"Black Lesbians—Who Will Fight for Our Lives but Us?":
Navigating Power, Belonging, Labor, Resistance, and Graduate
Student Survival in the Ivory Tower
S. Tay Glover
Feminist Teacher, Volume 27, Numbers 2-3, 2017, pp. 157-175 (Article)
Published by University of Illinois Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715994
Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (9 Feb 2019 12:29 GMT)
“Black Lesbians—Who Will Fight for Our Lives but
Us?”: Navigating Power, Belonging, Labor, Resistance,
and Graduate Student Survival in the Ivory Tower
S. TAY GLOVER
At two different instances during my graduate career, I saw Sara Ahmed give her
talk about institutional diversity, racism,
and the immense labor of being queer, a
feminist killjoy, and a willful subject.1 The
first instance was during my time completing my MA degree in a women’s studies
program where she delivered the keynote,
“Willful Queers and Other Wayward Subjects” for our graduate queer studies symposium. The second instance occurred two
years later when I matriculated to an elite
private university to earn my doctorate in
African American studies with a concentration in Black feminisms and Black queer
studies. Although I experienced both
lectures in different Midwestern institutional, departmental, and interdisciplinary
contexts, there was a glaring continuity. I
suffered immense upper body and facial
pain from muscular tension that became
chronic since entering higher education,
and I blinked back tears of sadness and
anger while in the majority-white rooms. I
identified all too well with Ahmed’s poetic
overview of the violence and bureaucracy that Black people, queers of color,
and women are set up to experience, to
weather, or be weathered by within primarily white cisheteronormative higher
education spaces. In both instances, I
was in the midst of intense departmental drama where I was positioned as the
problem for “talking back” to instructors
and peers’ gendered racist infractions,
and/or choosing silence in an attempt
to avoid conflict and backlash (hooks). I
was viscerally struck by Ahmed’s weave of
allegories, philosophy, and ode to Audre
Lorde’s Black lesbian feminist politics of
resistance, integrity, and survival because
I was also a subject at the interstices of
these “wayward” sociocultural locations.
I was persecuted for epitomizing the troublemaker figures Ahmed described—the
Black lesbian feminist killjoy and willful
subject.
In the midst of both traumatic confrontations with instructors and peers,
Ahmed’s messages contributed to Black
and women of color feminists’ ever-growing genealogy of literature concerning
academic institutional violences, and she
articulated the root and manifestation
of my antagonisms. Ahmed referenced
Lorde to ruminate on Black lesbian/queer
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positionality, affect and performance,
and the neoliberal corporate university’s
specific tactics of maintaining epistemologies of ignorance and structures of
white supremacy and racial capitalism
that make university spaces unconducive
to Black lesbian and queer feminist politics and survival. In this essay, I contribute to this objective while recognizing my
vulnerability as a Black lesbian woman
graduate student.
To interrupt epistemologies of ignorance, I engage Barbara Christian and
Grace Hong’s critiques of ways universities
and disciplines comply with the state’s
historical containment, management, and
extinguishment of Black women, Black
feminisms, and Black (queer) feminists in
particular, as well as literature exploring
Black queer women’s specific graduate
and postgraduate experiences in the academy (Musser; Bailey and Miller). For example, Moya Bailey and Shannon Miller elucidate the presence of gendered racism and
racist homophobia as significant structural
and sociocultural tenets of the neoliberal
university, Black faculty codes of conduct,
and of primarily white women’s studies
spaces’ codes of conduct, curricula, and
pedagogies. Building on this scholarship,
I seek to unveil the life-in-death consequences of neoliberal anti-Black, sexist,
homophobic institutional spaces for Black
lesbian/queer women in graduate school,
and specifically within women’s studies
and Black studies at predominately white
institutions (PWIs)—spaces thought to
be justice-centered, progressive homes
for graduate students like me. Part of this
analysis includes examining the mechanisms within those contexts that facilitated gendered racism, homophobia, and
health deterioration even as they propa-
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gated commitments to “feminism,” “diversity,” and “queers.”
Common factors challenged my belonging, safety, and wellness in both graduate
school spaces: regional racial and sexual
politics; misogynoir and homophobia
in respect to my Black queer body and
lesbian feminist politics; myths of safety
and community; asymmetrical solidarity;
professionalization cultures; and what
Chandra Mohanty terms “pedagogy of
accommodation.” Distinct from “pedagogy
of dissent and transformation” (Mohanty
178), pedagogy of accommodation promotes multicultural civility and respectability versus a social justice perspective,
by which one manages or quells race,
gender, sexual, and class conflict as a
stand-in for an active, ethical commitment
to challenging and diminishing them.
Pedagogy of accommodation appeases
white normativity and white comfort in
the curriculum and classroom environment, often to the detriment of students
of color. My experiences reveal how these
mechanisms sanction policing and criminalization of Black queer women’s affects
and intersectional decolonial antiracist
critiques, and ultimately contribute to an
uneven, unfair, and unhealthy distribution
of labors on our token bodies. In service of
white supremacy, neoliberalism, paternalism, misogynoir, and homophobia, these
mechanisms maintain the age-old dilemmas of unbelonging and weathering for
Black lesbian feminist scholars. To sustain
life, much less a commitment to scholaractivism, it became essential to heed the
words of Black and women of color feminists who came before me, regarding the
importance of cultivating self-care, selflove, and “differential consciousness”
(Sandoval).
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The Neoliberal Corporate
University: Reproducing
Respectability and Black
Lesbian Impossibility
Feminist critiques of white supremacy,
capitalism, racism, sexism, heteronomativity, and their detrimental effects
on Black women and Black feminism are
not new. Canonical Black feminist work
delineates how Black women have always
had a haunting inside/outside presence in
the world and academia (Hull et al.; Higginbotham; DuCille; Guy-Sheftall; Griffin;
White; James et al.; Moraga and Anzaldúa;
Spillers). Black feminists across the African diaspora and time recollect how Black
women’s epistemological, intellectual,
cultural, and social justice contributions
were theory in the flesh—born of their
physical-sexual, emotional, and affective
denigration (Shange; Higginbotham; GuySheftall; Collins). These entangled factors
of oppression catalyzed the social justice
struggles that helped institutionalize disciplines such as Black studies and women’s
studies.
This institutionalization left Black feminisms and Black women without a disciplinary home and symmetrical solidarity
from their feminist and Black nationalist
counterparts. Barbara Christian explains
this dilemma in her essay “But Who Do
You Really Belong To—Black Studies or
Women’s Studies?,” asking: “who can we
trust if we are to help ourselves? . . . Our
problem is that we do not have a ‘home
really fitted to our needs,’ for the study of
women of color is itself a critique of AfroAmerican Studies and Women’s Studies,
yet these groups are hardly powerful institutions in the university and their validity
is still in question” (90). Historically, this
homelessness has been compounded for
Black lesbian feminists at the intersection
of literary studies, Black studies, feminist
studies, Black feminism, queer studies,
and their respective movements because
of epistemological respectability and
praxis laden with hetero- and homonormativity (Clarke; Lorde; Smith, Home; Smith,
Truth).2 New to this dynamic are the configurations of power and culture that produce the neoliberal corporate university.
Scholars describe the contours of the
contemporary liberal capitalist-driven
university in many ways: historically,
socially, economically, and politically.
Martha Nussbaum underscores how
education is a tool for capitalist growth.
She delineates how U.S. society invests
in teaching students skills perceived to
bolster national profit and competition in
the global market. Science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
departments are predominantly rewarded
with educational support because of their
profit-making potentials. On a basic level,
this model robs students of skills needed
to make critical contributions to society
and in society’s best interests. It threatens
the general existence of humanities and
arts programs—spaces where students
interface with difference and learn those
skills. As Nussbaum warns, “If this trend
continues, nations all over the world will
soon be producing generations of useful
machines, rather than complete citizens
who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of
another person’s sufferings” (2). Furthermore, these conditions exacerbate labor
exploitation of women faculty of color
while undermining justice-oriented disciplines like Black studies and women’s
studies.
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Neoliberalism in the corporate university means claiming racial and gendered
violences are things of the past by selectively incorporating and deracinating previously radical politics and actors into its
structures and objectives of hegemonic
biopolitical and necropolitical power
through an appeal to reproduce respectability and have protected life from premature death (Hong). Like Ahmed, Grace
Hong articulates how historically, neoliberal disavowal emerged as a response
to contain and manage the liberation
movements of the post–World War II
period—local and global movements for
decolonization, desegregation, and selfdetermination. Epistemological norms
governing what can be validated as scholarly knowledge, in concert with the political and economic structures of racial hierarchy and economic deprivation, became
the mechanisms by which the university
excludes and extinguishes Black feminists
(Christian; Hong).3 These conditions contribute to the precarity of Black feminisms,
Black lesbian impossibility, and death of
Black feminist women.
Just as in the 1960s through the 1980s,
contemporary literature about Black women’s feminist labor outside and within the
academy and contemporary accounts from
Black queer women about their experiences in the academy, including my own,
illuminate how we remain ambivalently
located within the academy. Within Black
studies and women’s studies, we also
witness the ways “difference” and “diversity” are exploited and managed. Neither
discipline adequately validates nor contends with Black queer women’s “multiple
jeopardy,” or intersectional, particularized oppression in theory, curriculum, and
praxis (Crenshaw; Christian; King; GuySheftall; Hong).
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All of these contours generated health
deterioration and deeply violent graduate
school occurrences for me in my women’s
studies and Black studies programs in
respect to my standpoint and being. On
a systemic level, because the corporate
university puts feminist and Black studies programs in positions of capitalist
scarcity, the marginalized surplus—poor
Black women and Black queers who are
graduate students—experience abuses of
power, exploitation, and dispossession.
Having held work positions at various
institutional/power locations of student
life and student advocacy—from being
an undergraduate resident assistant,
graduate teaching assistant, university
women’s center employee, and graduate
student leader liason with multiple university offices dedicated to “equity” in student experience—I now know intimately
the workings of diversity labor and ways
universities are protected enclosures of
unchecked violence and abuse of power.
Black studies and women’s studies’ relationships to the university and their praxis
are implicated in maintaining or destabilizing the inherently racist, sexist, and cisheteronormative power relations in universities and society as they affect the most
marginalized populations like Black queer
students; therefore, Black queer feminist
women’s comparative experiences of
being both pseudo-employed instructors
and students simultaneously are important indicators of whether and how they
collude with the neoliberal university and
actualize anti-Black racist sexism and
heteronormativity in praxis as previously
indicated by experiences of similarly situated professors.
More often than marginalized graduate
students are safely able to admit due to
our political socio-economic-vulnerability,
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these programs and professors collude
with racist, sexist, queerphobic norms via
their social policies, department codes of
conduct, pedagogies, curricula, bureaucratic measures of assessment, and disciplining. At the same time, they celebrate
institutionalized feminism and diversity
to maintain (one’s place within) the neoliberal capitalist university. However, this
often evokes continued doubly invisibilized violence, exploitation, and silencing of Black feminist women and queer
graduate students in particular ways. It
means the violence lives at the intersection of systemic, institutional, interpersonal, workplace powerlessness and can
masquerade under the mouth-service
and liberal banner of “feminism” and be
coercively suppressed in service of androcentric racial solidarity by Black studies
agents. For a Black lesbian woman graduate student at a primarily white university
who occupies the strange position of poor
pseudo-employee and student with inevitable life crises on behalf of interstitial
and layered oppression, navigating power
dynamics, belonging, labor, and survival
while maintaining the integrity of her
Black queer feminist politics is, and was,
indeed, impossible.
Black Lesbian Feminist Killjoy
Chronicles: Navigating Place,
Pedagogy, Power, and Labor in
Women’s Studies
Scholars such as Lorde, Hong, Sharon Holland, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs provide
precedent regarding the importance of
examining Black lesbian/queer feminist
belonging and viability as potent sites
through which to trace the racializedgendered coercive nature of neoliberal
disavowal, disciplining, exploitation, and
death in the world and higher education
institutions across time. Their works note
that epistemological norms of validating
scholarly knowledge, affect, and racial,
gendered, political, economic deprivation are the mechanisms by which the
university excludes and weathers Black
feminists. These scholars also provide
additional details about contemporary
neoliberal mechanisms of disavowal and
Black lesbian impossibility that my experiences map onto. For instance, Amber
Musser invokes the term “specimen” to
articulate both the workings of, and her
affective experience of, how the fetishization and commodification of Black queer
feminist bodies and minority difference
affects her social experiences of tokenization and demands for diversity labor. I
contribute to this body of literature with a
comparative analysis of my experiences
at a large public research institution and
elite private institution from a Southern
point of view.
You could say that by pursuing my
degrees at one of the biggest public Big
Ten PWIs and a top private PWI, I was
bound to experience microaggressions.
However, growing up in a small segregated
rural town in the South with an almost
all-Black, conservative-religious social
experience made difference, or “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” and experiencing
urban geography enticing, and thus important deciding factors when choosing colleges in high school. Therefore, because of
the constructed silences in my education
and family regarding possibilities of Black
queer life in the South, I went further north
to the Midwest and attended a public, Big
Ten university to experience something
new. However, the difference I was seeking, the reasons why I sought it, were to
my awakening, not a part of the difference
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my institution advocated and promised
within their diverse, multicultural, LGBTaffirming, urban geography.
Upon entering higher education I was a
Black lesbian queer youth from the rural
South who was a star student my whole
life but was disowned after coming out to
my family. I sought refuge and freedom to
learn, be myself, and make a difference
in the lives of people like me by pursuing higher education. I inherited poverty
on multiple accounts—on account of my
familial history of being only three generations removed from slavery in which my
great-grandparents were sharecroppers,
being from a working-class family, being
cut off financially and emotionally from my
family after coming out as a queer person,
and on account of the racialized gendered
and sexualized wage gaps with lack of
the cultural, financial capital of the hetero
family unit or certain financial literacies.
Along with the ruse of “Southern” food
items on Midwestern restaurant menus,
I quickly discovered the ruse of white
supremacist multiculturalism and diversity
when I moved for college. But it was not
until I began my graduate education in the
university’s women’s studies program that
I became wholly conscious of the ruse in
terms of its violent manifestations within
higher education institutions. Difference
is cool and all, but if it is not exploitable
for the university or department’s image or
fails to pander to the palettes, comforts,
and interests of white folks, you end up
othered, antagonized by microaggressions, pissed off, and then made out to be
the problem yourself for being pissed off
and addressing the anti-Black woman shit
directed your way.
In both of my graduate school experiences, the in-betweenness of being an
employee and student (graduate teaching
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assistant), as well as token diversity figure
because of my checklist of oppressions,
would mean an uneven load of labor and
trauma that I still had not expected. I
experienced policing of my affects and critiques by professors and peers, immense
stress due to conflicts from structural
and interpersonal gendered racism and
homophobia that did not plague my peers,
in addition to difficulties successfully completing tough coursework, teaching, and
professional development responsibilities. While some of us may know we were
never meant to enter into, survive, and
thrive in graduate school, the rude awakening of these climates in a feminist or
ethnic studies program can be devastating
for those with assumptive hope that these
programs will be inherently ethical and
pro-praxis for transformative justice.
Because of faculty hiring/student
admission disparities and curricula in my
feminist studies program, I was admitted
with initial minimal academic and social
support for my research. With my admittance into my women’s studies program,
I ended up being the first and only Black
woman to be admitted in three years.
There was one Black woman faculty member who was assigned as my advisor.
When I began, however, I had to find out
on my own, versus anyone in my department telling me, that she was on leave for
the duration of my entire first year. This left
me feeling frazzled and neglected in comparison to my cohort, whose advisors were
easily accessible when they had qualms
about handling the pressures of acclimating to graduate school. It felt awful to
hear useful information about resources,
courses, and strategies second-hand from
my peers based on their advising meetings. This felt strange and disheartening
being the only Black person, still ignorant
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to what graduate school required and
actually meant.
I was admitted into a cohort that at
the time consisted of two self-identifying
white men (one has since claimed and
affirmed their trans* identity), four white
women, and another woman of color who
was an international student newly interpellated as a U.S. racialized subject and
“woman of color.” While I found friendship and camaraderie in my fellow woman
of color and two antiracist white folks out
of the six—one a smart and funny queer
woman formerly in the military and the
other a gentle and beautiful soul from
Georgia—the two antiracist white folk left
the program within the first year, with
the woman being essentially forced out
because of her militant audacity to confront the liberal whites’ racism. Besides
being a racialized-gendered-sexual anomaly, I could not be my whole true self in
the Midwestern liberal feminist climate.
Northern white folks’ conviction that racism and unrelenting homophobia only
existed in the South was bewildering and
infuriating while actually interfacing with
white supremacist gendered racist and
homophobic aggressions for the first time
in my life in the white environment. And
though I moved away for college to be out
and proud in my lesbian sexual identity in
a way that was foreclosed in my rural environment, in the white liberal queer feminist climate, my excitement was quickly
extinguished by the racism and cultural
appropriation of my white homonormative queers—many of whom believed their
Jewish and queer identities mediated their
white privilege and racism in thought and
action, as well as the lack of social spaces
for queer people of color in what is actually considered one of the nation’s top
“LGBT affirming” cities. While Bailey and
Miller mark the regional racial and sexual
politics of the Southern city Atlanta as aiding in their ability to find support outside
of the academy while in graduate school,
it was my distance from the majority-Black
South and my rich culture, and my Southern lesbian feminist epistemology and
politics of truth-telling that engendered
a bewildering, disappointing, isolating,
lonely, and exploited experience at my
midwestern PWIs among peers, in the
classroom, and from faculty.
In terms of curriculum, my women’s
studies program privileged Eurocentric
knowledge formation and points of view,
which propagated ahistoricism and intellectual posturing. Its core feminist ideological objectives consisted of teaching us
about knowledge, subjectivity, and oppressive power formation in ways that elided
how colonialism, anti-Blackness, and
slavery were their conditions of possibility.
In tandem it theorized gender versus race
or racialized gender as a primary signifier
in knowledge, subjectivity, and oppressive power formation. The class syllabus
for our core feminist theory course was
crafted with the common token women of
color feminism week where the white students complained about how hard it was
to understand the readings, while the rest
of the syllabus consisted of Judith Butler
and white European “high theorists” that
required arduous labor of translation for
someone like me whose native language
is Southern, country, African American
vernacular. The thing is, my classmates
also struggled to read these texts, and I
understood them more than they did, so
it became clear that they simply preferred
it because it was in their native epistemological frame and evaded talk of race.
Therefore, due to the nature of the curriculum and pedagogy, I was positioned to be
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“that Black person that makes everything
about race” or “the angry Black woman”
based on my intellectual critique and my
dark skin color regardless of volume and/
or tone in class. Besides the fact that I am
physically unable to subdue my bitch face
when I am over something—to which I
blame all of the church-going Black women
in my family—in this setup I was bound to
be a problem. I was a Black queer feminist
killjoy and always already projected as a
willful subject in intellectual debates and
in professional or informal social settings.
Ahmed and Lorde corroborated my
experiences of how affects such as willfulness, combativeness, negativity, unhappiness, and criminality are always already
mapped onto Black (queer) women’s bodies, especially when we refuse to comply
with the status quo by advocating in our
best interests. For example, being troped
as an angry Black woman when in classroom intellectual debates or interpersonal
conflict with instructors and peers is a
common response used by racist and/or
sexist folks to silence or disregard Black
women’s intellectual contributions and
critiques of any given issue, regardless
of the nature of delivery. Whether they
are university administrators, professors,
or peers, this ploy works to deflect the
critique and how they are implicated in
the problem. The trope is also commonly
evoked by professors to problematize
Black women’s modes of resistance and
survival in anti–Black woman classroom
spaces—whether it be speaking up, performing dissemblance, or being silent—
and to evoke paternalist punitive measures and questionable assessment of
Black women’s class participation, while
evading responsibility for cultivating and
sustaining exclusionary, harmful, paternalistic spaces.
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In the classroom environments there
was a simultaneous criminalization (by
peers and white faculty) and appropriation
of my marginalized transgressive knowledges while racist student commentary
and superfluous posturing actually went
unchecked by faculty, even when it was
clear intervention was required. It was an
environment in which, because students
were afraid of being called racists after I
had implied such on a few occasions, my
classmates became voyeurs and parrots
of my “outsider within knowledge,” sprinkling words like “colonialism” and “intersectionality” in their commentary without
having experiences or backgrounds that
produced that embodied knowledge, and
without having done any reading or intellectual labor to understand that work or
know that history. I became distrustful and
fearful of speaking in class because I also
noticed certain classmates started to type
down everything I said. I recalled the ways
that Black feminist intellectual property
is stolen and understood personally how
upsetting it was because it disavowed
and took for granted the corresponding
trauma and affective/physical labors that
are a part of its production. In addition, it
was an experience in which I felt incredibly unprotected because a white woman’s
tears had magical powers to turn victims
of her racism into the attacker—even.
another. white. woman—when they called
her out, revealing the professor’s racial
bias when they took her side. Again. And
again.
Eventually I became so traumatized,
distrustful, and angry that I stopped participating in extracurricular events and
speaking to the white folks in my program. I also tried to get out of professional
development events. But what is amazing
about professionalization requirements
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is not just their ability to waste your “colored people time,” but also their ability to
mandate you show up to experience violence. It sometimes pleads for you to show
up to the violent spaces for representational purposes and to fulfill an illustrative
multicultural image for website pictures.
It requires you to socialize with folks you
hate while providing free labor under the
professional development requisite of
service. And, when you stop showing up, it
positions you as unprofessional and having failed to meet expectations without
considering their failure to create a space
that supports your well-being and success
in the first place.
Pedagogy and Graduate Teaching
Experiences
Neoliberal institutions often facilitate
disciplining and exclusion for students
(and faculty) of color through “unclear and
ever-rising expectations, lack of support,
subjective evaluations, and limited external support” (Rockquemore and Laszloffy
2). Relatedly, in the face of conflict it opts
for subjective bureaucratic and diplomatic
forms of conflict management, which are
not often mutually exclusive with ethics,
although it presents itself as such. As I
experienced, these norms are maintained
via professionalization cultures, myths
of safety and community, and pedagogy
of accommodation. An important aspect
of praxis for freedom is pedagogy, which
Mohanty warns can naturalize capitalism,
postracialism, and racialized gendered
governance in higher education in particular (hooks and McKinnon 814–29).
A pedagogy of accommodation, in
combination with professionalization
demands, often serves as a mechanism
to actualize and normalize universities’
structural, sexist racism. And in the liberal
humanities this means being compelled
to celebrate diversity, mainstream white
feminism, and homonormativity when
really as a Black queer lesbian woman
you know these things contribute to your
own and your communities’ oppression.
It means performing reverence in being
a token since its entangled with your
job security, while pretending that trust,
safety, and community are established.
It also means feigning belief in the most
elaborate lie that one could tell—that
a safe world exists for Black people in
general, let alone a Black queer woman.
Relatedly, protocols of professionalization
demand that those committed to justice,
suppress dissent, code-switch, and try not
to be more noticeable (or disruptive) than
you are in/to a sea of whiteness.
For a graduate student, the aforementioned prohibitive structures manifest in
the context of navigating campus climate,
the politics of your discipline/department,
power dynamics in interpersonal/professional relationships, curricula, and classroom intellectual debates, while juggling
labors of coursework and teaching. Navigating the institutional and departmental
hierarchies and assimilationist, repressive demands in these different contexts
is especially hard for folks “who occupy
a disadvantaged position within one or
more of the social hierarchies structured
around race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and nationality” (Mohanty 178). And
if we reject these demands of the system
we are impediments to the status quo
and face backlash. Or push-out. For those
more interested in preserving normative
ideals we must be silenced and reminded
of our rightful place at the bottom of social
hierarchies. Only recently is this dilemma
for graduate teachers with marginalized
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identities who must navigate their interstitial position as employee and student/
subordinate, along with the antagonistic institutional and professional power
dynamics being explored. What do you do
when you are a grown-ass Black lesbian
feminist woman, impassioned pedagogue,
and colleague to your professors, yet
remain subject to surveillance and anti–
Black woman antagonism as a graduate
student, and cannot dissent and critique
the terrible racist-sexist pedagogy your
professor enacts in a course you are in
because of sticky politics and infantilizing
power dynamics?
In my women’s studies program, a common justification for non-transgressive
pedagogy and politics was that the department did not want to scare undergraduate
students away from feminism or jeopardize
the department’s existence. Enrollees for
introductory feminist courses were predominantly white students from the business
and science schools seeking to meet their
elective requirements, thus this nontransgressive approach maintained the corporate university. This pedagogical approach
maintained the “school to oppressor pipeline” for white undergraduate and graduate
students and demarcated feminist politics
as not mutually exclusive with antiracist
and decolonialist politics. It had negative implications for me as a Black, queer,
student-teacher and my women of color colleagues. It also had negative implications
for undergraduate students of color.
My graduate teaching pedagogy course
was a contradictory ebb and flow of experiencing violence of white privilege while
being explicitly trained to teach about
violence and social justice. I witnessed my
professor fail to address classmates’ racism while discussing best feminist teaching strategies for us to employ in our own
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courses. They relayed utopic tips to make
our feminist classrooms a “safe space,”
and I intervened to assert students have
different levels of risk and trust in the
classroom according to intersections of
race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality,
ability, and nation. The historical sociopolitical contentions of “safety” and “safe
space” concepts are simply not realities
for people of color in America, which is
hyper-visible. It was also ironic considering
the unsafe atmosphere already created for
the students of color in the room. This only
deepened the alienation I felt from my colleagues, while also taking our core feminist
theory course that never addressed the historical material violence that upended theories of power, subjectivity, and oppression.
When we discussed wielding authority and
power as an instructor, the corresponding
feminist solutions were to have nonhierarchical relationships between students and
teachers. We did not problematize what
this meant for women instructors of color
whose corporeality signifies hypersexuality, criminality, and militancy that can warrant resistance and violent contestation
from students. As the only Black woman
in my cohort and the department in years,
and the darkest person in my classes, this
training certainly did not address questions
of gendered anti-Blackness and embodiment. When discussing the corporate university, I pondered how my teacher-student
power imbalance would be mediated by
my entangled color, race, gender, sexuality, and femme embodiment, as well as
by the power white students at primarily
white institutions wield as consumers in
the corporate university—especially when
it comes to complaints about instructors
of color. This white rhetoric of safety under
the guise of feminist pedagogy marginalized graduate and undergraduate students
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12/14/18 10:52 AM
of color, and it made me and the other
woman of color in my cohort feel even more
nervous about teaching. In resolve, I had
to walk with hooks and Paulo Freire and
simply lead with my heart, humanity, and
grandma’s prayers.
I first witnessed the effects of this
pedagogy while a teaching assistant in a
large introductory feminism course. For
example, during a lecture on the gendered
wage gap, when an Asian woman student
asked how race impacted the gap statistics
(which was not included in the lecture), the
professor skirted around the demand for
intersectional analysis and even told the
student there was not enough research to
know. She said that for Asian and Native
American populations, the populations
were simply too small to get an accurate
account. In my recitation session I constantly redressed elisions from the lectures
regarding racialized gender and sexuality
differences and how issues impacted queer
and trans people of color differently, often
at the behest of students’ questions and
students of color’s complaints. And in our
group teaching assistant meetings, the professor said plainly that she skirted around
discussions of race so as not to alienate
students. So, plainly, this meant that white
students’ comfort and epistemologies of
ignorance was priority and not the interests
of students of color.
Undergraduate students of color had
issues with the trickle-down effects of this
pedagogical tradition. They coordinated
an interventionist panel/town hall meeting calling out our department for its racist, colonialist politics and pedagogy. On
this panel we heard from Native American,
Asian, Black trans*, and Black lesbian
students dissatisfied with the content and
pedagogical tools used by instructors. Students recounted instances of unchecked
racism, trans* erasure, and indigenous
erasure. They testified to boredom from
recycled white feminist content across their
classes that did not push their feminist
analyses. This melded with their frustrations concerning the disconnect between
theory and real-world issues—historical
and present—that were relevant to them
and increasingly prevalent in the news.
Ultimately, they attested their interests
were not priority. The effects of this pedagogical praxis confirmed that the rhetoric of comfort, safety, and pedagogy of
accommodation was a colonialist notion
that maintained the “school to oppressor
pipeline” for white students, facilitated
violence and exclusion for undergraduate
and graduate teachers of color in these
primarily white spaces, and demarcated
feminist politics as not mutually exclusive
with antiracist and anticolonialist politics.
By not integrating a woman of color, decolonial feminist philosophy into teaching,
the department adamantly maintained the
corporate university and racialized gendered suppression of dissent/governance
among students and student-teachers of
marginalized identities. However, interestingly, the white liberal climate allowed me
and the undergraduates to push back and
have our departmental grievances somewhat addressed to influence structural
changes that benefitted others thereafter,
which was unexpectedly foreclosed in the
Black studies department at the private PWI
I attended next.
When Skin-Folk Queer Folk
Ain’t Kinfolk: Reproducing
Respectability
A private, elite institution was a change of
pace and social norms for doctoral study.
I looked forward to finding belonging
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and a safe, supportive work environment
in the Black studies department since it
competitively recruited me and others
based on its interest in further substantiating its reputation as a premier department to conduct research in the field of
Black Queer Studies. This area of research
primarily attracted Black queer students
with investments in destabilizing white
dominant and historically oppressive policies, social practices, cultural illiteracies,
and higher education disciplinary norms
that contributed to unbelonging and criminalization of intersectionally marginalized populations such as us. My research
project also made me a particular match
for the program.
During my visit I asked questions that
were important to me given my previous
graduate experience and career trajectory,
such as inquiries around the department’s
commitment to pedagogy and supporting students in the unstable job market.
Although I desired more concrete answers
to these questions, my visit was nevertheless a success, with the department
offering me acceptance and a competitive
package to sway my decision from another
extremely prestigious university to which
I had been accepted. However, I could not
negotiate help with moving expenses. I
took out loans and incurred more debt to
move states since I lacked familial or intimate partner support.
I arrived nervous, brave, and excited to
have many Black queer peers to journey
with, get advice from, and build a social
life with—a markedly different experience
from my previous school and department.
I learned quickly, however, that department culture was deeply affected by dysfunctional relationships, power struggles,
and ideological wars among faculty that
contributed to low morale. This environ168
FT 27_2-3.indd 168
ment negatively affected students’ ability
to work between faculty—especially if their
interdisciplinary research required so—for
fear of experiencing backlash or becoming a chess piece and/or collateral damage in faculty disagreements. Combined,
these factors contributed to a department culture that enforced a paternalistic
hierarchy, conservative code of conduct,
competitiveness, and punitive pedagogy,
that was the backdrop of their reputation
for “weeding and pushing students out.”
This manifested in: 1) policing students’
engagements around intellectual ideas; 2)
lack of transparency with students when
it came to relaying important information
about required milestones and measures
of assessment, which routinely meant
moving goalposts and differing subjective
assessments for students that affected
student performance and mental health
negatively in the highly competitive and
prestigious environment; 3) lack of student democracy in terms of an inactive
departmental student government, connected to a history of hostile and/or negligent reception of raised student concerns;
and 4) sometimes punitive backlash when
adult student persons raised concerns,
which was often the subtext of students’
all-too-common experience of being put
on probation. These probations then were
amassed as grounds for exclusion.
From the perspective of students, faculty were far removed from and apathetic
to understanding ways contemporary
conditions in society and departmental
culture affected students’ lives and wellbeing. This proved devastating to the vulnerable marginalized population of Black
queer graduate students. For example,
compared to the graduate school’s larger
policies for its primarily upper-class white
student body, such as assessing satisfac-
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12/14/18 10:52 AM
tory progress toward degree completion
and its accommodating timeline to completion, the departmental graduate study
handbook held its 99 percent Black and
queer students to higher standards with
less accommodating and more punitive
standards.
The prestige of the university and
department foreclosed radical refusal
or protest by demanding respectability.
Students were urged not to call attention
to the stricter professionalism standards
and to sustain reputable appearances
to the rest of the university and access
to resources. I also found that whether
I pointed out department or peer gendered racism like I did during my master’s
degree experience or tried to intentionally
avoid conflicts and confrontation because
of burnout and previous trauma, my action
and inaction were read as insubordination due to conscious and unconscious
demands of my affective, emotional,
and intellectual labor that privileged
subjection. These cumulative experiences illustrate precisely how “access
(or lack thereof) to gendered and sexual
respectability becomes the dividing line
between those who are rendered deviant,
immoral, and thus precarious and those
whose value to capital has been secured
through a variety of norms. The invitation
to respectability becomes a way of regulating and punishing those populations it
purports to help; thus, in the neoliberal
moment, ‘care’ becomes the conduit for
violence, both epistemological and physical” (Hong Kindle Locations 412–15).
What was psychologically, mentally,
and emotionally abusive about my graduate programs was learning about the roots
of these specific issues under a guise of
feminist reverence, while experiencing
these phenomena from instructors and
fellow classmates simultaneously. For
example, from my graduate courses and
their elisions especially, I came to understand more fully the connections between
racism and white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, colonial history, and its
protracted effects manifested through
ideological state apparatuses such as
education institutions (Althusser 86).
Institutionalized multiculturalism, diversity, and respectability were the threads
that bolstered this structural formation.
Diversity campaigns were strategic distractions from the fact that the university and
its programs maintained demographic
disparities of students and faculty of color
through admissions and hiring/retention
practices, uneven allocation of resources
to support STEM fields over the arts and
humanities, the student as consumer
paradigm, and the myth of safety, comfort,
and community for all students across
difference. I also learned that these Black
elitist appeals to prestigious ego and
excellence in the academy were a guise
for a sick exploitation of slavery, Southern
horrors, and Southern politics of resistance, as I sat in course after course in
which they eulogized them (us) as central
to the Black studies canon, our very lives,
and our future (even as they also only gestured to the South as stuck in the past).
And here I was. The materiality of hauntings. The interstice. In the flesh. Dying.
Just to live.
A Note on “The Transformation
of Silence into Language and
Action”: Decolonial Refusal, Care,
and Black Queer Lesbian Survival
The first thing my first Black queer woman
mentor told me when applying to graduate school was that Black women have
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the highest rate of suicide among graduate students. I never verified this then,
but took it as her forewarning to be extra
attentive to and honest about my mental
health and general wellness in the stressful, racist spaces of graduate school. Just
as her Black queer housemother care
kept me alive and encouraged leading
up to my grad experience, it never left me
when I matriculated. However, I could not
have imagined the tremendous toll that
the stress and trauma of graduate school
would wreak on my body in addition to my
psyche.
While in my master’s program, at the
tender age of twenty-two, I began to suffer from debilitating chronic neck, shoulder, and back pain, which I learned from
doctors was because of subluxations, or
misaligned vertebrae, and a deteriorating spinal disk that correlated to constant
poor posture from extended laptop use
and reading, as well as carrying heavy
books. My chiropractors told me, intently,
that “subluxations are misalignments in
one or more of the vertebrae in your spine.
They can cause nerve interference, hindering communication between the brain
and the rest of the body—every cell, tissue
and organ. This makes it so the body is
unable to function at 100 percent” (Chiro
One Wellness Centers). Most importantly,
subluxations can occur at any age, and the
main causes are considered the “Three
Ts”: trauma, toxins, and thoughts—with
thoughts/stress being the number one
cause, followed by both micro and major
trauma. My x-ray was so alarming, yet
filled with hope that my chiropractor urged
treatments two to three days a week and
arranged a generous payment plan with
me.
Essentially, this world and this environment was killing me slowly—constantly
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experiencing racialized and homophobic
familial crises, financial crises, microaggressions and lack of safety, being tense
and criminalized all of the time in the
white and respectable environments,
being disconnected from cultural expression central to my life force and catharsis,
having no time to maintain wellness rituals, relationships, or get enough rest due
to the large workload and its demands.
The stress, trauma, and distrust I felt for
white people during my first PWI experience became compounded by the incessant Black deaths from police brutality
reported in the media. Plus, given my
research and subjectivity, the sociopolitical moment underlined how anti-Black
violence against Black cis and transwomen fails to galvanize the same mourning and fervor for redress. I suffered from
muscle spasms and inability to sleep
comfortably because of muscle tension;
and I developed anxiety and panic attacks
for the first time in my life. My panic
attacks happened during finals—once
when I was afraid I wouldn’t finish on time
and another from revisiting Angela Davis’s
Women, Race, and Class (1981) and being
so triggered by the graphic details of
Black women’s subjection to violence and
death in plantation landscapes like home,
in combination with Black death in the
news.
These instances made me consider leaving academia on multiple occasions given
the common knowledge that it engenders
short life spans related to this work. I
began to see that as my fate. But then I
realized I couldn’t be like them. I couldn’t
kill me too. I couldn’t feed into the lie and
gaslighting that their treatment of me was
a reflection of my badness, inadequacy, or
worth, but instead the truth, which is that
my presence served to remind them of
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12/14/18 10:52 AM
their own waywardness and evils. I leave
implications for senior faculty committed
to diversity, inclusion, and equity in the
academy by suggesting the ways these
mechanisms in graduate school map onto
the Black feminist concept and empirical
social reality that Monique Morris terms
“push-out” in respect to Black girls in
grade school—the deployment of policies,
social practices, cultural illiteracies, and
pedagogies of apathy by teacher, administrators, and the justice system that push
Black women students out of institutions
charged with helping them flourish, into
unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe
futures. This research, like my narrative,
also shows how, despite obstacles, stigmas, stereotypes, and despair, Black
girls—and I add Black women—still find
ways to persevere.
Like Black and women of color feminists before me, I realized the importance
of cultivating, and being just as militant
about, self-care and self-love as I was
about scholar activism if I hoped to sustain it. I have to love myself more fiercely
than anyone else ever could. This means
shielding myself from triggering content
on social media, disengaging toxic people
and situations, utilizing free counseling
sessions on campus to heal all the parts
of myself damaged by my family and the
university environment, consistent chiropractic care, spiritual wellness therapies, exercise, and being in tune with the
erotic—unapologetically indulging in the
things that give me pleasure and feed my
heart-mind-body-spirit.
Another part of this is honing my differential consciousness. Chela Sandoval’s
notion of differential consciousness is
about enacting a U.S. Third World feminist oppositional consciousness based on
functioning within and beyond dominant
ideology and hegemonic feminist praxis.
It is about being able to shift between
and among modes of political decolonial
oppositional stances based on the situation for the sake of your goal—something
queer, Black, women of color, and indigenous feminists have been doing forever.
For me it is about the bravery to utilize
and transform silence to practice decolonial refusal in affect and theory, or ways
of knowing/feeling (Lethabo-King) and
care. My positionality, ancestry, Southern
womanist upbringing, and proximity to the
South’s devastating conditions of protracted colonialism means I have different
stakes in life, a different indebtedness to
redefining life and liberation, and a notion
of safety and survival that unfortunately
is always already entangled with risks of
violence, being silenced, and death. So in
the words of Assata Shakur, I have nothing
to lose but my chains.
Barbara Smith edited the canonical
Black feminist anthology Home Girls: A
Black Feminist Anthology, where she used
a line from Beverly Smith’s 1983 essay to
entitle section three of the book “Black
Lesbians—Who Will Fight for Our Lives but
Us?” Although the text was published in
1983, this question is still urgent. Black
cis and trans*, queer and lesbian women
are still faced with the dilemma of perhaps being the only persons in theory and
praxis invested in a liberationist politics
that could free them too. Even with the
development of Black queer studies and
trans studies. Even though Barbara Smith
and the entire field states that some of
the most radical change-making feminists of color in past social justice movements have been lesbians (Home), and
even though Black queer and lesbian
women propelled and continue to lead
and labor in new liberationist movements
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such as Black Lives Matter. What happens to Black feminism when normative
(academic) reproduction is subverted or
even foreclosed not only by the exclusion
of the “children,” as Christian’s essay
details, but also by the premature deaths
of the “mothers”? What alternative, queer
modes of reproduction and memory must
be mobilized to forge these connections
(Hong Kindle Locations 2433–36)? Who
will fight for our lives but us? Audre Lorde
encapsulates the stakes of this positionality in a haunting proposition for all of us
to heed: “I was going to die, if not sooner
then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected
me. Your silence will not protect you. . . .
What are the words you do not yet have?
What do you need to say? What are the
tyrannies you swallow day by day and
attempt to make your own, until you will
sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Perhaps for some of you here today, I am
the face of one of your fears. Because I am
woman, because I am Black, because I
am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black
woman warrior poet doing my work—come
to ask you, are you doing yours?” (Lorde
41). This is the question for liberal humanities programs born out of anticolonial
struggle. To regain some integrity based
on their histories and their commitments
to diversity, equity, and feminist liberation, they must take these things into
account. Commitments to diversity and
inclusion within higher education institutions often do not engender meaningful
change because their efficacy is contingent upon capitalism, myths of safety for
people of color and queers, and a genuine
misunderstanding of/lack of care for how
anti-Black racism and sexism, specifically, manifests on the micro- and macrolevels within these spaces. Just as recent
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research, police brutality incidents, and
Black Lives Matter #SayHerName protests
highlight how primary and secondary educational spaces disproportionately criminalize Black girls, this phenomenon also
weeds out Black women pursuing higher
education degrees (Crenshaw et al.; Morris). Every Black woman in academia I
know has a story about a Black woman
pushed out of academia due to anti–Black
woman antagonism. Even while battling
attempts to push me out, I witnessed the
successful push-out of others and was left
to mourn my fate. And when swapping stories, this anti–Black woman antagonism
is always specific, harkening to capitalist
logics and racist-sexist archetypes that
have sustained Black women’s disparagement across time and space. Willfulness attaches to us—beings who refuse
to carry out the will of hegemonic power
and who are already corporeally unworthy of respect or autonomy. So, for the
Black female queer feminist, she is always
already a willful subject, invisible and
hypervisible through her difference, and
a rebel that must be disciplined based on
her existence within these structures when
she is simply trying to survive. The words
of Audre Lorde still rang true:
Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken,
distortion of vision, Black women have
on one hand always been highly visible,
and so, on the other hand, have been
rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the
women’s movement, we have had to
fight, and still do, for that very visibility
which also renders us most vulnerable,
our Blackness. For to survive in the
mouth of this dragon we call america,
we have had to learn this first and most
vital lesson—that we were never meant
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12/14/18 10:52 AM
to survive. Not as human beings . . . And
that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source
of our greatest strength. . . . But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by
living and speaking those truths which
we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we
can survive. . . . it is never without fear—
of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of
death. But we have lived through all of
those already, in silence, except death.
(42–43)
So we keep fighting, knowing that we
have no choice, that we will be a perpetual
problem, that we may be alone taking
these risks. But I hope, for all of us, that
this inspires reflexive praxis from liberal
humanities programs born out of anticolonial struggle and senior faculty committed
to diversity, inclusion, equity, humanities programs, and feminist pedagogy in
the academy to hear Black women, and
change. Who will fight for our lives but us?
notes
1. Ahmed’s lectures about institutional diversity, racism, and the fatiguing labor of being a
queer, a feminist killjoy, and a willful subject
reflect her cumulative thoughts in The Promise
of Happiness (2010), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012),
and Willful Subjects (2014). Indebted to BlackBlack and women of color feminists, Ahmed
interrogates how the neoliberal corporate
university is secured through institutional diversity.
2. Black lesbian feminists writing and organizing in the context of 1960s–1980s feminist, Black, and LGBT freedom struggles were
particularly critical of homophobia within the
Black community and Black nationalisms, and
insisted its eradication was a critical component for liberation through a Black sexual politics that restores the embodied, epistemologi-
cal, spiritual, and sexual dispossession Black
people have faced from white supremacist
terror.
3. Black feminist women who look back at
significant historical periods of Black women’s
activism and protest continue to uncover how
Black women have been/are overlooked,
silenced, forgotten, and continuously exploited
within nation-state systems, social movements,
and intellectual and literary/scholarly cartographies (Carby; Christian; Davis; Higginbotham;
Roberts; Collins; Springer; Gore; Higashida).
This vast archive of Black feminist contributions
threads a common fact: Black lesbian consciousness has been particularly formative to
major theoretical advancements in Black diaspora, feminist, and queer studies. Black lesbian
feminists and the anticolonial theory-in-praxis
they urge, however, are often met with asymmetrical solidarity, death, and liberal cooptation and repackaging from women’s studies,
Black studies, lesbian and gay studies, and
queer studies.
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Lee, Rachel. “Notes from the (Non)Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color.” Meridians, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 85–109.
Lethabo-King, Tiffany. “Of Decolonial Refusal
and Abolitionist Misandry.” Speech, The Colloquium on Indigeneity and Native American
Studies, May 2016, Northwestern University.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. 1984. Crossing Press, 2007.
Mohanty, Chandra T. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Point Par Point, 2007.
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This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. SUNY Press, 2015.
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Musser, Amber Jamilla. “Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University.” Feminist
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Leslie McCall
The Complexity of Intersectionality
S
that feminism claimed to speak universally for
all women, feminist researchers have been acutely aware of the limitations of gender as a single analytical category. In fact, feminists are
perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced
intersectionality—the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations—as itself a central category of analysis. One could even say that intersectionality is the most
important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction
with related fields, has made so far.1
Yet despite the emergence of intersectionality as a major paradigm of
research in women’s studies and elsewhere, there has been little discussion
of how to study intersectionality, that is, of its methodology. This would
not be worrisome if studies of intersectionality were already wide ranging
ince critics first alleged
I am grateful for comments from participants at the 2001 American Sociological Association meetings in Anaheim, California, especially Judith Howard and Lisa Brush; the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, especially Dorothy Sue Cobble and
Averil Clarke; and the Northwestern University Gender Workshop in the Department of
Sociology, especially Ann Orloff and Jeff Manza; as well as from Vilna Bashi, Maria Cancian,
Vivek Chibber, and Charles Ragin. The graduate students in my seminar on intersectionality
provided invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this article, and their insights are woven
throughout this version. I have also benefited enormously from conversations with Leela
Fernandes and Irene Browne as well as from the reviewers’ comments. For financial support
during the initial writing of this article, I thank the Russell Sage Foundation visiting scholars
program. I alone bear responsibility for all errors and omissions.
1
A crucial note on terminology: it is impossible to find a term that is both recognizable
and merely descriptive of the kind of work that is the focus of this article. Many scholars
will not regard intersectionality as a neutral term, for it immediately suggests a particular
theoretical paradigm based in identity categories (see, e.g., Brown 1997). This is not the
only sense in which I use the term here; rather, I intend for it to encompass perspectives
that completely reject the separability of analytical and identity categories. As for the origins
of the term itself, it was probably first highlighted by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991).
Many other key texts introduced the conceptual framework and offered similar terms: see
Davis 1981; Moraga 1983; Smith 1983; hooks 1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1984; Glenn
1985; Anzaldúa 1987, 1990; King 1988; Mohanty 1988; Spelman 1988; Sandoval 1991.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2005, vol. 30, no. 3]
䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2005/3003-0003$10.00
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in terms of methodology or if the methodological issues were fairly
straightforward and consistent with past practice. I suggest, however, that
intersectionality has introduced new methodological problems and, partly
as an unintended consequence, has limited the range of methodological
approaches used to study intersectionality. Further, both developments
can be traced to what arguably has been a defining characteristic of research
in this area: the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expands
to include multiple dimensions of social life and categories of analysis.2
In a nutshell, research practice mirrors the complexity of social life, calling
up unique methodological demands. Such demands are challenging, as
anyone who has undertaken the study of intersectionality can attest. Not
surprisingly, researchers favor methodologies that more naturally lend
themselves to the study of complexity and reject methodologies that are
considered too simplistic or reductionist. This in turn restricts the scope
of knowledge that can be produced on intersectionality, assuming that
different methodologies produce different kinds of knowledge. Note that
this is equally a problem outside and inside women’s studies, though I
mainly address the field of women’s studies here in order to simplify the
argument.
But are these assumptions about the capacity of different methodologies
to handle complexity warranted? Scholars have not left a clear record on
which to base a reply to this question. Feminists have written widely on
methodology but have either tended to focus on a particular methodology
(e.g., ethnography, deconstruction, genealogy, ethnomethodology) or
have failed to pinpoint the particular issue of complexity. Although it is
impossible to be exhaustive, my intention is to delineate a wide range of
methodological approaches to the study of multiple, intersecting, and
2
The terms complex, complexity, and complexities appear frequently and are central in key
texts on intersectionality, although no text focuses on complexity as such. A representative
early statement, for example, is from the back cover of bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From
Margin to Center (1984): “Feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against
sexual oppression because the very foundation of women’s liberation has, until now, not
accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.” Similarly, but from a
different theoretical perspective, Wendy Brown writes: “We are not simply oppressed but
produced through these discourses, a production that is historically complex, contingent, and
occurs through formations that do not honor analytically distinct identity categories” (1997,
87). A more recent example appears in the short description of the Consortium on Race,
Gender, and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland, which, according to its Web site, is “a
university-wide initiative promoting research, scholarship, and faculty development that examines intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference as they
shape the construction and representation of identities, behavior, and complex social relations.” For more information, see http://www.umd.edu/crge.
S I G N S
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complex social relations and to clarify and critically engage certain features
of the most common approaches. In total, I describe three approaches.
All three attempt to satisfy the demand for complexity and, as a result,
face the need to manage complexity, if for no other reason than to attain
intelligibility. For each approach, I describe how scholars manage complexity and what they achieve and sacrifice in the process.
The three approaches, in brief, are defined principally in terms of their
stance toward categories, that is, how they understand and use analytical
categories to explore the complexity of intersectionality in social life. The
first approach is called anticategorical complexity because it is based on a
methodology that deconstructs analytical categories. Social life is considered too irreducibly complex—overflowing with multiple and fluid determinations of both subjects and structures—to make fixed categories
anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the
process of producing differences. Of the three approaches, this approach
appears to have been the most successful in satisfying the demand for
complexity, judging by the fact that there is now great skepticism about
the possibility of using categories in anything but a simplistic way. The
association of the anticategorical approach with the kind of complexity
introduced by studies of intersectionality may have also resulted from the
tendency to conflate this approach with the second one, which I will
discuss momentarily, despite the fact that the two have distinct methodologies, origins, and implications for research on intersectionality.
Jumping to the other end of the continuum next, the third approach
is neither widely known nor widely used, making its introduction a key
purpose of this article. This approach, intercategorical complexity, requires
that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document
relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions. I describe
my own research methodology as an example of the intercategorical approach. Because it is the lesser known of the three approaches, I spend
more time discussing an example of this type of research than I do the
other two approaches. I also identify examples of research by other social
scientists working with similar methodologies, though my aim is to be
illustrative rather than exhaustive.
Finally, although the approach I call intracategorical complexity inaugurated the study of intersectionality, I discuss it as the second approach
because it falls conceptually in the middle of the continuum between the
first approach, which rejects categories, and the third approach, which
uses them strategically. Like the first approach, it interrogates the boundary-making and boundary-defining process itself, though that is not its
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raison d’être. Like the third approach, it acknowledges the stable and even
durable relationships that social categories represent at any given point in
time, though it also maintains a critical stance toward categories. This
approach is called intracategorical complexity because authors working in
this vein tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of
intersection—“people whose identity crosses the boundaries of traditionally constructed groups” (Dill 2002, 5)—in order to reveal the complexity
of lived experience within such groups. Since the second approach is
sometimes associated (erroneously) with the anticategorical approach, I
discuss these two approaches in the same section.
Before proceeding, I must raise four caveats. First, not all research on
intersectionality can be classified into one of the three approaches. Second,
some research crosses the boundaries of the continuum, belonging partly
to one approach and partly to another. Third, I have no doubt misunderstood and misclassified some pieces of research and some researchers,
for which I issue an apology up front. Fourth, I do not claim that all
research cited in the same category is the same on all counts—only roughly
the same on the count that concerns me, which is the researcher’s stance
toward categorical complexity. For example, there is no seamless overlap
between feminist poststructuralists and anticategoricalists. All this being
said, the three approaches can be considered broadly representative of
current approaches to the study of intersectionality and together illustrate
a central element of my argument: that different methodologies produce
different kinds of substantive knowledge and that a wider range of methodologies is needed to fully engage with the set of issues and topics falling
broadly under the rubric of intersectionality.
Since my primary goal is a substantive one—to expand research on
intersectionality—all other philosophical and methods-related issues are
important only to the extent that they impede or facilitate this goal. As
philosophical and methods-related issues have played a large role in the
development of feminist research, they must be considered here as well.
To that end, I adopt a fairly expansive view of what a methodology is.
Ideally, a methodology is a coherent set of ideas about the philosophy,
methods, and data that underlie the research process and the production
of knowledge. As is clear from this definition, I am not concerned solely
with methods but with the philosophical underpinnings of methods and
the kinds of substantive knowledge that are produced in the application
of methods. My focus is on the connections among these elements of the
research process rather than on identifying any particular philosophy or
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method as feminist, as some feminist writings on methodology do.3 Indeed, I consider all three approaches to be consistent with feminist research.
Given that, my aim is to understand how methodological issues have
had a hand in drawing the nebulous line within feminist research between
interdisciplinary and disciplinary scholarship. This distinction is extremely
consequential, for research that falls on the interdisciplinary side of the
line is more likely to constitute the core of women’s studies as a new
inter/disciplinary field and thus spark new feminist research in women’s
studies proper as well as in the disciplines. In the end, it is my hope that
dispelling at least some of the philosophical and methods-related concerns
that have been raised about the interdisciplinary status of the intercategorical approach in particular may help to expand the scope of research
on intersectionality.
Anticategorical and intracategorical complexity
I begin with a very brief and stylized chronology of the development of
the field of women’s studies. Many overviews and critiques of the stages
of development of feminist studies have covered the same ground, so that
is not my objective (see, e.g., Sandoval 1991). My emphasis instead is on
the convergence of several interrelated but analytically separate developments that led to the current mode of research on intersectionality.
One of the first developments in the emergent field of women’s studies
was a critique of existing fields for not incorporating women as subjects
of research.4 This critique was substantive in nature, and the solution was
equally substantive: women should be added to the leading research agendas across the full range of disciplines. Women’s distinctive experiences
became important ingredients in the attempt to set the record straight.
However, mounting evidence of the pervasiveness of male bias led to a
critique that became primarily theoretical in nature; consequently, the
simple addition of women to the research process no longer seemed adequate. The introduction of gender as an analytical category, feminism as
3
In particular, the distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods, which has
characterized much feminist writing on this subject, is severely underdeterminative of the
philosophical and substantive issues involved in any study of intersectionality.
4
I will use the term subject throughout this article in two quite different ways. First, I
will use it to refer to the actual topic of research or the actual individuals or groups who are
being studied in any particular research project, as in “the subjects of analysis.” Second, I
will use it to refer to the more theoretical notion of an implied collective author or speaker
or agent, as in “the theoretical subject of feminism.”
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a theoretical perspective, and male dominance as a major social institution
all became necessary to counter the tendency toward neglecting and misrepresenting women’s experiences (Scott 1986).
But feminist scholars also took their critique to a much deeper level.
They began to question the very edifice of modern society—its founding
philosophies, disciplines, categories, and concepts. All of the valued categories that fraternized on the male side of the modern male/female
binary opposition became suspect for symbolizing and enacting the exclusion of women and femininity.5 In particular, the philosophical critique
of modernity included a disciplinary critique of modern science and a
methodological critique of the scientific method, its claims to objectivity
and truth belied by the actual practice of science (see, e.g., Keller 1985;
Harding 1986). Finally, these critiques dovetailed with two separate but
highly influential developments: first, the postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques of modern Western philosophy, history, and language
(see, e.g., Foucault 1972; Derrida 1974), and second, critiques by feminists of color of white feminists’ use of women and gender as unitary and
homogeneous categories reflecting the common essence of all women.6
The methodology of anticategorical complexity was born in this moment of critique, in which hegemonic feminist theorists, poststructuralists,
and antiracist theorists almost simultaneously launched assaults on the
validity of modern analytical categories in the 1980s, though, as I said,
often from differing perspectives and with different consequences for the
course of feminist theory’s intellectual trajectory. I will return to these
differences in a moment, but for now it is important to recognize that
some similarities in the positions of all three groups compounded and
reinforced the conflation of the anticategorical and intracategorical approaches into a single widely received approach. More specifically, writings
by feminists of color, which were more oriented toward the intracategorical approach, were often assimilated into and then associated with the
writings of feminist poststructuralists, which were more oriented toward
the anticategorical approach.7
5
See, e.g., Pateman 1988; Scott 1988; Fraser 1989; Fuss 1989.
Although I use feminists of color to refer to the authors of this perspective, not all
feminists of color adhere to the same theoretical position or this position, and not all feminists
writing from this perspective are feminists of color.
7
It is impossible to prove this point, but others have made it. See especially Moya 1997
for specific examples of conflation. In terms of the hegemony of the deconstructive position,
Nancy Fraser (1998) implies it, as does Kay Armatage in speaking about institutionalizing
women’s studies as a department: “The transformative, self-critical nature of women’s studies,
6
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At least initially, the emphasis for both groups was on the socially
constructed nature of gender and other categories and the fact that a wide
range of different experiences, identities, and social locations fail to fit
neatly into any single “master” category. Indeed, the premise of this approach is that nothing fits neatly except as a result of imposing a stable
and homogenizing order on a more unstable and heterogeneous social
reality. Moreover, the deconstruction of master categories is understood
as part and parcel of the deconstruction of inequality itself. That is, since
symbolic violence and material inequalities are rooted in relationships that
are defined by race, class, sexuality, and gender, the project of deconstructing the normative assumptions of these categories contributes to the
possibility of positive social change. Whether this research does in fact
contribute to social change is irrelevant. The point is that many feminist
researchers employ this type of analysis because of their belief in its radical
potential to alter social practices—to free individuals and social groups
from the normative fix of a hegemonic order and to enable a politics that
is at once more complex and inclusive. Feminist researchers take this stance
even with the acknowledgment that it is impossible to fully escape the
normalizing confines of language because new relations of power/knowledge are continuously reinscribed in new systems of classification, and yet
it is impossible to avoid using categories strategically for political purposes.8
The primary philosophical consequence of this approach has been to
render the use of categories suspect because they have no foundation in
reality: language (in the broader social or discursive sense) creates categorical reality rather than the other way around. The methodological
consequence is to render suspect both the process of categorization itself
and any research that is based on such categorization, because it inevitably
leads to demarcation, and demarcation to exclusion, and exclusion to
inequality. At the anticategorical end of the continuum I have developed,
these philosophical and methodological consequences have been fully
embraced.
How, then, are intersectionality and the complex social relations it
embodies analyzed substantively in an anticategorical framework? Methodologies for the study of anticategorical complexity crosscut the discicombined with the emphasis on postcolonial and poststructural approaches that ceaselessly
question the established canons and canonicity itself, is seen as the check against retrograde
institutional tendencies” (Armatage 1998, 315).
8
See, e.g., Riley 1988; Fuss 1989; Butler 1990, 1995; Gamson 1996. See also Fraser
1998 for a cogent, if controversial, summary of this position and its dominance in feminist
studies.
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plinary divide between the social sciences and the humanities. The artificiality of social categories can be illuminated in history with the method
of genealogy, in literature with deconstruction, and in anthropology with
the new ethnography. In each case, the completeness of the set of groups
that constitutes a category is challenged. For example, the category of
gender was first understood as constituted by men and women, but questions of what distinguishes a man from a woman—is it biological sex, and
if so what is biologically male and female?—led to the definition of “new”
social groups, new in the sense of being named but also perhaps in the
sense of being created. There are no longer two genders but countless
ones, no longer two sexes but five (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Other examples
abound. In a remarkably short period of time, bisexual, transgendered,
queer, and questioning individuals have been added to the original divide
between gay and straight sexuality groups, and the social groups that
constitute the category of race are widely believed to be fundamentally
indefinable because of multiracialism (see, e.g., Fuss 1991; Omi and Winant 1994). And, theoretically, eventually all groups will be challenged and
fractured in turn. As these examples make clear, this approach has been
enormously effective in challenging the singularity, separateness, and
wholeness of a wide range of social categories.
As stated in the anticategorical approach above, these vexing questions
about how to constitute the social groups of a given social category, which
have often arisen in the context of empirical research, have inevitably
resulted in questions about whether to categorize and separate at all.9 But
we can still go a step further. In psychoanalytic versions of the anticategorical approach, complexity is contained within the subject and therefore
the very notion of identity on which categories are based is fully rejected:
“Locating difference outside identity, in the spaces between identities, [ignores] the radicality of the poststructualist view which locates differences
within identity. In the end, I would argue, theories of ‘multiple identities’
fail to challenge effectively the traditional metaphysical understanding of
identity as unity” (Fuss 1989, 103). Given theories of the “irreducible
heterogeneity of the other” (and self), even single individuals, let alone
social collectivities, cannot be given voice as they had been in the days of
“‘innocent’ ethnographic realism” (Lather 2001, 222, 215).
Thus new practices of ethnographic representation have been developed
to allow feminist research to proceed while the authenticity of both the
subject and the researcher—as if either had a single, transparent voice—
9
Interestingly, as part of their critique of multiculturalism, universalists have also seized
on the problems of defining social groups (see, e.g., Offe 1998).
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is questioned.10 Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman (1993) is a well-known
example of this new style of research in which the complexity of a single
individual’s life and the complicated nature of the researcher’s relationship
to the individual/subject are the central themes of the book. Another
example is given by Patti Lather and Chris Smithies (1997), who selfconsciously split their book on women with HIV/AIDS into three separate panels, first for their analysis and interpretation as researchers and
authors, second for the voices of the subjects, and third for other relevant
issues such as information and facts about HIV/AIDS. Not surprisingly,
these authors are careful to resist claims of having transcended the crisis
of representation that they see as essentially irresolvable in epistemological
terms (Visweswaran 1994).
While broadly influential in feminist studies, these methodological interventions follow directly only from the anticategorical critiques of categorization and not from many of the critiques of categorization by feminists of color. It is probably more appropriate to describe much of the
literature emerging from the latter group as critical of broad and sweeping
acts of categorization rather than as critical of categorization per se. Certainly feminists of color have been critical of a certain version of essentialism that has defined women as a single group, but virtually all feminists
now share this criticism. Feminists of color have also rejected the individualistic project of a politics based on identification and opposition, as
have poststructuralists.11 But while taking such positions, many feminists
of color have also realized that such a critique does not necessitate a total
rejection of the social reality of categorization.12 In other words, one
10
For a recent methodological discussion of the complicated relationship between the
identity of researchers and subjects that does not reject categories as a basis for research and
is oriented toward the other two approaches, see Twine and Warren 2000.
11
Norma Alarcón, building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s writings, argues that “consciousness
as a site of multiple voicings is the theoretical subject, par excellence, of [This] Bridge [Called
My Back]. . . . Indeed, the multiple-voiced subjectivity is lived in resistance to competing
notions for one’s allegiance or self-identification. It is a process of disidentification with
prevalent formulations of the most forcefully theoretical subject of feminism. . . . Thus,
current political practices in the United States make it almost impossible to go beyond an
oppositional theory of the subject, which is the prevailing feminist strategy and that of others;
however, it is not the theory that will help us grasp the subjectivity of women of color”
(1990). For an insightful analysis of how the “politics of ambiguity” plays out in several
different types of social movements, see Foster 2000.
12
Crenshaw writes, for example, “Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the
site of where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of
talking about categories at all” (1991, 377). Similarly, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra
Talpade Mohanty argue that “postmodernist discourse attempts to move beyond essentialism
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cannot easily lump these critics in with either deconstructionists, on the
one hand, or multiculturalists and proponents of identity politics, on the
other, which Nancy Fraser and others have distinguished as the two main
and opposing perspectives on the conceptual and political status of excluded groups (Fraser 1998). Whereas the multicultural and identity-politics perspective tends to maintain group boundaries uncritically in order
to revalue them and the deconstructive perspective seeks to eliminate
them, the alternative perspective described here seeks to complicate and
use them in a more critical way. Feminists of color have steered a middle
course, consistently engaging in both theoretical and empirical studies of
intersectionality using finer intersections of categories. It is these studies
that inaugurated the study of intersectionality and what I call the intracategorical approach to complexity. They and their intellectual descendents are the primary focus of the remainder of this section.
Interest in intersectionality arose out of a critique of gender-based and
race-based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected
points of intersection—ones that tended to reflect multiple subordinate
locations as opposed to dominant or mixed locations. It was not possible,
for example, to understand a black woman’s experience from previous
studies of gender combined with previous studies of race because the
former focused on white women and the latter on black men. Something
new was needed because of the distinct and frequently conflicting dynamics that shaped the lived experience of subjects in these social locations.
To take just one example from the earliest explorations, black women
seemed to achieve greater equality with men of their race relative to white
women because the conditions of slavery and white supremacy forced
them to work on par with black men, yet black women also were more
vulnerable to sexual violence because whites did not consider them worth
protecting “as women” (see, e.g., Davis 1981). The potential for both
multiple and conflicting experiences of subordination and power required
a more wide-ranging and complex terrain of analysis. How was this to be
achieved? The primary subject of analysis was typically either a single social
group at a neglected point of intersection of multiple master categories
or a particular social setting or ideological construction, or both. To il-
by pluralizing and dissolving the stability and analytic utility of the categories of race, class,
gender, and sexuality . . . but the relations of domination and subordination that are named
and articulated through the processes of racism and racialization still exist, and they still
require analytic and political specification and engagement” (1997, xvii).
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lustrate, I discuss only the first of these approaches, which I also take to
be the most common of the three, particularly in earlier writings.13
This prototypical approach was set out in the early narrative essays that
defined the field of intersectionality.14 Narratives take as their subject an
individual or an individual’s experience and extrapolate illustratively to
the broader social location embodied by the individual. Often such groups
are “new” groups in the sense of having been named, defined, or elaborated upon in the process of deconstructing the original dimensions of
the master category. A key way that complexity is managed in such narratives is by focusing on the single group represented by the individual.
How does this minimize complexity? Individuals usually share the characteristics of only one group or dimension of each category defining their
social position. The intersection of identities takes place through the articulation of a single dimension of each category. That is, the “multiple”
in these intersectional analyses refers not to dimensions within categories
but to dimensions across categories. Thus, an Arab American, middleclass, heterosexual woman is placed at the intersection of multiple categories (race-ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual) but only reflects a single
dimension of each. Personal narratives may aspire to situate subjects within
the full network of relationships that define their social locations, but
usually it is only possible to situate them from the partial perspective of
the particular social group under study (i.e., if an Arab woman is the
subject of analysis, then issues of race and nationality are more fully examined from the perspective of Arab women than from the perspective
of Arab men).
In personal narratives and single-group analyses, then, complexity derives from the analysis of a social location at the intersection of single
dimensions of multiple categories, rather than at the intersection of the
full range of dimensions of a full range of categories, and that is how
complexity is managed. Personal narratives and single-group studies derive
th...
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