246 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Invited Session. Queering the Tripartite and Troubling the Metaphor

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

The critical concept of “intersectionality” coined by Kimberle Crenshaw continues to be put to use, its limitations discovered, and it’s utility maximized. As the term has circulated, it has also manifested multiple meanings, at times carrying some concerning baggage. While the problems may not be inherent to Crenshaw’s original formulation of this heuristic tool, with some regularity it has been employed in ways that are limiting, conceptualizing social formations and identities as ahistoric and static rather than as dynamic, processual, relational, constructed, and temporal. In other instances, the meaning of “intersectionality” has been appropriated and mainstreamed by discourses that co-opt its more radical meaning for neoliberal “diversity” politics. Moreover, while the tripartite “race, gender, and class” was momentarily effective in challenging the blind spots of ethnic studies, feminist studies, and marxisms by asking them to be in conversation with one another, unfortunately the tripartite has also routinely produced key absences. This session features scholars whose research pushes the boundaries of an array of analytical tools, putting forth new vocabularies. For some intersectionality has given way to the concept of co-produced assemblages; resistance to ruptures and lines of flight; consciousness to affect; and identity to subjectivity, performativity, and becoming. These scholars go far in complicating restrictive models of intersectionality, whether conceptualized as critique or an elaboration on its founding impulse, by disarticulating race, gender, class, sexualities, ethnicity, nationalisms, sovereignty, tradition, modernity, colonialisms, neoliberalisms, and so on in deep, careful, nuanced ways.

Sub Unit

• Section Invited

Session Organizer

• Julie Bettie, University of California-Santa Cruz

Presider

• Roderick A. Ferguson, University of Minnesota

Presenters

• Jyoti Puri, Simmons College

• Marcia Ochoa, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Fatima El-Tayeb, University of California-San Diego

Discussant

• Roderick A. Ferguson, University of Minnesota