"Post-war" Reflections on Intersectionality : Arrivals, Methodologies and Structural Entanglements

• The chapter suggests a genealogical approach to feminist debates on intersecting enactments of power and resistance. A starting point is the ongoing “intersectionality wars”, which, particularly in a US context, have been framed among others as critiques of European feminism claimed to “whiten” and neoliberalise intersectionality through monocategorical (liberal) understandings of oppression and power, and through defensive positionings which bring in class, when confronted with critiques for lack of attention to race. Instead of staying within the stalemates of these debates, a genealogical approach is offered that looks into the archives of socialist feminisms, post- and decolonial feminisms, queer feminisms and posthuman feminisms, and their putting gender/class, gender/race, gender/sexuality and gendered human/non-human relationships, respectively, as key to analyses of intra-acting power dynamics and resistances. Following a Foucauldian conceptualisation of genealogy, historical links between different critical feminist theorisings of multiple oppressions, based on gender, race, class, sexuality and human/non-human relations, should be investigated retrospectively rather than traced along linear chronologies. Against this background, the chapter aims at suggesting ways of rethinking current struggles over intersectionality in terms of exploring how to reconfigure them through genealogical groundings, which not only investigates intersecting identities in a grid-like fashion, but asks about their intertwined genealogies in entangled systems of power: capitalism, post/colonialism, heteronormativity, Western modernity, and the Anthropocene, i.e., power systems which the mentioned archives have critically pinpointed as the ones to be resisted and changed. The methodology of genealogical grounding is explored with inspiration from feminist research, which cross-cuts borders between archives.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Genusstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Gender Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

intersectionality

intersectionality "wars"

multicategoricality

Pussy Hat

entangled systems of power

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)