ABSTRACT

This chapter makes a theoretical intervention into debates on governance from a feminist psychosocial perspective. Its key claim is that the distribution of power and emotion are intimately connected in governance. The concept of intersectionality developed out of feminist concerns to understand inequalities as multiple and overlapping. Its analytical focus is the lived complexity of the multiple inequalities. From the latter perspective intersectionality is concerned with the complex, irreducible, which ensure when multiple axes of differentiation economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential intersect. For the purposes of thinking about relational politics, rather than relational identification, suggesting that the notion of the relational can be applied more broadly to shift the analytic focus in governance. The logic of multiplicity also implies that it is the outcomes as well as the inputs of politics which are multiple. The process of oscillation between emotional multiplicity and cognitive simplification singularity, between ethics and politics, uis analysed in terms of relational politics.