ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how debates concerning intersectionality's origins rely on racial capitalist assumptions about property, place, and production. In the early 2000s, a kind of collective forgetting accompanied the token citation to Kimberle Williams Crenshaw's work. Intersectionality, despite being a critique of dominant paradigms within feminism and antiracism, has been represented as the “most important contribution that women's studies has made so far”; the arrival of a postracial or antiracist feminism; and “the primary figure of political completion in US identity knowledge domains”. The embattled question of the concept's origins lies, whether implicitly or explicitly, at the heart of several current debates about intersectionality: the legitimacy of intersectionality's “travels” versus its intellectual roots. Certain critiques of intersectionality have disputed its “originality” seeing it just as Black feminism “recycled”: “intersectionality recycles black feminism without demonstrating what new tools it brings to black feminism to help it fashion a more complex theory of identity”.
