Intersectionality, More or Less: A Review Essay

• Published in: Australian humanities review no. 67; p. 1
• Main Author: Simic, Zora
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bundoora Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 01.11.2020
• Subjects: Abolitionists; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Domestic violence; Ethics; Feminism; Gender; Grass roots movement; Institutionalization; Intersectionality; Pandemics; Political activism; Politics; Prisons; Sexuality; Womens studies; United States > US
• ISSN: 1325-8338; 1325-8338

Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality By Jennifer C. Nash Duke University Press, 2019 Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism By Alison Phipps Manchester University Press, 2020 Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power By Lola Olufemi Pluto Press, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence and spread of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and protests within the US and beyond have drawn fresh attention to the usefulness of intersectionality as an analytic and political lens through which to comprehend the world. [...]while Nash, in some contrast, argues for reimagining black feminism through 'an archive black feminist theorists have largely disavowed: law' (113), reading these books in tandem affirms the enduring and nimble capacity of intersectionality to animate past, present and future feminisms, including beyond the United States. In the first, 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex', she challenged the 'single-axis framework' of legal doctrine in the United States in which 'race and gender [are treated as] mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis'. In the next, 'Mapping the Margins', Crenshaw elaborated further, identifying and distinguishing between 'structural intersectionality', referring to 'race, gender and class domination' via social institutions and interventions (1246), and 'political intersectionality' in which 'women of colour are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas' (1252). Crenshaw encouraged wider applications to issues of 'class, sexual orientation, age, and color' (1276), but also clarified that she was not advancing a 'new totalizing theory of identity' (1244).