on angry feminist affect

I recently woke up to a lovely email in my inbox: a message from a person who had been in the audience for my presentation, on “un-buzzword-ifying intersectionality”, at the Australian Social Policy Conference last year. The person wanted me to know that they had enjoyed my talk. I'm concerned by the way many folks are using the term 'intersectionality' as a fancy synonym for diversity. I'm wondering if you have published anything on this that I might share with my colleagues?

With a sincere thank-you, I responded: I don't (yet) have any publications from my research, but I'm happy to let you know when I do.

Since my presentation back in September, I’ve been reflecting on Black feminist defensiveness. For Jennifer Nash, defensiveness has come to define the affective relationship of Black feminism to intersectionality — defensiveness as a response to epistemic violences that Black women are routinely subjected to in the academy; defensiveness as an impulse to protect the integrity of Black women’s intellectual labours. Defensiveness as the policing of intersectionality, the desire to ensure it is used faithfully, correctly.

I am not Black, however you wish to define Blackness, but I sure do see myself reflected in her assessment. For example, I’m writing this to you on International Women’s Day, seething at the many ways in which I am feeling let down by race-blind, trans-exclusionary, binary-gender events, activities and social media posts, from organisations that a) have previously exploited me, and b) purport to champion intersectionality. I’m writing this in a desperate attempt to make sense of and move past my bloating sense of hostility, bitterness, hurt at their audacity — their hypocrisy! I’m writing this because I want it on the record (and, for various reasons, cannot document my critiques anywhere else): just because they say intersectionality doesn’t mean they do intersectionality.

Black feminist defensiveness, though, is harmful. Nash borrows from Sianne Ngai in positioning defensiveness as “ugly feelings”; ugly, in part, because they are ultimately non-productive. They are generally justified feelings, and often carthatic, but in the end, they achieve little. They leave us at an impasse.

A few weeks ago, as part of my data analysis, I found myself caught off-guard by one particular sentence in a government document: a brief admission that it would use intersectionality — a far more complex, richer idea than a government document can grapple with — rather simplistically. It was a caveat that I had never seen in documents of this kind before; it seemed to be evidence of more careful engagement with intersectionality literature. I realised, then, that I was in fact not pleased to see this improvement. I wanted the document to be a poor representation of intersectionality; I wanted to be able to tear it apart.

I have become so accustomed to taking a defensive stance, to being the critical eye, that my analytical eye as a scholar has been dulled. I am too used to being angry, I can’t seem to feel intersectionality in any other way; thus, I am now only able to see intersectionality, engage with it, write about it, when it is being misused and abused. 

At a later session at the conference, after my own presentation: a speaker confessed, with a chuckle, that she was feeling self-conscious about using the word intersectionality, with me in the room. As a baby academic, a newly-minted PhD candidate, I felt a little rush of affirmation: I appreciated that I had managed to provoke greater attentiveness towards the contours of intersectionality as a constellation of ideas, and the Black feminist ideals that have driven its conceptual development. And yet, I also felt a bit unsettled: prompting others to walk on eggshells around me just didn’t seem like the impact I wanted to have.

I don’t yet have any publications from my research, because — apart from the fact that I have barely started, really (!) — I am trying to reconfigure my emotional attachments to intersectionality before I put my thoughts out into the world. I am giving myself an opportunity to learn how to be a feminist scholar-activist-practitioner motivated by love as much as anger. I am pushing myself to, in Nash’s words, let go; to surrender intersectionality, so that it can grow, and be re-imagined, and prompt more radical visions of the future.