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Intersectionality
INTRODUCTION
This article identifies a set of power relations within contemporary feminist academic debates on intersectionality that work to "depoliticizing intersectionality," neutralizing the critical potential of intersectionality for social justice-oriented change. The overarching motivation behind the article is to explicate how intersectionality--despite receiving unprecedented international acclamation within feminist academic circles--has been systematically depoliticized. I seek to counteract this trend by encouraging methods of debate that reconnect intersectionality with its initial vision of generating counter-hegemonic and transformative knowledge production, activism, pedagogy, and non-oppressive coalitions. I begin by providing two anecdotes to illustrate the complex workings (or absence) of intersectionality in social practice, using the Occupy movement and SlutWalk. I go on to examine the practices through which a kind of disciplinary academic feminism specifically attuned to neoliberal knowledge economy contributes to the depoliticization of intersectionality. I analyze several specific trends in this debate that work to neutralize the political potential of intersectionality, such as confining intersectionality to an academic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation, as well as "whitening intersectionality" through claims that intersectionality is "the brainchild of feminism," and that it requires a reformulated "broader genealogy of intersectionality."
Recent years have seen various movements with claims about social justice and democratization sweeping across the world, from the lndignados to the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, SlutWalk, and the transnational student movement. However inspiring they may be, these contemporary progressive politics of protest have not escaped the enduring problems of legitimacy and representation, in particular the intricacies of speaking about, for and instead of others (Alcoff 1995). Despite their best intentions and claims of inclusiveness and solidarity, many have fallen short of intersectional reflexivity and accountability, and prompted their own kinds of silencing, exclusion or misrepresentation of subordinated groups. Here I draw on the Occupy movement and Slutwalk to illustrate the need for constant reflection about intersectionality and non-oppressive coalitional politics.
The Occupy movement has been challenged for lacking decolonial awareness by Aboriginal peoples from an anticolonialist and indigenous-centered perspective (Montano 2011; Yee 2011). Critics argue that its rallying motto--"Occupy"--discursively re-enacts colonial violence and disregards the fact that, from the indigenous standpoint, those spaces and places it calls for occupation are already occupied. The Aboriginal critique...