ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors approach the concept of intersectionality in two different but overlapping ways. First, they consider how the concept brings forward a consciousness of perpetration and difference. In a second interweaving of Laplanche and Crenshaw’s ideas of intersectionality, the authors consider how Laplanche’s model, in which subjectivity ‘arrives’ from the other, will be imbricated with different aspects of subjectivity: gender, sexual desire, racial identity, class and cultural formation, and historical markers of trauma. Clinical material is developed in both sections.
Kimberle Crenshaw employs the term mutual elision to describe the negating force that, as an outcome of intersectionality, at once conceals and as a consequence simultaneously reinforces the subordination of multiply marginalized groups. The authors use the lens of psychoanalysis, while also critiquing that lens to explore how intersectionality not only reveals the denial of subordination of certain people, but also uncovers an active, if unconscious, perpetration by others through that denial. A key clinical elaboration of material discussed by Joan Riviere in 1929 is examined for its interpenetration and interpellation of racial violence into a Southern girl’s fantasy. The meaning of these excitements and fantasies has been, over nearly 100 years, elaborated on in terms of femininity and homosexuality, and almost never of race. The authors use this material to reflect on how intersectionality may be drawn into discussions of the elaboration and developmental trajectories of sexuality. At this point in the evolution of psychoanalysis to consider social unconsciouses, the intersubjective and the intrapsychic, we have the possibility of a very rich account of how historical and socially derived categories of experience interact in unique and unpredictable and emergent forms.
