ABSTRACT
Introduced as a method of integrating anti-essentialist perspectives into feminist perspectives on law, intersectionality has now achieved a wide degree of currency within legal and policy discourses on equality. In this chapter I interrogate intersectionality for its effects as a technique of governance. I draw on Wendy Brown’s analysis of rights claims in States of Injury to argue that intersectionality cannot challenge law’s disciplinary constructions of identity and that it in fact functions as an ‘anatomy of detail’ which supports law’s propensity to classify. Moving away from the regulatory effects of intersectionality within law, I aim to reframe my understanding of the liberal subject’s experience of inequalities through the cultural functions of trauma (Cvetkovich, 2003), and the role of impressions in connecting questions of justice with emotional and physical encounters (Ahmed, 2004). Viewing discrimination claims as expressions/impressions of trauma may, paradoxically, give us new ways of viewing complex inequalities, shifting the focus of intersectionality away from disciplinary identity categories and towards the cultural circulation of emotions. Intersectional ity
Intersectional analysis grew from critiques in the 1980s and 1990s which fundamentally challenged the arrangement of feminist theory and praxis around white women’s experiences and priorities (see for example, Harris, 1990; Williams, 1991). Like many other academic methods of analysis, intersectionality responds to political work that was, and is, taking place within activist spheres, as people engaged in activism around race, gender, disability and poverty attempt to address, and strategise around, complex forms of inequality. An early example was the work of the Combahee River Collective, which used a sophisticated form of systems theory to integrate into black feminist scholarship an understanding of class, gender and sexuality (see Cooper, 2004: 44). More recent examples of activist projects which
explicitly foreground anti-essentialist approaches include the Safra Project in the United Kingdom, which provides advice and support for lesbians, trans women and bisexual women who identify either culturally or religiously as Muslim and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), based in New York, which campaigns around trans issues.1Intersectionality is not, therefore, reducible to an academic, or even legal framework, but describes a much broader field of practice and analysis engaged in critiquing hierarchical and categorical concepts of oppression (see, for example, MacDonald et al. 2005). Importantly, critical race, LatCrit and feminist scholars have also used it to interrogate academic environments. Angela Harris has written about working to maintain an analysis of heteronormativity within the field of critical race studies (Harris, 1999), whilst Francisco Valdes has argued for an analytics of queer interconnectivity to work with and through intersections of sex and race within sexual minority scholarship (Valdes, 1995). This work reminds scholars of the practical applications of intersectionality theory within the academy.In the legal arena, the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, specifically her 1989 piece ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, has been instrumental in turning a critical gaze onto the categorising function of equality and anti-discrimination laws and policies (Crenshaw, 1989). As Crenshaw argued in that article, maintaining a focus on the ‘archetypal’ female or Black legal claimant leads to the wholesale exclusion of people who exist at the intersections of these subject positions: Black women. Following Crenshaw, many legal scholars and activists have used an analytics of intersectionality to deconstruct essentialist identity positions in favour of focusing on the ‘intersections’ – the spaces where subjects are more than their categorisations as women or Black. The motivation for such a move within feminist and queer legal scholarship is to challenge the grounding of legal and political claims in ‘unified’ notions of identity and to trace the complex forms of inequalities that get lost in traditional categorical analysis (see, for example, Duclos, 1993; Hutchinson, 1997). In this way, intersectionality provides a vitally important vehicle for anti-essentialist work in the field of feminist legal theory and practice.Nevertheless, there have been problems with the development and application of intersectionality analysis. According to Davina Cooper, one significant issue is how to conceive the intersection (Cooper, 2004: 48). What does the intersection look like and what are its effects? Intersectionality implies a model through which it would be possible to exercise more power in one aspect of one’s identity than in another. It might be possible to say that an individual is privileged by her ethnicity and subordinated by her gender, for example. But this would require a polarised analysis that would view the individual either at the midpoint of different social positions, or as see-sawing between them (ibid). Social location is lived in much more
complex ways than this, but the metaphor of the intersection appears too static to respond to such complexities. For her part, Joanne Conaghan argues in this collection that inter-sectionality has reached the limits of its potential for the feminist project in law (Conaghan, this volume). In her opinion, intersectionality does not have a sufficiently nuanced vision of the complexities of inequality, and this is partly because it prioritises a focus on the individual and on identity formation, and does not adequately address social processes and relations (ibid). She argues that earlier work in socialist/materialist feminism was more successful in this regard. As she puts it: … intersectionality is rather limited in its theory-producing power. In particular, while it acts as an aid to the excavation of inequality experiences at a local level, it tells us little about the wider context in which such experiences are produced, mediated and expressed (ibid: 28).
