Olivia Hendricks
Professor Sparks
WGSS Proseminar
27 October 2014
Article Extension: “From intersectionality to interference: Feminist onto-epistemological reflections on the politics of representation”
A broad overview of the debates on intersectionality within feminist and queer studies is in itself an ambitious project, even more if that overview builds to a proposed alternative to intersectionality. Ending in the idea of “interference” as its proposed resolution, the 2013 article “From intersectionality to interference: Feminist onto-epistemological reflections on the politics of representation” by EvelienGeerts and Iris van der Tuin of Utrecht University takes on both of these projects. This article was selected as an extension of JasbirPuar’s “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” as it devotes a bit of space to placing her arguments within a broader context of the intersectionality debates and similarly seeks to more thoroughly explore alternatives to traditional notions of intersectionality, though through different means and to a different end.
The bulk of the article consists of a genealogy of intersectionality that puts into dialogue and political context the past ideas of thinkers on the topic. Though an academic term only thirty-something years in the making, it is not surprising that the authors chose to devote a genealogy to intersectionality’s history since, as Puar notes, intersectionality is often considered one of the (if not the) primary intellectual products of women’s studies. It has been debated rather hotly in part because of its importance to addressing historical issues of racial exclusion in feminist thought, but also because of its engagements with other difficult questions such as categorization, materiality, conceptions of power, and subjectivity. Most recently, scholars such as Puar in her 2012 article have been rethinking ways in which intersectionality can be approached in a “convivial” sense to be viewed as less at odds with other notions of subject and identity construction (p. 51). Published just one year after Puar, and citing her 2012 work, Geerts and van der Tuin may be following suit in trying to build off of intersectionality to advocate for new metaphors (Puar’s is “becoming-intersectionality”; Geerts and van der Tuin’s is “interference”.)
Geerts and van der Tuin begin by rooting intersectionality’s start in the context of black feminist thought and proceed to highlight the complications of intersectionality through subsequent tensions between feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist post-modernism. They emphasize the links between feminist standpoint theory and intersectionality as reasons why the idea was able to survive changing theoretical trends in the field. Related issues of categorization and language are raised, focusing especially on their implications for marginalizing or universalizing experiences primarily of black women, which are then expounded upon through a discussion of Butler’s social constructivism. The authors argue that through all of this development and critique of intersectionality, one primary ongoing problem is that of representationalism, in the simplest sense articulated as a privileging of thought over being. Voicing support for an “onto-epistemological” understanding of subjects, the authors review Foucauldian notions of power’s productiveness, the possibility for agency, and the embodied, materiality of subjects (engaging Puar briefly here) as part of their development of an argument for interference, which they cite primarily as inspired by Karen Barad.
Perhaps one of the places in which the authors’ elaboration on Barad’sinterference is clearest is when they demonstrate how it differs from the past conceptions of intersectionality they had previously outlined. They explain: “By allowing for relations to be made and made differently, we no longer assume that a social catefory or a set of social categories has a decisive and uniform effect…nor do we continue to believe in the Butlerian queering of the norm”, instead, they affirm that “Structures are exclusionary (i.e., they are constraining) and enabling (i.e., they allow for surprises.) They are nothing but phenomenal interference patterns that are always on the move”, where here we can imagine the ways in which waves of light or sound overlap into each other, as the authors describe earlier in the article (p. 176).
While the notion of interference is interesting, a great deal of the article’s worth also lies in its succinct contextualization of the arguments of thinkers on intersectionality, including Crenshaw, Collins, Butler, Barad, Appiah and many others incorporated into the genealogy. This contextualization somewhat oddly was perhaps most impactful in its discussion of Crenshaw and her original political reasons for advocating for intersectionality—to address the flattening of black women in discrimination cases to simply women or simply black. In their discussion on page 173, the authors make clear the political necessity of what Crenshaw began. This being said, there are clear parallels between the origins of women’s studies and the origins of intersectionality. Both began with specific political intents and within specific political moments, and both expanded to a point of possible institutionalized unwieldiness and overgeneralization.
This is one sense in which the authors’ support for interference seems like less than a complete answer to the challenges they outline regarding intersectionality. The authors acknowledge that intersectionality has a certain “versatility” that has allowed it to withstand a number of transitions in feminist thinking (p. 174). Another way of understanding this versatility, however, is that feminist theory may be over-invested in the concept, revisiting again Puar’s citation of McCall on the importance of intersectionality as one of women’s studies primary intellectual productions. As Wendy Brown notes in her article “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies”, the field as it currently exists depends on the category of women in order to have a subject of study. Part of the trouble of intersectionality, and similarly interference, is that they both still rely on certain generalizations around notions of class, race, and of course, gender. Thus, women’s studies has two reasons to be overly invested in intersectionality and similar theories of subject construction—first, because these theories “prove” that the field has produced a widely-known concept and is thus valid (a concern for a newer field that is often on the defensive), and second, because that concept, similar to the field itself, is oriented around broad identity constructs, even if those are being broken down and modified.
In this sense, Puar’s approach to intersectionality is somewhat more intriguing because it is more inviting of Assemblage Theory, and of intersectionality “losing” some of itself to ideas that come from outside institutionalized feminist thought (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari.) The more women’s studies and intersectionality are willing to continue losing themselves in this fashion, the more successful they may be in addressing the concerns that have been raised around intersectionality. For example, psychology, which focuses more on individuals’ engagements with broader social constructs may offer some rich metaphors for thinking about the ways in which individuals are constituted at many, many different layers of socialization and subjecthood (e.g. Bronfenbrenner’s concentric circles ecological model.) Psychology’s overlapping waves model of learning would also explain that individuals may choose to engage different models of understanding themselves within broader identities to suit different individual needs in different moments (e.g. sometimes they may think intersectionally for certain purposes, other times in terms of interference, other times something else entirely, as a matter of need and function.) Perhaps prescribing an overarching, constant metaphor for how identities relate to individuals is in the interest of the field as it is currently formulated. However, it may be worth thinking about creating more space in the field for other disciplines and conceptions of the questions that are important to us.
Works Cited
Brown, Wendy. “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies.”Women’s Studies on the Edge.Ed. Joan Wallach Scott. Durham: Duke University Press. 2008.
Geerts, Evelien and Iris van der Tuin. “From intersectionality to interference:Feminist onto-epistemological reflections on the politics of representation.” Women’s Studies International Forum 41 (2013): 171-178.
Puar, Jasbir K. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” philoSOPHIA. 2.1 (2012): 49-66.