 45.

16. Marcano, Convergences.
17. Ibid.
18. Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of

Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 14.
19. Ibid., 20.
20. See Christopher Kuzawa and Elizabeth

Sweet, “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race:
Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities
in Cardiovascular Health,” American Journal of
Human Biology 21 (2009): 2–15.

21. Carby, ReconstructingWomanhood, 15–16.
22. A recent exception is Kaila Adia Story, ed.,

Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood
(Ontario: Demeter Press, 2014).

23. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 5.
24. Ibid., 9.
25. Ibid., 7.
26. Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black:

Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 149. See
introduction n.1.

27. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications:
Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), 22.

28. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 78.
29. Ibid., 57–8.
30. Ibid., 61.
31. Ibid., 75.
32. Wiegman, Object Lessons, 242.
33. Jasbir Puar, “I’d Rather Be a Cyborg, than a

Goddess,” Philosophia 2, no. 1 (2012), 54. Puar
argues that intersectionality is mired in “geopoliti-
cal” problems, namely that it doesn’t travel well
transnationally. Moreover she says the “cherished
categories of the intersectional mantra … are the

TBS • Volume 45 • Number 4 • Winter 201520

product of modernist colonial agendas and regimes
of epistemic violence” (54). Here again is the pro-
blematic claim that by taking up categories we
didn’t create, and seeking to unmask the power
relations of those categories through intersectional
analysis, intersectionality in fact does violence to
other women of color by colluding with “colonial
agendas.”

34. M.T. Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and
Revival,” Women & Performance: A Journal of
Feminist Theory 22, nos 2–3 (2012): 190.

35. Ibid.
36. See Wiegman, Object Lessons.
37. Michelle Goldberg, “Feminism’s Toxic

Twitter Wars,” The Nation February 17, 2014,
http://www.thenation.com/article/feminisms-toxic-
twitter-wars/ (accessed July 13, 2015).

38. Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Mul-
tiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist
Ideology,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of
African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly
Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995),
312.

39. See Jennifer Nash, Re-Thinking Intersec-
tionality,” Feminist Review 89 (2008), for an

example of Black feminist scholarship ambivalent
about intersectionality.

40. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 61.
41. Kelly Googan-Gehr, “The Politics of Race

in U.S. Feminist Scholarship: An Archaeology,”
Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society
37, no. 1 (2012): 102. Coogan-Gehr demon-
strated that within feminist scholarship terms
like “women of color” and “third world
women,” which Black feminists helped to
create in order to form solidarities “have had
the unintended consequence of masking speci-
ficity, rendering scholarship by and about black
women invisible.”

42. V. Denise James, “Theorizing Black Femin-
ist Pragmatism: Forethoughts on the Practices and
Purpose of Philosophy.” The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2009): 93. James derives the
term social hope from John Dewey who argues that
“philosophy is … a social hope reduced to a
working program of action, a prophecy of the
future, but one disciplined by serious thought and
knowledge.”

43. Dotson, “Between Rocks and Hard Places,”
forthcoming.

Brittney C. Cooper, PhD is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at
Rutgers University. Her first book, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual
Tradition is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is co-founder of the popular Crunk Fem-
inist Collective Blog, and has been named in The Root 100 list of top Black influencers in 2013 and
2014.

Brittney C. Cooper 21

http://www.thenation.com/article/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars/

Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That: Black Feminism Interruptus
It’s Our Prerogative. We Can Do What We Wanna Do.

Love No Limit
Notes

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Page 1 of 15

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Subscriber: OU P-Reference Gratis Access; date: 19 August 2015

Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Theory
Online Publication Date: Aug
2015

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.20

Intersectionality
Brittney Cooper
The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Forthcoming)
Edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality has become the key analytic framework through
which feminist scholars in various fields talk about the structural identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
This chapter situates intersectionality within a long history of black feminist theorizing about interlocking systems of
power and oppression, arguing that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but one of power. It
challenges feminist theorists, including Robyn Wiegman, Jennifer Nash, and Jasbir Puar, who have attempted to
move past intersectionality because of its limitations in fully attending to the contours of identity. The chapter also
maps conversations within the social sciences about intersectionality as a research methodology. Finally, it
considers what it means for black women to retain paradigmatic status within intersectionality studies, whether
doing so is essentialist, and therefore problematic, or whether attempts to move “beyond” black women constitute
attempts at erasure and displacement.

Keywords: intersectionality, race, class, gender, neoliberalism, black women, black feminism

In the nearly three decades since black feminist legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined
the term intersectionality, a host of debates within feminist theory have ensued about what the term means, the
breadth of its intellectual history and genealogies, and the scope of its political possibility. Though intersectionality
has taken on a kind of “citational ubiquity” (Wiegman 2012) in academic circles, giving the sense that “everyone”
does intersectional work, there seems to be less agreement about what exactly intersectionality is and a growing
sense that despite its expansive academic reach, the framework does not sufficiently attend to a range of critical
questions. In this chapter, I provide both an overview of Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality and a sense of
the broader genealogies of black feminist thought from which it emerges. I map the most significant recent
arguments against intersectionality in the work of three feminist theorists: Jennifer Nash, Robyn Wiegman and Jasbir
Puar. I then attend to the work of theorists who take up intersectionality as a kind of feminist methodology and
consider whether this approach solves the problems attributed to intersectional approaches.

Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s as an analytic frame capable of attending to the particular positionality
of black women and other women of color both in civil rights law and within civil rights movements. It is the most
visible and enduring contribution that feminism, and in particular black feminism, has made to critical social theory
in the last quarter century. Coined and elaborated by Crenshaw in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991,
the term intersectionality asserted an analytic frame that disrupted the tendency in social-justice movements and
critical social theorizing “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis
(Crenshaw 1989).” In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Crenshaw exposed the problems of this
“single-axis” analysis when set against the backdrop of “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences.”
“This single-axis framework,” she argued, “erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and
remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members

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of the group” (1989, 140). Calling attention to the manner in which the single-axis framework erased the
experiences of black women also exposed the larger challenge that “these problems of exclusion cannot be
solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure” (140). The
“intersectional experience,” Crenshaw averred, “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism,” meaning that
“any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in
which Black women are subordinated” (140). These observations demanded a total “recasting and rethinking” of
existing policy frameworks (140).

In her 1991 article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,”
Crenshaw revisited intersectionality with respect to its relationship to social constructionist ideas about identity and
cultural battles over identity politics. She made clear that intersectionality should not be taken as “some new,
totalizing theory of identity” (1991, 1244). Rather intersectionality demonstrated “the need to account for multiple
grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (1245). Explicitly expanding her
framework to include both black and Latina women, Crenshaw talked about the relationship between “structural
intersectionality” and “political intersectionality.” Structural intersectionality referred to a convergence of “race,
gender, and class domination” wherein social interventions designed to ameliorate the results of only racism, or
sexism, or poverty would be insufficient to address the needs of a woman of color marginalized by the interaction
of all three systems of power. For instance, in addressing domestic violence, “intervention strategies based solely
on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to
women who face different obstacles because of race and class” (1246). Political intersectionality, on the other
hand, looked outward to “highlight that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that
frequently pursue conflicting political agendas” (1252).

Taken together, Crenshaw’s essays catalyzed a tectonic shift in the nature of feminist theorizing by suggesting
that black women’s experiences demanded new paradigms in feminist theorizing, creating an analytic framework
that exposed through use of a powerful metaphor exactly what it meant for systems of power to be interactive, and
explicitly tying the political aims of an inclusive democracy to a theory and account of power. As an account of
power, intersectionality attended to the particular forms of subjugation and subordination that characterized black
women’s intersecting and multiplicative (King 1986) experiences of racism and sexism within the law.

After more than a quarter century of traversing feminist academic terrain, there is an increasing concern that
intersectionality has outlived its analytic usefulness. Some argue, implicitly rather than explicitly, that its
overarching investment in speaking about the social conditions of US black women’s lives militates against its
ability to offer a broadly applicable set of theoretical propositions. Others are disillusioned with intersectionality’s
inability to fully account for all the exigencies of identity in the face of multiple and proliferating categories of social
identity, such as sexuality, nation, religion, age, and ability, in contemporary intersectional discourses. Yet, the
political import of paradigms that make the interactive process of social marginalization visible cannot be denied.
The institutional transformation of the status of women of color feminisms within the academy is a direct result of
the political work that intersectional frames do. Thus, there is a tension about what it might mean to jettison or move
beyond intersectionality’s theoretical concerns without jettisoning a commitment to its social-justice aims.

Sirma Bilge (2013) notes that “like other ‘traveling theories’ that move across disciplines and geographies,
intersectionality falls prey to widespread misrepresentation, tokenization, displacement, and disarticulation.
Because the concept of intersectionality emerged as a tool to counter multiple oppressions, there are multiple
narratives about its orgins, as well as tensions over the legibility of its stakes” (410). Thus, I want to begin with an
intellectual genealogy of works by black women thinkers that laid the intellectual groundwork from which Crenshaw
launched intersectionality.

Genealogies

The idea that patriarchy interacts with other systems of power—namely, racism—to uniquely disadvantage some
groups of women more than others has a long history within black feminism’s intellectual and political traditions. As
early as 1892, Anna Julia Cooper wrote, “[T]he colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position
in this country…. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an
unacknowledged factor in both” (134). The “woman question” was nineteenth-century shorthand for talking about

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the full inclusion of women as legally recognized human beings entitled to property rights and all other rights
attaining to citizens. The “race problem” was nineteenth-century shorthand for discussing the cementing of Jim
Crow segregation in the post-Reconstruction era. Black women endured the ignobility of both systems, often while
confronting crushing poverty too. Even after significant milestones had been reached in the broader women’s
movement, black women often found themselves excluded from employment opportunities reserved for white
women.

In 1940, Cooper’s colleague and contemporary Mary Church Terrell penned a self-published autobiography with
the title A Colored Woman in a White World, with the opening lines, “This is the story of a colored woman living in
a white world. It cannot possibly be like a story written by a white woman. A white woman has only one handicap to
overcome—that of sex. I have two—both sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country, which has two
such huge obstacles to surmount. Colored men have only one—that of race” (Terrell [1940] 2005, 29) Terrell
argued that these “two such huge obstacles” constituted the “double-handicap” of race and sex (29). She
positioned herself in relationship to white women, whose struggles for equal rights had fomented an epic battle in
the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, and also to black men,
whose failure on the basis of racism to attain what Ida B. Wells frequently called “manhood rights” has formed the
basis of the long black freedom struggle. The idea that racism and sexism and patriarchy acted in tandem to duly
disadvantage black women in the body politic became a mainstay of early feminist theorizing among black women.
Over and over again, black women formulated new ways to think and talk about how racism and sexism dovetailed
to wall them out of the benefits of citizenship.

In the early 1940s, while she was a student at Howard University Law School, the only woman in her class, famed
civil rights activist Pauli Murray coined the term “Jane Crow.” Murray (1987, 183) characterized the male-centered
legal culture she encountered in the law school as a culture of “discriminatory sex bias,” a system of “Jane Crow,”
which she understood to be “a twin evil” of Jim Crow. In the 1970s, Murray had come to think more specifically
about how Jane Crow or sexual bias against black women showed up within the confines of the law. In a
groundbreaking essay, “Constitutional Law and Black Women” (Murray, n.d.) she drew a range of parallels
between the treatment of blacks and the treatment of women in the law. She concluded that “Black women have an
important stake in the present movement to make the guarantee of equal rights without regard to sex the
fundamental law of the land” (45). The use of the race-sex analogy became one of Murray’s signal contributions to
legal thought and civil rights activism (Mayeri 2011).

Because Murray felt that sexism functioned analogously to racism, she believed that cases brought under the
Equal Protection Amendment (the 14th) could alleviate sex discrimination against all women. Though she did not
fully factor in that the law was incapable of accounting for black women’s unique position vis-à-vis Jane Crow, she
laid the groundwork for legal interventions that emerged two decades later in Crenshaw’s work and the work of
other critical race theorists.

In 1970, echoing Terrell’s concept of the “double-handicap” of race and sex, Frances Beale argued that black
women were caught in a kind of “double jeopardy” of being both black and female. She described “the black
woman in America … as a ‘slave of a slave,’ ” placed in that position because black women often became the
“scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous system has perpetrated on black men (Beale [1970] 1995, 148).” By
the mid-1970s the Combahee River Collective was arguing that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
Most importantly they argued, “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (1995, 232).

By the late 1980s, Deborah King revisited Beale’s concept of double jeopardy and Beverly Lindsay’s concept of
triple jeopardy, which attempted more explicitly to account for class and to include the experiences of Native
American, Chicana, and Asian American women. King (1988, 47) argued that these frameworks fell into the trap of
taking an “additive approach” that “ignor[ed] the fact that racism, sexism, and classism constitute three,
interdependent control systems,” something that could be better captured in a term like multiple jeopardy.
“Multiple,” she argued referred “not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative
relationships among them as well” (47).

Taken together, this body of proto-intersectionality theorizing advanced the idea that systems of oppression—
namely, racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism—worked together to create a set of social conditions under
which black women and other women of color lived and labored, always in a kind of invisible but ever-present

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social jeopardy. Crenshaw built on and brought together this body of black feminist theorizing, when she
encountered the legal conundrum of black women who were discriminated against as black women, not only as
women and not only as blacks. What she named “intersectionality,” encapsulated and expanded a body of work
about a set of social problems that black women thinkers had been grappling with and attempting in various shapes
and forms to name for nearly a century. In this regard, Crenshaw’s bringing together of critical race theory with the
work of such black feminist theorists as Anna Julia Cooper, Gloria Hull, Barbara Smith, and the women of Kitchen
Table Press, as well as the work of Paula Giddings, represented the very kind of interdisciplinarity that has become
a hallmark of black feminist theorizing. In the twenty-five years since the publication of these two germinal essays,
Crenshaw has continued over the course of several articles to sharpen her intersectional analysis. For instance,
she argued in “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race, and
Social Control” (2012), that with regard to the growing problem of black and Latina women and mass incarceration,
“not only is there no one way that racially marginalized women are subject to overlapping patterns of power, but
also women of color are certainly not intersectionality’s only subjects when it comes to social punishment” (1425).
Thus, she argues, “intersectional dynamics are not static, but neither are they untethered from history, context, or
social identity” (1426). But the core of her work remains about mapping the manner in which power dynamics
interact to make black women marginalized by social systems like mass incarceration invisible.

Intersectional Feminisms

Crenshaw used a discrete set of problems that black women encountered when bringing antidiscrimination lawsuits
against their employers to point to the broader challenge of the law’s insufficiency to remedy harm done to people
placed along multiple axes of marginalized identities. Although she did not intend it to, her framework, which is at
base an account of structural power relationships, offered a way to begin talking about the interaction of these
systems of power in the formation of identity. To return to Combahee, black women noted that interactive systems
of power “formed the conditions” of their lives. And insofar as material conditions bear some relationship to how
one identifies in the world and moves through the world, intersectionality’s implications for reconceptualizing
identity have had far-reaching consequences, in particular for the development of feminist studies in the academy.

However, the disjuncture between theories of identity and the intellectual project of intersectionality led to a range
of unfortunate consequences as the theoretical framework traveled to other disciplines. The most egregious of
these consequences is the tendency to treat intersectionality as a feminist account of identity, despite Crenshaw’s
(1991, 1244) very clear assertion that the framework did not constitute some “new, totalizing theory of identity.” So
while Crenshaw used intersectionality to demonstrate certain fissures in identity politics and the ways that these
kinds of group politics were frequently unable to meet the needs of certain putative members of the group, the
theory has been accused of fomenting unhelpful and essentialist kinds of identifications.

In the original formulation of intersectionality, Crenshaw demonstrated that black women’s experiences, while
intersectional, were not reducible to intersectional treatments of race and sex, or to any other category, for that
matter. Intersectionality was a first, formative step that allowed for recognition of the black female subject within
juridical structures of power, where she had heretofore remained invisible and illegible, and thus unable to obtain
any kind of justice. Crenshaw’s argument was that failure to begin with an intersectional frame would always result
in insufficient attention to black women’s experiences of subordination. She did not argue for the converse,
namely, that intersectionality would fully and wholly account for the range or depth of black female experiences.
Intersectionality constituted a specific paradigm or framework for understanding black women’s subordinated
social position and the situated effects of mutually constructing systems of power and oppressions within black
women’s lives. Never did her work indicate that intersectionality was an effective tool of accounting for identities at
any level beyond the structural. More recently, she has argued that “at the same time that intersectionality
transcends an exclusive focus on identity or mere categorization, the lived experiences of racially marginalized
women and girls are shaped by a range of social and institutional practices that produce and sustain social
categories and infuse them with social meanings” (2012, 1426).

The implicit distinction being made here between personal kinds of identity and structural identities is an important
one. The law conceptualizes people through the structural identities of gender, race, sexual orientation, or national
origin. These kinds of identities are different from personal identities of the sort that refer to personal taste,
personality traits, gender performativity, or intimate and filial relationships. If Crenshaw’s account of

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intersectionality is implicated in the project of identity politics at all, it is implicated at the structural level rather than
the personal level. However, as an analytic tool it has been erroneously taken up in some feminist academic
circles as a totalizing account of identity, and it has proved insufficient for such projects. That in no way implicates
the merits of intersectional paradigms, but rather calls into question the epistemic routes through which it has
traveled to other places and whether these routes make sense.

In one of the earliest major critiques of intersectionality, legal scholar Peter Kwan argued:

Intersectionality does not pack much of an epistemological punch. In other words, although
intersectionality illuminates the ways in which victims of multiple forms of oppression must be recognized
as such on their own terms, in and of itself intersectionality tells us little about the fiscal, emotional,
psychological, and other conditions nor the subjectivity of those caught in the trajectories of intersecting
categories. Intersectionality tells us, for example, that the condition and subjectivity of and hence the legal
treatment of Black women is not simply the sum of Blackness and femaleness, but it does not shed much
light on what it is nevertheless. Narratives are often used to fill this gap. But narratives provide only
empirical data on which the theoretical work remains to be done.

(Kwan 2000, 687)

Kwan is right on one level: knowing about the various intersections that constitute a person’s structural position
does not mean in fact knowing that person as an individual. But Kwan’s real critique of intersectionality seems to be
not of Crenshaw’s articulation, but rather of black feminist standpoint theory, which is invested in an affirmative
articulation of a black women’s epistemological point of view. Intersectionality is not beholden to a particular
epistemological viewpoint. While it brings into focus marginalized people practicing what Nancy Hartsock might call
“subjugated knowledges,” and while the relations of power intersectionality exposes might be most articulable
through the framework of subjugated knowledges, intersectionality does not tether black women to a certain
epistemological standpoint. By the time Kwan penned his essay at the end of the 1990s there had already been
more than a decade of scholarly dissent among black feminists about the role of standpoint theory in
circumscribing and ghettoizing black women’s experiences and black feminist knowledge production (Carby 1987;
Smith 1998). Still, intersectionality is dogged by critiques of its alleged epistemological and identitarian investments.

Take for instance, the work of black feminist theorist Jennifer Nash. In an essay called “Rethinking
Intersectionality,” Nash (2008, 4) outlines four central problems or “unresolved questions” with intersectionality:
“[T]he lack of a clearly defined intersectional methodology, the use of black women as prototypical intersectional
subjects, the ambiguity inherent to the definition of intersectionality, and the coherence between intersectionality
and lived experiences of multiple identities.” In raising these questions, Nash’s “hope is not to dismantle
intersectionality” but rather to expose intersectionality’s underlying assumptions in order to help scholars
“dismantle essentialism,” “craft nuanced theories of identity and oppression,” and “grapple with the messiness of
subjectivity” (4). Current articulations of intersectionality are situated in Nash’s work in opposition to the
aforementioned goals.

Nash defines intersectionality as “the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race,
gender, class, and sexuality” (2). She further argues that one of the theoretical and political purposes that
intersectionality serves for feminist and antiracist scholarship is “to subvert race/gender binaries in service of
theorizing identity in a more complex fashion” (2). This definition of intersectionality and articulation of its goals
reveals two significant misreadings of intersectionality. The first is that the framework never claimed to be an
affirmative assertion about how subjectivity is constituted, but was rather a claim about how certain aspects of
one’s identity could make them invisible as subjects within the law. The second problem, which is not unique to
Nash’s work but is, rather, indicative of how intersectionality is now discussed in some feminist circles, is that
“vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality,” are conflated with a discussion of remedying “racism, sexism, and
classism.” One set of phrases points to identity categories; the other points to systems of power. Intersectionality is
thus assessed as failing to account fully for identity issues from the view that its goal is to “subvert race/gender
binaries in service of theorizing identity in a more complex fashion” (emphasis added) (2). Undoubtedly, this is
how the project of intersectionality has been taken up in feminist studies, and undoubtedly, intersectionality would
be found wanting as an epistemological system since it was meant to be a provisional solution to a more specific
problem. Nowhere in the genealogies of thought that came to constitute intersectionality do black women ever put

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forth the interlocking nature of racism and sexism as the basis for understanding their identity wholly. In fact, they
assert just the opposite—namely, that the operations of racism, sexism, and sometimes classism make them
civically and juridically unknowable. In this case, the solution to the problem of unknowability is not being known
but being knowable. Therefore, we should not conclude that frameworks that attempt to solve the problem of
“unknowability,” or what we might call juridical illegibility (Carbado 2013, 815), are attempting to help us know
anyone. These frameworks attempt to make some aspect of people’s identity legible. They attend to the problem of
recognition rather than a problem of subjectivity.

Existing structures recognize and provide property rights and protections for a standard white, male, property-
owning, heterosexual, able-bodied subject. But bringing into view lives that have been occluded by obtrusive
structures, such as racism and sexism, does not then mean that the people living them are now known. It means
that the structures making them invisible are now clear and that the negative impact of those structures must be
addressed. Feminist theorists must reject any misrepresentations of intersectionality that suggest that the search
for a theoretical frame that fully encompasses the bounds of articulable identities takes priority over a framework
that sustains critiques of the institutional power arrangements that make those identities invisible and illegible.
Intersectionality’s most powerful argument is not that the articulation of new identities in and of itself disrupts power
arrangements. Rather, the argument is that institutional power arrangements, rooted as they are in relations of
domination and subordination, confound and constrict the life possibilities of those who already live at the
intersection of certain identity categories, even as they elevate the possibilities of those living at more legible (and
privileged) points of intersection. Thus, while intersectionality should be credited with “lifting the veil,” to invoke Du
Bois’s metaphor of the racial “color line,” we should remain clear that the goal of intersectionality is not to provide
an epistemological mechanism to bring communities from behind the veil into full legibility. It is rather to rend the
veil and make sure that no arguments are articulated to support its reconstruction. Thus political commitments
which grow out of intersectionality are rooted in a critical demeanor of vigilance, my riff on Koritha Mitchell’s notion
of a “critical demeanor of shamelessness,” (2014) with regard to challenging the ever-shifting machinations of
systems that seek to reinstantiate and reinscribe dominance.

Barbara Tomlinson (2013, 1000) takes issue with critics, such as Nash, whose work suggests that
“intersectionality’s critique of structural power interferes with its more important use for developing general
theories of identity.” Tomlinson writes, “Diminishing the role of power in identity formation, such critics demonstrate
a desire for individual self-invention, as if history and power no longer have claims on us, as if the significance of
identities lies in expressions of subjectivity” (1000). This set of concerns is markedly different “for scholars
concerned with antisubordination,” for whom “the experience and subjectivity of specific identities is not really the
focus of the argument but rather a proxy or tool to examine and counter structural justice and subordination”
(1000). Tomlinson issues a scathing indictment in the form of a warning: “which meaning of identity we are
interested in depends on the work we want our work to do” (1000).

The stated desire among intersectionality’s most pointed critics to “not dismantle it” has everything to do with their
recognizing that intersectionality is institutionally important for providing the language and justification for a diverse
academy. Robyn Wiegman (2012), for example, makes clear that she agrees with the central thrust of Jennifer
Nash’s argument and that she has many reservations about intersectionality herself. Nonetheless, we are told that
to take her concerns as “an indictment of intersectional analysis is to hear a judgment I do not intend” (250).
Rather, Wiegman is concerned not “with measuring the value of the promise that intersectionality makes but with
the lessons at stake in fully inhabiting them” (250). Moreover, she argues that Nash’s work “brings to the
foreground the significance of the institutional setting in which intersectionality has garnered its critical authority,
such that a theory of marginalization can become dominant even when the majority of those represented by its
object of study have no access to the ameliorative justice its critical hegemony represents” (299). This
assessment of intersectionality’s broad critical reach seems very much to indict it for an inability to achieve
“ameliorative justice” on behalf of black women (and perhaps other marginalized groups of color) that it claims to
represent. To suggest that intersectionality possesses “critical hegemony” in a world where hegemony always
signals a problematic relationship of dominance that needs to be dismantled runs counter to Wiegman’s (and
Nash’s) assertions that they are not interested in “judging” or “dismantling” the project of intersectionality. But the
fear, it seems, is that to fully “inhabit” the lessons of intersectionality is to prevent ourselves from attending to
groups whose experience of marginalization is not akin to black women’s or to suggest erroneously that black
women are always, in every case, marginalized. This kind of intersectional conundrum as articulated by Nash and

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echoed by Wiegman is a skepticism about “whether all identities are intersectional or whether only multiply
marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity” (Nash 2008; Wiegman 2012). Carbado (2013) responds to
this particular quibble about which identities are intersectional essentially by noting that all identities are
intersectional. The theory applies in cases where we are talking about multiply jeopardized or marginalized
subjects, but “the theory [also] applies where there is no jeopardy at all. Thus it is a mistake to conceptualize
intersectionality as a ‘race to the bottom’ ” (814). The theory seeks to map the top of social hierarchies as well. By
suggesting that intersectionality has a range of problems to which it cannot attend, some critics artificially
circumscribe the limits of what the theory can perform. This need to displace intersectionality while claiming a
desire to keep it intact in some greatly altered form is absolutely a function of market-driven, neoliberal forms of
academic knowledge production and the sense that academics must always say something new. It is therefore
bizarre when critics suggest that it is intersectionality itself, and not the impulses seeking to displace intersectional
frames, that acts as a tool of neoliberal collusion, despite a continuing need for its political project within
institutions.

The argument that the way intersectionality accounts for identity and its indebtedness to stable intact categories
reproduce juridical structures that collude with neoliberal and imperialist projects emerges in the work of Jasbir
Puar. In her groundbreaking Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar (2007, 212) argues
for new formulations of identity that don’t begin and end with intersectionality: “As opposed to an intersectional
model of identity, which presumes that components—race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion—are
separable analytics and can thus be disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that
merge and dissipate, time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.” Puar deploys Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (2001, 6) conception of assemblage, which they define as a “multiplicity” that has
“neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions.” They go on to say that “there are
no points or positions … such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.” In other words,
assemblage is a way of describing relationships between constitutive entities that does not assume either an
overarching system or structure, or a shared set of roots or genealogies. Puar suggests that this conception is
more favorable than intersectionality, which

demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic
of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of progress that
deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity, yes, but also
timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space.

(Puar 2007, 212)

One immediate problem with this account is that the black body has never been conceived as being capable of
linearity and coherency, and certainly not of permanency, particularly when it comes to institutionalized and
official knowledges. Moreover, since the earliest days of intersectional theorizing, Patricia Hill Collins (1998) has
stridently rejected the logic of equivalence that inheres in some work on intersectionality, writing that “continuing to
leave intersectionality as an undertheorized construct contributes to old hierarchies (and some new ones) being
reformed under … a new myth of equivalent oppressions” (211). She says, “[I]f all oppressions mutually construct
one another, then we’re all oppressed in some way by something—oppression talk obscures unjust power
relations” (211). Moreover, Rebecca Clark-Mane (2012, 92) argues that this logic of equivalence, this “flattening
and proliferation of difference,” is part of syntax of whiteness that inheres in third-wave or contemporary feminist
theorizing. So a “stabilizing” of black identity across time and space might be politically attractive in the US context
insofar as it creates the conditions for the protection of one’s rights as a citizen. But this would require leaving an
analysis not only of race as identity but also of racism as a system of power at the forefront of analyses of
intersectionality, a point I will return to shortly.

Puar (2007, 215) continues her indictment of intersectionality by arguing that “intersectionality privileges naming,
visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology,
affect, and information.” Because assemblages attempt to “comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory
models,” in Puar’s estimation they are more adept at “work[ing] against narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that
secure empire, [by] challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies that inform practices of state
surveillance and control” (215). Although Puar contends (like Nash and Wiegman) that she does not want to do
away with intersectionality but only to supplement and complicate it through the introduction of the assemblage,

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the claims that intersectionality is complicit with US imperialism, that it is overly beholden to what Wiegman terms
the “juridical imaginary,” and that it replicates taxonomies of violence are nothing short of devastating. Moreover,
to recast the desire of marginalized US subjects for state-based recognition as a collusion with empire suggests a
troubling misunderstanding of the differing material realities of those who benefit from empire and those whose lives
and labor and marginalization buttress the foundation of violence upon which the empire is built.

Yet, Puar writes, “as a tool of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality
colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state—census, demography, racial profiling, surveillance—in that
‘difference’ is encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic
grid” (212). In Puar’s formulation, state recognition is an inherently limiting thing to want, because the desire for
recognition vis-à-vis official channels reinscribes the authority of the state. But if, in the case of racialized others in
the United States. for instance, the state is already interpellating identities in violent ways, then asking for
recognition on different terms constitutes not collusion but dissent from various forms of state-based violence, both
physical and discursive. Crenshaw (2012, 1452) argues in the case of mass incarceration that “some of the
discursive spaces most vulnerable to neoliberal occupation have been those where feminist and antiracist
commitments have been weakened by their failure to address the intersectional dimensions of violence and social
control.” In other words, to lose sight of structural systems of power and their varied interactions is to enable
“neoliberal occupation” of putative social justice discourses. To suggest, for instance, that the desire for
intersectional recognition in the law means that working-class communities of color are acquiescing to the
overpolicing and surveillance of their bodies and communities assumes that lack of recognition and the invisibility
that comes with it somehow constitutes a form of “protection” for black and brown people. That kind of analysis
also suggests that intersectionality is implicated in obscuring rather than exposing the massive kinds of state
surveillance that characterizes life in communities of color. This is simply not the case. Where protection of one’s
body is tied to being a recognizable category, the idea that people of color should not want categorizations and
the protections they afford is short-sighted. And because intersectionality can consider a range of different ways in
which modes of power intersect in these instances, it offers tools for dismantling these systems not reifying them.

Because US-based intersectionality does seek to understand circulations of juridical power, it would be problematic
to impose dominant US identity categories in other national or transnational contexts. But if it is true that
intersectionality’s primary concern is to expose the way circulations of power enable or disable articulations of
identity, rather than to offer better language through which to express and make subjectivity legible, then the
suggestion that intersectionality colludes with rather than exposes power seems to be misplaced. Puar (2012)
returns to this critique of intersectionality as a tool of US imperialism in another essay, called “I’d Rather Be a
Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” Here, she argues that intersectionality
falls victim to certain “geopolitical problems”:

[T]ransnational and postcolonial scholars continue to point out that the categories privileged by
intersectional analysis do not necessarily traverse national and regional boundaries nor genealogical
exigencies, presuming and producing static epistemological renderings of categories themselves across
historical and geopolitical locations. Indeed many of the cherished categories of the intersectional mantra,
originally starting with race, class, gender, now including sexuality, nation, religion, age, and disability, are
the product of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence, operative through a
western/euro-american epistemological formation through which the whole notion of discrete identity has
emerged.

(Puar 2012, 54)

In other words, intersectionality relies on the production and reproduction of fixed identity categories that are
tethered to the apparatuses of the nation-state, which is itself a problematic category and social formation, in order
to make any interventions. Essentially, the argument here is that in seeking to remedy one kind of epistemic
violence—namely, that against black women—intersectionality proliferates a variety of other kinds of violence
against other women of color subjects.

Puar (2012) offers her own intervention to remedy the limitations of intersectionality through recourse again to the
Deleuzean notion of assemblage. Intersectional identities, she tells us, “are the byproducts of attempts to still and
quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility” (50).

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I want to register two concerns about this move. First, I concur with Devon Carbado (2013) that formulations such
as Kwan’s cosynthesis and Puar’s assemblages are “no more dynamic than intersectionality” because they all
grow out of a common problem: “[T]here are discursive limitations to our ability to capture the complex and
reiterative processes of social categorization. The very articulation of the idea that race and gender are co-
constitutive, for example discursively fragments those categories—into race and gender—to make that point. The
strictures of language require us to invoke race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories one discursive
moment at a time” (816). To then suggest that this amounts to a reproduction of the fixity of these categories is
false.

Second, Puar argues that intersectional identities “attempt to quell” the “mobility” of assemblages. To acknowledge
that fixity is an essentializing fiction does not deny either the very real realities of fixed or declining social positions
or the ways that the matrix of domination (Collins [1990] 2000), acts very much like a spider’s web that captures
and immobilizes its prey. The concept of mobility should itself be problematized as being the property of certain
embodied subjects. Intersectionality makes the disciplinary apparatus of the state visible and theorizes the way
legal constructions continually produce categories of bodies existing outside the limits of legal protection. In other
words, the ways in which juridical structures affix narratives of criminality to black male bodies (or brown bodies),
for instance, Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, on the basis of a very particular race-gender schema, works to limit
the mobility of these kinds of bodies in public and private space. In the end, even Puar concedes these realities
and opts for some unarticulated possibility of bridging the two frameworks:

[To] dismiss assemblage in favor of retaining intersectional identitarian frameworks is to miss the ways in
which societies of control apprehend and produce bodies as information, … to render intersectionality as
an archaic relic of identity politics then partakes in the fantasy of never-ending inclusion of capacity-
endowed bodies, bypassing entirely the possibility that for some bodies—we can call them statistical
outliers, or those consigned to premature death, or those once formerly considered useless bodies or
bodies of excess—discipline and punish may well still be the primary mode of power apparatus.

(Puar 2012, 63)

The Paradigmatic Black Female Subject

This tension about the way intersectionality purportedly limits the ability of scholars to develop frameworks that
more fully account for subjectivity leads to a central question: What is the status of the black female subject in a
world where the theoretical paradigm that has made her the most visible is indicted for making the identities of
other marginalized groups invisible? Because Crenshaw constructed the intersectional proposition on the ground of
black women’s erasure in civil rights law, intersectionality has come to stand in as a kind academic and/or
theoretical pronoun, whose antecedent is, or has at different turns been, black women, the black woman, and the
black female experience. It is has also become central to the intellectual scope of black feminism as an institutional
project. Literary scholar Valerie Smith (1998, xxiii) has argued that “there is no black feminism without
intersectionality.”

There is therefore no denying that institutional endorsement of intersectional frameworks has made unprecedented
space for the intellectual production of academic works by and about black women. However, unsubstantiated
claims that intersectionality must always be about black women presume, as Devon Carbado (2013, 813) notes,
that black women cannot “function as the backdrop for the genesis and articulation of a generalizable framework
about power and marginalization.” As Carbado goes on to explain, “many of the articles on intersectionality focus
squarely on black women or on race and gender. Surely, however, that is not, in itself, a problem. It is becoming
increasing[ly] unspeakable (dubbed theoretically backward, monopolistic, identitarian, categorically hegemonic,
etc.) to frame theoretical and political interventions around black women…. It is part of a larger ideological scene in
which blackness is permitted to play no racial role in anchoring claims for social justice” (814). Indeed, there is
disagreement among feminist scholars about whether this is in fact the case. Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2012, 19)
argues that “intersectionality research must be properly understood as the purview of scholars investigating
women of color.” She rejects the view that this is an endorsement of essentialism because intersectionality allows
women of color to “contest and refashion” embattled identity categories. To the extent that intersectionality makes
systems of power that disadvantage other groups visible, the idea that its theoretical and analytic scope should be

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limited to women of color seems parochial. But we should caution against any moves to evacuate or relegate to the
margins women of color from the intellectual trajectories of their own knowledge production. And we should
recognize that part of what it means to have women of color doing knowledge production is that their particular
positionality enables a different view of the way that many other groups move through power structures and not
just themselves.

Still for feminist scholars such as Wiegman, black women anchor intersectionality to a kind of particularity that
seems difficult to overcome. As intersectionality circulates in the academy, Wiegman argues that

the particularity of black women’s identity position functions as the formative ground for a critical practice
aimed at infinite inclusion. The leaps engaged here are most arresting if set in slower motion. On what
terms, for instance can the commitment to particularity take paradigmatic shape without sacrificing its force
as a counter to universalizing tendencies? Or more to the point, how can particularity retain the specificity
it evokes when the destination it inscribes is to render practice not simply coherent but comprehensive in
its analytic capacity and scope? Both of these questions point to the tension between intersectionality as a
commitment to the particularity of black women’s minoritization and its redeployment as the means to claim
paradigmatic mastery over both the experiences of women of color and identity’s historical, social,
political, and psychic complexity as a whole.

(Wiegman 2012, 242)

It seems that what Wiegman points to is a problem of what she terms the “redeployment” of intersectionality rather
than a problem of the framework itself. Moreover, it is intersectionality that exposed the limitations of single-axis
frameworks that presumed a kind of paradigmatic mastery over experience. Still, she and Puar are correct that it is
unfair to saddle intersectionality with the challenge of accounting for the experience of all groups. The problem is
that critiques of the epistemological limitations of intersectionality frequently cast intersectionality as something
either that has been achieved or something that is wholly unachievable. This discourse in which intersectionality
“is ‘hailed’ and ‘failedʼ simultaneously” is part of a neoliberal push in which “some elements of intersectionality are
taken into account, but only to be declared lapsed or obsolete, to be set aside for something better” (Bilge 2013,
407). In either case, the search is for some new paradigm that can do what intersectionality cannot do. But we
should remain skeptical of newer approaches to identity that take as their centerpiece a fundamental belief that the
particularity of black women’s experiences exempt black women from being the foundation on which broadly
applicable theoretical frames can be built. This desire to move on from intersectionality bears the spectre of a
troubling desire to move on from discussions of black women. That kind of move matters not simply theoretically
but also institutionally, since it would have the effect of using a theory rooted in the experiences of black women as
the sine qua non of feminism’s achievement of institutional diversity while potentially marginalizing black women in
the academy who have made space for themselves largely based on the intellectual cachet afforded to
intersectionality.

According to Wiegman, it is intersectionality’s relationship to a paradigmatic black female subject that creates the
need for a new analytic frame. Intersectionality is mired in an analytic impasse whereby “its figural resolution as a
comprehensive, inclusive, and multidimensional approach to the intersections of race and gender not only renders
‘Black women’s experience’ paradigmatic, but stakes intersectional reason on the force of the protocols of
paradigmatic reading it hones” (248). It seems here that this is really an argument against the use of experience as
the basis for theorizing, because no experience can be taken as paradigmatic without apparently doing violence to
the experiences of people who are differently placed. But intersectionality does not argue that black women’s
experiences are wholly paradigmatic for all experiences of social marginalization. Rather, it captures the parts of
black women’s common experiences and suggests that these experiences illumine the experiences of others
marginalized vis-à-vis intersecting categories. Moreover, black feminist engagements with and critiques of
standpoint theory and its attendant epistemologies are as old as intersectionality itself (Carby 1987; Collins 1998;
Smith 1997). Yet Wiegman (2012, 250) concludes that “in exacting its obligation to the figure that compels its
analysis [the black woman], intersectionality becomes enthralled to an object of study that must conform to the
shape of its critical desires, which is to say to the shape of the authority it draws from her perspective and social
position in order to confer on her the very epistemological priority and legal autonomy it promises to her.” In other
words, intersectionality prescribes what it claims to only name or describe. But Carbado (2013) warns that those
who falsely impose these kinds of limits on intersectionality are the ones who are prescribing what they claim only

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to describe. Moreover, all of these critics accede to the politics of diversity and inclusion that buttress calls for
intersectionality—hence their reluctance to move on from it. In response to such reluctance, Tomlinson (2013, 996)
warns that “critics assume that their task is to critique intersectionality, not to foster intersectionality’s ability to
critique subordination.” At the risk of being too prescriptive of the task of the feminist critic, I would add the caveat
that those feminist theorists who claim an investment in challenging structures of power that lock marginalized
subjects out should rethink the role of their criticism regarding intersectionality.

Because intersectionality’s biggest success within feminist studies is largely estimated to be its exposure of the
nonessentialist nature of gender identity, its role in helping us to understand racial formation remains nebulous. The
fact that intersectionality has seemingly successfully named and exposed the problem of racism and white
privilege in feminism has emboldened a new generation of scholars to become postintersectional. Like post-feminist
discourses that positively invoke feminism and cite the prevalence of feminist discourses to prove that there is no
longer a need for feminism, post-racial discourses use the neoliberal language of diversity to prove that we are
either beyond racism or that racism happens in individualist and isolated incidences. Broad systemic racism is no
longer a problem, and one of the ways that we continue to promote racism is to remain invested in the fictive
category of race and racialized discourses. The desire to become postintersectional is bound up with these post-
racial and post-feminist moves. Postintersectional discourses and analyses take the pervasiveness (or citational
ubiquity) of intersectionality in the academy (and now also in feminist social media) to be evidence that it has
achieved its goals, become outdated, and beckons for something new. Further, they insist that a continued focus
on the outmoded categories that inhere in intersectional analysis elides other peoples and problems and prohibits
progress. The turn to intersectionality as methodology is one concrete way that intersectionality has attempted to
get beyond its implicit connections to a black female embodied subject.

Intersectionality as Methodology

One way in which scholars have attempted to demonstrate the broader usefulness of intersectionality beyond its
import for black women is by employing it as a research paradigm. In her book Not Just Race, Not Just Gender:
Black Feminist Readings, literary scholar Valerie Smith (1998, xv) rejects black feminism as a “biologically
grounded positionality,” arguing instead that black feminism vis-à-vis intersectionality “provide[s] strategies of
reading simultaneity.” She proposes that the critic can “read intersectionally in the service of an antiracist and
feminist politics that holds that the power relations that dominate others are complicit in the subordination of black
and other women of color as well” (xvi). This kind of intellectual maneuver is meant to remove black feminism from
all attempts by earlier black feminist critics to situate black feminism on the ground or standpoint of black women’s
experience. In making it, Smith echoes the work of black feminists such as Ann duCille and Hazel Carby (1987, 10),
who argued that “black feminist criticism cannot afford to be essentialist and ahistorical, reducing the experience
of all black women to a common denominator and limiting black feminist critics to an exposition of an equivalent
black ‘female imagination.ʼ ” In response to critics who questioned whether or not this approach to intersectionality
disappears black women from view, Smith attempts to hold in tension a desire “to avoid notions of identity that are
timeless, transparent, or unproblematic in favor of those that are, in Stuart Hall’s words, ‘never complete, always in
process, and always constituted within, not outside representation’, alongside a need to “acknowledge the
strategic need to claim racial, gendered, sexual and class identities as meaningful in specific ways in the name of
struggle and resistance to institutional violence and exploitation” (1998, xvii). In this regard her critique anticipates
Puar (2007, 216) who argues that “intersectionality and its underpinnings—an unrelenting epistemological will to
truth—presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and
thus fixes a permanence to forever [whereas] assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot
be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being.”

Smith runs squarely into the challenge that many of her successors have noted as well—there is a fundamental
tension between intersectionality’s theoretical and intellectual possibilities and its use as a tool of institutional
transformation. But unlike her successors, Smith’s adoption of intersectionality as a reading strategy is a useful
corrective to approaches which attempt to circumscribe the usefulness of intersectionality on the grounds that it
cannot epistemologically account for the intersectional identities that it has made visible. Smith (1998, xxiii)
reminds us that the primary usefulness of intersectionality, whether as a tool of achieving institutional diversity or
as a kind of black feminist reading strategy, is that “by addressing the multifarious ways in which ideologies of
race, gender, class, and sexuality reinforce one another, reading intersectionally can illuminate the diverse ways

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in which relations of domination and subordination are produced.”

Smith’s ability to wrest intersectionality from the clutches of essentialist ghettoization suggest that battles over the
potential essentialism of black feminist perspectives have shaped intersectionality’s traversal through the
academy. These debates about the ways that black feminist criticism had the potential to render black female
identities static have existed within black feminist criticism at least since 1987, when Hazel Carby suggested that,
at best, black feminism should be understood as a “locus of contradictions.” But what Smith reminds us of again is
that intersectionality is most useful not as an account of all the intricacies of the subjectivity of any intersectional
group, but rather it is useful for exposing the operations of power dynamics in places where a single axis approach
might render those operations invisible.

In the fields of sociology and political science, Leslie McCall (2005) and Ange-Marie Hancock (2007), respectively,
have also argued for intersectionality as a rubric that can shape social science research protocols. Attempting to
remedy the failure of intersectionality researchers to clarify a methodology for intersectionality, McCall argues that
in sociology, intersectional research paradigms are indicative of what she terms the intracategorical approach.
Researchers using this approach “tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection … in
order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups.” McCall (2005, 1786) advocates for a move
toward an intersectional approach that facilitates “intercategorical complexity,” which “focuses on the complexity
of relationships among multiple social groups within and across analytical categories and not on complexities within
single social groups, single categories, or both.”

In a follow-up essay about intersectionality as methodology, McCall and Averil Clarke clarify what intersectional
methodologies make possible in the field of social science research. In social science, intersectionality facilitates
what the authors call “different interpretations of the same facts,” by both incorporating and specifying “the
overlap of multiple social dynamics” (Clarke and McCall 2013, 351). “These different interpretations and their
normative implications,” they argue, “are the logical outcomes of intesectionality’s beginnings in women of color’s
critique of the dominant descriptions of gender and racial inequality, and in their production of new knowledge at
the intersection of multiple vectors of scholarship, identity, structure, and social activism” (351). For instance,
Clarke (2013, 353) has used the intercategorical approach to challenge traditional sociological understandings of
fertility as being tied to class, using the experiences of educated black women to demonstrate that “when it comes
to the achievement of low fertility, a race-based deprivation in romance differentiates the experiences of black
women with college degrees from similarly educated White and Hispanic women. The advantages of class in
desired family formation practices are thus distinctly racialized.” Moreover, “this conclusion, buttressed by detailed
analysis of group differences, augments and modifies the conclusions of studies that elevate the role of class-
based explanations” (Clarke and McCall, 353).

Hancock (2007) argues that within political science, intersectionality can be useful not solely as a “content
specialization” but as a research paradigm. Mapping a similar set of concerns in political science as those outlined
by McCall (2005) in sociology, Hancock (2007) notes a shift in political science from single or unitary categorical
approaches, to explorations of multiple approaches (i.e., examinations of race and gender) to finally intersectional
approaches or the interaction of categories such as race and gender. Within political science, intersectionality as
a research paradigm makes at least two important methodological interventions. It “changes the relationship
between the categories of investigation from one that is determined a priori to one of empirical investigation,”
which could make a difference for instance in “large-n quantitative studies,” which might “assume that race
operates identically across entire cities, states, and nations when placed in interaction with gender or class”
(2007, 67). Additionally, “intersectionality posits an interactive, mutually constituted relationship among these
categories and the way in which race (or ethnicity) and gender (or other relevant categories) play a role in the
shaping of political institutions, political actors, the relationships between institutions and actors and the relevant
categories themselves” (67).

These paradigmatic approaches open up useful new avenues for thinking about how various social identity
categories co-constitute and are constituted by other categories and for asking new kinds of questions in empirical
and social-science-based approaches to research. But they also raise concerns about the status of the black
female subject relative to these research paradigms. For instance, there is a way in which despite the many
adaptations of Western political thought, white men are never disappeared from Western intellectual traditions.
Within the history of Western feminism, white women are in no danger of being disappeared as architects of

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feminist theory. Yet, the move toward postintersectional frames shows a resurgence of hesitancy to deal with
racism. Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2012, 2) situates her skepticism toward these instrumentalist approaches to
intersectionality within “two competing currents [that] shape the contemporary moment: a postmodern avoidance
of identity and a postfeminist deployment of feminism focused on incorporation and formal equality.” She argues
that postmodern approaches to identity, in their insistence that we all “have ruptured identities and fragmented
bodies,” “delegitimize the study of racism, sexism, and the structural bases of inequality” (2). Moreover, the
convergence of post-feminist and post-racial discourses has created a kind of “post-Black feminist” sensibility that
“emphasizes gender and racial representation while short-circuiting more far-reaching social and political change”
(2). In this regard, I think that the calls to become postintersectional and to move beyond intersectionality are akin
to and give false intellectual heft to broader political suggestions that the election of Barack Obama has thrust us
into a post-racial era. These institutional and political moves index an increasing discomfort with talking about
racism. Race, removed from an overarching framework of talking about racism, is fine as such conversations
merely signal diversity and mark a sense that we are progressing to a time when such categories will become
devoid of meaning.

Alexander-Floyd takes both McCall and Hancock to task for using rhetorical strategies that reframe intersectionality
in ways that disappear black women from a body of scholarship that emerges from the intellectual production and
political activism that they created. According to Alexander-Floyd (2012, 13), McCall’s focus on complexity
“advances a post-black feminist politics that disappears black women.” For Alexander-Floyd, the “issue is one of
subjugation, not complexity,” but McCall’s categorical approach, “unmoors intersectionality from women of color’s
lives and their multifaceted marginalization as its focus” (11). Moreover, Alexander-Floyd demonstrates that McCall,
in her rejection of the centrality of narratives to the “intracategorical approach” that defines black feminism,
reinstantiates positivist research frames despite “explicit epistemological challenges that black women, along with
feminists in general, have made to the positivist approach” (13). Alexander-Floyd’s critiques sound a note of
concern similar to Smith’s, but she concludes that black women should remain at the center of intersectional
paradigms.

In tandem with what she terms McCall’s “bait-and-switch” approach to the knowledge production of black women,
Alexander-Floyd indicts Hancock for the “universalizing tendency” of her work. Citing Hancock’s argument for
intersectionality as a general research paradigm, Alexander-Floyd (2012, 15) notes that “the re-visioning of
intersectionality that Hancock presents, however, is designed to give it greater appeal in the discipline in ways that
undermine black women and other women of color and intersectionality’s potentially transformative power.” She
argues that the universalizing tendency in Hancock’s work constitutes a post–black feminist reading of
intersectionality that disappears black women. For instance, one of the key ways that Hancock’s work represents a
universalizing tendency is “through its privileging of dominant modes of knowledge production in the discipline.
The relegation of intersectionality to a content specialization, as opposed to a research paradigm, voids its
standing as a vibrant, complex body of knowledge, implicitly suggesting that its knowledge is naïve or
nonempirical” (17). Sirma Bilge (2013, 413) has noted that there is now a troubling move to diminish the import of
the racial foundations of intersectionality by coopting its genealogy and declaring the concept to be the “brainchild
of feminism” rather than the “brainchild of black feminism.” “Such reframing makes intersectionality a property
specifically of feminism and women’s/gender studies,” and erases the intellectual labor of its black women
creators. Wiegman does not erase this history. Instead, she suggests that the depth of intersectionality’s
connections to black feminism saddles it with a kind of baggage—racial baggage—that makes its movement to
other spaces problematic. Alexander-Floyd’s point about the ways in which a desire to “universalize”
intersectionality disappears black women as a material matter while also curtailing and taming its potential to
disrupt problematic relations of power is a powerful one. Thus, she rejects all pretense of universal inclusion and
stakes her territory on the ground of black female particularity.

The broader challenges raised by Alexander-Floyd’s critique of intersectionality’s traversal through the social
sciences reflect issues about the way in which intersectionality works not just as theory but as praxis. And
certainly, we must recognize the manner in which postintersectional moves are deeply tethered to investments in a
faulty post-racial idea. The status of racial others within academic spaces remains fragile, especially in the era of
the neoliberal university, with its increasing commitments to diversity at the rhetorical level but decreasing
commitments at the level of funding for faculty in departments and programs in women’s and gender studies and
ethnic studies. To suggest as Puar does that intersectionality is a tool of a neoliberal agenda rather than a tool that

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Page 14 of 15

works against it is a line of thinking that should be vigilantly guarded against. Still, questions remain: Does
intersectionality need to have a more universal utility in order retain relevance in the academy? Do we really want
to argue that theories about black women should only travel in limited amounts? Is this not an essentializing fiction
that limits black women as much as it limits the import of our knowledge production? And if it achieves citational
ubiquity but is found not to be broadly applicable, is not intersectionality guilty of the charge of doing violence to
other marginalized peoples? These remain challenging questions, but what we must hold front and center is that in
its relationship to dominant institutions (be they juridical, academic, or social), intersectionality has a teleological
aim to expose and dismantle dominant systems of power, to promote the inclusion of black women and other
women of color and to transform the epistemological grounds upon which these institutions conceive of and
understand themselves. If it can be found to be doing this work, whether politically, analytically or
methodologically, then it should be understood not only as a continued boon to feminist theorizing but also to
feminist movement-building. At the same time, intersectionality does not deserve our religious devotion. It has
particular goals. To the extent that intersectional frames have made clear a need for new paradigms that more fully
explicate the lived realities of women of color, across a range of identity positions, the framework does not
preclude the development of new ways of thinking about identity. But as a conceptual and analytic tool for thinking
about operations of power, intersectionality remains one of the most useful and expansive paradigms we have.

References

Alexander-Floyd, Nikol. 2012. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-
Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations 24 (1): 1–25.

Beale, Frances. (1970) 1995. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of
African American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 146–155. New York: New

Press.

Bilge, Sirma. 2013. “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies.” Du
Bois Review 10 (2): 405–424.

Carbado, Devon. 2013. “Colorblind Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 811–
845.

Carby, Hazel. 1987. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Clarke, A.Y., and L. McCall. 2013. “Intersectionality and Social Explanation in Social Science Research.” Du Bois
Review 10 (2): 349–363.

Collins, Patricia Hill. (1990) 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of
Empowerment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota.

Cooper, Anna Julia. 1988. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. “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:
139–167.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against
Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 2012. “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about
Women, Race, and Social Control.” UCLA Law Review 59: 1419–1472.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 2001. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone

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Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a
Research Paradigm.” Perspectives on Politics 5 (1): 63–79.

Kwan, Peter. 2000. “Complicity and Complexity: Cosynthesis and Praxis.” DePaul Law Review 49: 687.

King, Deborah. 1986. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14: 42–72.

Mayeri, Serena. 2011. Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law and the Civil Rights Revolution. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (3):
1771–1800.

Mitchell, Koritha. 2014. “No More Shame! Defeating the New Jim Crow with Antilynching Activism’s Best Tools.”
American Quarterly 66 (1): 143-152.

Murray, Pauli. 1987. Song in a Weary Throat. New York: Harper & Row.

Murray, Pauli. n.d. “Constitutional Law and Black Women,” in American Law and the Black Community: Viewed By
Black Women Lawyers. Boston University Afro-American Studies Program, Occasional Paper No. 1.

Nash, Jennifer. 2008. “Re-Thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89: 1–15.

Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.

Puar, Jasbir. 2012. “I’d Rather Be A Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.”
Philosophia 2 (1): 49-66.

Smith, Valerie. 1998. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge.

Terrell, Mary Church. (1940) 2005. A Colored Woman in a White World. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books.

Tomlinson, Barbara. 2013. “To Tell the Truth and Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and Intersectionality at the
Scene of Argument.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 993–1017.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Brittney Cooper
Brittney Cooper is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University

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