ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers two relatively recent examples of analytical system-building, scholarship by Anna Carastathis and Ange-Marie Hancock, and, then he turns to work by two Indigenous feminist theorists, Melanie Yazzie and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, that illustrates how intersectionality might be employed in ways that enable engagement with such struggles for self-determination, replacing the analytical role of larger scale structural modeling with what might be understood as theorizations of intersectional diplomacy. The emphasis on “culture” and “tradition” as markers of the specificity of given Indigenous peoples produces an insulating sense of unity detached both from matters of governance and the ways the enactment of governance itself depends on open-ended networks of relation with other peoples and polities. As in Yazzie's analysis, the intersectionally resonant principles Simpson offers extend beyond Indigenous polities to thinking about how such polities relate to other groups, struggles, and political orders and what an understanding of such diplomacies might contribute to intersectional analysis.
