INTERSECTIONALITY UNDONE
Saving Intersectionality from Feminist
Intersectionality Studies
1
Sirma Bilge
Département de sociologie, Université de Montréal
Abstract
This article identifies a set of power relations within contemporary feminist academic
debates on intersectionality that work to “depoliticizing intersectionality,” neutralizing the
critical potential of intersectionality for social justice-oriented change. At a time when
intersectionality has received unprecedented international acclaim within feminist academic
circles, a specifically disciplinary academic feminism in tune with the neoliberal knowledge
economy engages in argumentative practices that reframe and undermine it. This article
analyzes several specific trends in debate that neutralize the political potential of
intersectionality, such as confining intersectionality to an academic exercise of
metatheoretical contemplation, as well as “whitening intersectionality” through claims that
intersectionality is “the brainchild of feminism” and requires a reformulated “broader
genealogy of intersectionality.”
Keywords: Intersectionality, Academic Feminism, Disciplinarity, Neoliberalism, Diver-
sity, Postrace, Europe (Germany, France)
INTRODUCTION
This article identifies a set of power relations within contemporary feminist aca-
demic debates on intersectionality that work to “depoliticizing intersectionality,”
neutralizing the critical potential of intersectionality for social justice-oriented change.
The overarching motivation behind the article is to explicate how intersectionality—
despite receiving unprecedented international acclamation within feminist aca-
demic circles—has been systematically depoliticized. I seek to counteract this trend
by encouraging methods of debate that reconnect intersectionality with its initial
vision of generating counter-hegemonic and transformative knowledge production,
activism, pedagogy, and non-oppressive coalitions. I begin by providing two anec-
dotes to illustrate the complex workings ~or absence! of intersectionality in social
practice, using the Occupy movement and SlutWalk. I go on to examine the prac-
tices through which a kind of disciplinary academic feminism specifically attuned to
neoliberal knowledge economy contributes to the depoliticization of intersection-
ality. I analyze several specific trends in this debate that work to neutralize the
political potential of intersectionality, such as confining intersectionality to an aca-
demic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation, as well as “whitening intersection-
Du Bois Review, 10:2 (2013) 405–424.
© 2013 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 1742-058X013 $15.00
doi:10.10170S1742058X13000283
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ality” through claims that intersectionality is “the brainchild of feminism,” and that it
requires a reformulated “broader genealogy of intersectionality.”
Recent years have seen various movements with claims about social justice and
democratization sweeping across the world, from the lndignados to the Arab Spring,
the Occupy Movement, SlutWalk, and the transnational student movement. How-
ever inspiring they may be, these contemporary progressive politics of protest have
not escaped the enduring problems of legitimacy and representation, in particular
the intricacies of speaking about, for and instead of others ~Alcoff 1995!. Despite
their best intentions and claims of inclusiveness and solidarity, many have fallen short
of intersectional reflexivity and accountability, and prompted their own kinds of
silencing, exclusion or misrepresentation of subordinated groups. Here I draw on the
Occupy movement and Slutwalk to illustrate the need for constant reflection about
intersectionality and non-oppressive coalitional politics.
The Occupy movement has been challenged for lacking decolonial awareness by
Aboriginal peoples from an anticolonialist and indigenous-centered perspective ~Mon-
tano 2011; Yee 2011!. Critics argue that its rallying motto—“Occupy”—discursively
re-enacts colonial violence and disregards the fact that, from the indigenous stand-
point, those spaces and places it calls for occupation are already occupied. The
Aboriginal critique developed a “decolonize occupy movement” wherein indigenous
people hold center stage. Despite being much less publicized, the critique has suc-
ceeded in changing the name of the Occupy movement at least in some parts of the
world.
The SlutWalk movement,
2
organized to protest the shaming and blaming of
women for wearing clothing that invited sexual assaulted, received criticism for its
racial blindness: its lack of concern about the differential resonance of the term “slut”
for Black women of the United States. Historically-sedimented gender stereotypes
have persistently pathologized Black female sexuality as improper and promiscuous.
Stepping away from SlutWalk, Black women’s organizations poignantly asserted
that:
As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves “slut”
without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring
messages about what and who the Black woman is. We don’t have the privilege to
play on destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on our bod-
ies and souls for generations ~Black Women’s Blueprint 2011!.
This collective demand for the relabeling of the movement has not been successful.
For example, during a NYC SlutWalk on October 1, 2011, at least two young White
women were photographed with placards reading: “Woman is the N* of the world”
~referencing a John Lennon and Yoko Ono song and using the full racial slur!. While
organizers issued an apology for this racist incident,
3
the incident nonetheless dem-
onstrates that even movements positioning themselves as progressive can still lose
sight of the tools that intersectional thinking makes available ~see Bilge 2012; Carby
1982; Rich 1979!.
4
Such incidents demonstrate Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ~1993! argu-
ment that “political strategies that challenge only certain subordinating practices
while maintaining existing hierarchies not only marginalize those who are subject to
multiple systems of subordination but also often result in oppositionalizing race and
gender discourses” ~pp. 112–113!.
These examples illustrate that despite their claims of inclusiveness, progressive
movements can fail in intersectional political awareness. This failure comes at a
significant cost for various subordinated groups, which are silenced, excluded, mis-
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represented, or co-opted. In the present-day political landscape the need for a radical
intersectional praxis may be more pressing than ever. Intersectional political aware-
ness offers critical potential for building non-oppressive political coalitions between
various social justice-oriented movements now required to compete with each other,
rather than collaborate, under the neoliberal equity0diversity regime.
RETHINKING INTERSECTIONALITY IN AN AGE SATURATED
WITH A NEOLIBERAL CULTURE OF DIVERSITY
Ideas about social justice infuse everyday life in complex and contradictory ways,
through popular and corporate discourses and practices ~Ward 2007!. At the same
time underlying structures that produce and sustain social inequalities are over-
looked and erased. Commonplace discourses assume that western societies have
largely overcome problems of racism, sexism, and heterosexism0homophobia. Polit-
ical myths of “posts” ~postraciality, postfeminism! and fantasies of transcendence
~Ahmed 2004! are espoused by both liberal and conservative forces. The result is a
contradictory political and cultural climate replete with idea~l!s of equality, accom-
panied by an unbending refusal to see the persistence of deeply entrenched inequal-
ities of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship-status. Framing social life
not as collective, but as the interaction of individual social entrepreneurs, neoliber-
alism denies preconditions leading to structural inequalities; in consequence, it con-
gratulates itself for dismantling policies and discrediting movements concerned with
structures of injustice. Thus neoliberal assumptions create the conditions allowing
the founding conceptions of intersectionality—as an analytical lens and political tool
for fostering a radical social justice agenda—to become diluted, disciplined, and
disarticulated.
Pervasive neoliberal notions have facilitated feminism being altered into “post-
feminism” in ways that parallel the current depoliticizing of intersectionality. Accord-
ing to Angela McRobbie ~2009!, “post-feminism positively draws on and invokes
feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved,
in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no
longer needed, it is a spent force” ~p. 12!. Intersectionality is going through a similar
“double entanglement” ~p. 6! , as it is “hailed” and “failed” simultaneously; some
elements of intersectionality are taken into account, but only to be declared lapsed or
obsolete, to be set aside for something better. Certain lines of feminist debate both
invoke and evacuate intersectionality as post-feminism did feminism.
This double entanglement serves important purposes for the circulation of diver-
sity rhetorics across the academy, progressive social movements, and non-profit and
corporate organizations. Intersectionality, originally focused on transformative and
counter-hegemonic knowledge production and radical politics of social justice, has
been commodified and colonized for neoliberal regimes. A depoliticized intersec-
tionality is particularly useful to a neoliberalism that reframes all values as market
values: identity-based radical politics are often turned into corporatized diversity
tools leveraged by dominant groups to attain various ideological and institutional
goals ~Ward 2007!; a range of minority struggles are incorporated into a market-
driven and state-sanctioned governmentality of diversity ~Duggan 2003!; “diversity”
becomes a feature of neoliberal management, providing “managerial precepts of
good government and efficient business operations” ~Duggan 2003, p. xiii!; knowl-
edge of “diversity” can be presented as marketable expertise in understanding and
deploying multiple forms of difference simultaneously—a sought-after signifier of
Intersectionality Undone
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sound judgment and professionalism ~Ward 2007!. Given the range of deployments
available for it, intersectionality has become an “open,” umbrella term used in
different, even divergent, debates and political projects, both counter-hegemonic
and hegemonic ~Erel et al., 2008!.
The mutations of intersectionality and its depoliticizing rest not merely on the
economic logics of neoliberalism, but also on its cultural logics, particularly the
ability of neoliberalism to speak a complex language of diversity. One of the key
features of neoliberalism is its extension of the economic rationale beyond the
economic sphere to saturate all aspects of life. As Oishik Sircar and Dipika Jain
~2012! point out astutely, neoliberalism has slickly achieved three things to ensure its
robust longevity: “first, it has enabled the mutation of the state into a firm; second, it
has given birth to the responsibilised and self-governing citizen; third, it has con-
stantly projected experiences of human precarity and risk as entrepreneurial0
developmental0funding opportunity” ~pp. 11–12!. These adaptions are infused with
social identities and categories. Lisa Duggan ~2003! argues that alliances built by
neoliberal politicians to assist the flow of money up the economic hierarchy are
complex, flexible, and shifting, yet the contexts of their concretion are always forged
by “the meanings and effects of race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of differ-
ence” ~p. xiv!. In other words, Duggan insists,
these alliances are not simply opportunistic nor are the issues merely epiphe-
nomenal or secondary to the underlying reality of the more solid and real
economic goals. Rather, the economic goals have been ~must be! formulated in
terms of the range of political and cultural meanings that shape the social body in
a particular time and place ~p. xvi, italics in original!.
Intersectionality has been transformed by the confluence between neoliberal corpo-
rate diversity culture and identity politics in the last fifteen years and also acquired
undeniable intellectual, political, and moral capital ~Knapp 2005; Ward 2007!, which
proved to be a fertile ground for opportunistic uses of intersectionality that I have
dubbed “ornamental intersectionality” ~Bilge 2011, p. 3! . It would be misleading to
consider ornamental intersectionality as benign, for it is part and parcel of the
neutralization, even active disarticulation, of radical politics of social justice. Its
superficial deployment of intersectionality undermines intersectionality’s credibility
and potentials for addressing interlocking power structures and developing an ethics
of non-oppressive coalition-building and claims-making. Similar to routine declara-
tions of commitment to equity and diversity, ornamental intersectionality allows
institutions and individuals to accumulate value through good public relations and
“rebranding” without the need to actually address the underlying structures that
produce and sustain injustice ~Ahmed 2012; Luft and Ward, 2009!. Recast in depo-
liticized terms, intersectionality becomes a tool that certain feminist scholars can
invoke to demonstrate “marketable expertise” in managing potentially problematic
kinds of diversity.
Part of my task in this article is to answer a vital question with regard to how a
depoliticized intersectionality is achieved and “managed” by academic feminism.
Through what kind of practices does academic feminism participate in this paradox-
ical process of co-optation: invoking intersectionality ~or a specter of intersectional-
ity! so that it might be stripped of its radical vision of social justice—rendering it
politically neutralized and undone? I discuss below a number of argumentative
patterns and trends through which intersectionality is deliberately neutralized. The
problematic strategies I discuss do not characterize the arguments of all academic
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feminisms, but are deployed in a kind of scholarship that I call disciplinary feminism .
By disciplinary feminism, I refer to a hegemonic intellectual position with regards to
knowledge production, a way of doing “science” which is more concerned with
fitting into the parameters of what constitute legitimate scientific knowledge than
challenging those parameters. It strives to install disciplinarity over the object of
study, to be recognized within traditional disciplines, or to establish itself as a new
discipline or interdiscipline. This is unlike the initial political impetus of academic
feminism, which conceived itself as a “means to institutionalize feminist resistance to
the normalizing agencies of the traditional disciplines” ~Wiegman 2012, p. 71!, and
many academic feminists still engage in a critique of the disciplines, attempt to
challenge hegemonic practices in scholarship and public life. Disciplinary feminism,
in contrast, participates in institutional ~mis!appropriation and attendant depoliti-
cization of both interdisciplinarity and intersectionality.
Disciplinary feminism appears to be more concerned with the institutional suc-
cess of the knowledge it produces than institutional and social change through
counter-hegemonic knowledge production. Hence, today’s disciplinary feminism
uses the very tools that unruly feminist knowledge projects of the 1970s and early
1980s attempted to critique. These were radically political intersectional knowledge
projects that resisted the standardized visions and normalizing techniques promoted
in the name of disciplinarity or interdisciplinarity. Contemporary scholars cannot
fully retrieve themselves from the market logics and practices of the neoliberal
university; we all must, to some degree, tackle neoliberal demands for branding,
product differentiation, and emphasizing novelty. Yet, this does not mean we are
obliged to espouse the kind of work I call disciplinary feminism, which conflates
political struggles and identities with market niches, and contributes to the depolit-
icizing of intersectionality.
More broadly, differentiating academic feminism from disciplinary feminism
also highlights deep contradictions: initially insurgent formations of fields such as
women’s studies, ethnic studies, gay and lesbian studies, and postcolonial studies
were driven in part by the desire to disrupt scientific conventions and decolonize
methodologies and epistemologies; yet their radical critiques are tamed through
their institutionalization and dominant ideologies, as the operations of state and
capital are deeply implicated in the processes allowing the emergence of counter-
hegemonic minoritarian knowledges. Even as they contest power, these formations
constantly strive to make themselves legible to power ~Ferguson 2012, p. 38!. The
neoliberal recomposition of power alignments between state, capital, and academy
subvert unprecedented forms of minority visibility by valorizing difference without
consequences, recognition without redistribution. The minority perspectives created
by counter-hegemonic fields of inquiry can then be rearticulated and incorporated
into an ever adaptive hegemony without altering its structure ~Ferguson 2012, p. 8;
Bilge forthcoming!.
My argument does not idealize the formative stages of intersectionality as unfet-
tered by the workings of capital and state. Stuart Hall argues that new forms of global
economic and cultural power work through an apparently paradoxical treatment of
difference: “economic power . . . lives culturally through difference and . . . is con-
stantly teasing itself with the pleasures of the transgressive other” ~1997, pp. 180–
181!. Hall points out that just as new social movements developed around and
articulated minority justice claims and identities, with their attendant counter-
hegemonic knowledge projects, the flexible accumulation strategies of capitalism
found ways to turn these new interests in local and minority difference into new
market niches, promoting ever more segmented markets, smaller groups, niche
Intersectionality Undone
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