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Discussion Questions (DQ’s):

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.

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PRIN TED FROM OXFORD H AN DBOOKS ON LIN E (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford U niversity Press, 2015. All Rights
Reserved. U nder the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
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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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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.

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

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