Trans-Scripts 2 (2012)

Reading Intersectionality


Roderick A. Ferguson
*

No one can really say when the theory emerged. Some say the legal scholar
Kimberl Crenshaw created it. Others locate it even further back, with the
Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977. Most agree that the category
was a way to address the simultaneity of modes of difference. Whether
located within the late seventies or the late eighties, the term has become a
signature feature of the critical vocabularies of queer studies and academic
feminism. It has been used by folks in a variety of fieldsgender studies,
queer studies, ethnic studies, American studies, sociology, literature, history,
and so on. In this essay, I am interested in what Ive come to think of as a
dominant affirmation of and a dominant objection to the category. In its
dominant affirmation, intersectionality is engaged as an assemblage of social
relations that can be observed as empirical truths. Hence, the affirmation
designates intersectionality as the occasion for a positivism that will grant us
authentic and true knowledge. The dominant objection, though, characterizes
the category as one that preserves ideologies of discreteness, identity politics
and so forth. Despite their antinomy to one another, the dominant
affirmation and the dominant objection share an affinity: they both are
invested in a belief that intersectionality as a signifier is destined toward a
meaning of discreteness, truth, and legibility. And as well see, while they
disagree about the truth-telling abilities of the category, they both desire a
will to truth. Hence, this article investigates how the presumption that
intersectionality is ordained for certain ideologies and discourses emanates
from a notion in which the relationship between the vehicle for meaning (i.e.
the signifier) and meaning itself (i.e. the signified) are predetermined. Such an
understanding of languageas it is applied to the category intersections
and the work that takes it upends up disciplining the meaning of
intersectional scholarship, threateningon the one handto produce a
policing consensus that potentially assigns past work to the dustbin of history
to address minority social formations and and threateningon the other

* Roderick Ferguson is Professor of American Studies, Gender, Women, and

Sexuality Studies, and African American and African Studies at the University of
Minnesota. His works include The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption:
Modernity, Race, Sexuality, and the Cold War (1999), Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer
of Color Critique (2004), Administering Sexuality, Or the Will to Institutionality in
Radical History Review (2008), and The Lateral Moves of African American Studies
in a Period of Migration in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of
Comparative Racialization (2011). He is also the author of The Reorder of Things: The
University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, due out from the University of
Minnesota Press in October 2012.
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modes of difference as fixed and stable entities that are in the service of
empiricist and positivist analytics.
As I hope will be clear, these dominant objections and affirmations
presume a theory of language that deserves some thought and meditation
precisely because this theory of languagewith its presumptions about
meaningassumes and engenders relations of power.
1
Meditating over the
linguistic foundations of these objections and affirmations will necessarily
require us to go over lessons that many of us have perhaps forgotten.
Turning to the linguistic foundations of those affirmations and objections
might also inspire a new agenda around the nature of language and its
possibilities for critical and intellectual incitement. Here we have an
opportunity to create a mode of intelligibility based on the complexity of
formations regarded as minor, flawed, or lacking rather than building our
intelligibility on the usual foundation, one that can only announce and reveal
its erudition through the erection of an other and a will to truth.

The Dominant Affirmation and the Dominant Objection

To begin with, the dominant affirmation of intersectionality posits the
category as the means to a positive and authentic knowledge about the lives
and experiences of women- and queers of color. In this vein, intersectionality
becomes a tool in the arsenal of positivism. Tracing the use of positivism
to the work of the early French sociologist Henri de Saint-Simon, Herbert
Marcuse defines positivism as partly encompassing the orientation of
cognitive thought to the physical sciences as a model of certainty and
exactness and the belief that progress in knowledge depends on this
orientation (Marcuse, p. 172.) This type of affirmation attempts to assimilate
intersectionality into models of certainty and exactness. In this way, the
category works to facilitate the ideological presumptions of social scientific
methodologies, particularly their claim to get at the truth of (an unmediated)
reality.

and sexuality can be found in w

The dominant critique of intersectionality falls along two axes, one axis
charging the category with committing to an idealist outlook, the other axis
indicting it as an ideology of discreteness. By an idealist outlook I am
referring to the notion that the essence of intersections of race, class, gender,
omen of color, queers of color or particular

1
In this way, my inquiry attempts to frustrate the dichotomy that Foucault posits
between relations of meaning and relations of power in the interview Truth and
Power. He states, Here I believe ones point of reference should not be to the
great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history
which bears and determines us has the form of war rather than that of language:
relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no meaning, though this
is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary it is susceptible of
analysisdown to the smallest detailbut this in accordance with the intelligibility
of struggles, of strategies, and tactics (Foucault, 1980, p. 114).
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groups thereof. This idealism oftentimes leads to the charge that
intersectionality is thus really an alias for an identity and an identity politics.
And as an alibi for discrete ideologies, the objection accuses the category of,
ironically, advancing notions of social forces as separable and distinct.

There areto be surearticulations of intersectionality that exemplify
an empiricist/idealist outlook and presume discrete ideologies. But what is
most curious about the dominant critique is that it often presumes that this is
the only destination for work that takes up the category intersectionality.
Like the dominant affirmation, the domination objectiontherefore
argues that the destination for intersectionality is predetermined. In such
presumptions, the problem with and the promise of the category cease to be
matters of its articulation and deployment and instead become matters of its
ontology, thus making a claim about the categorys theoretical life and
chances. At the heart of the dominant affirmation and the dominant
objection is not simply a theoretical disagreement. There is also here a claim
about language and its presumably fixed nature.

Discreteness as the Problem of Language

Both the affirmation and the objection believe in the possible naturalization
of the sign, a naturalization that eventuates in truth. Intersectionality, in this
regard, is naturalized as the sign of discreteness. This discreteness serves the
dominant affirmation by reading intersectionality as embodied in a stable and
discrete object that is ready for measurement and data extraction. The
dominant objection, on the other hand, sees the presumed discreteness as a
reason to dismiss the category in an effort to identify a category or theory
that will achieve exactness and certitude.

The analysis of discourses of discreteness, exactness, and certitude has
been one of the defining preoccupations of the modern study of language.
That study, as inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure, announced itself by
making powerful interventions against the notion that language was fixed and
wedded to essential and prior meanings. As Saussure said famously,
language is a system of arbitrary signs (Saussure, p. 73). In their
introduction to the Course in General Linguistics, Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy
elaborate on this point. In a reference to Saussures drawings of the sign, they
write, The little drawings representing the sign as a bubble divided into two
halves, signified on top, signifier on the bottom, suggest that the sign is a
whole that can be analytically divided into parts (as if sign = signifier +
signified) and that these parts fit together like two halves of a split egg.
Symmetrical to each other, these halves seem as inseparable as the front and
back sides of a single sheet of paper. But this would be to naturalize the
sign, to make it into a thing, to offer it a position in reality that would confer
on it an essence (Meisel, p. xxx). Further emphasizing that arbitrariness,
they wrote, Language is primarily a relation between two sets of things that
have nothing in common in essence between them (Ibid, p. 27). The
modern study of language begins with the critique of language as containing

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an essential nature in an attempt to reveal the contingent, non-essential, and
arbitrary nature of language.

Saussures observations would set the foundations for later inquiries by
thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hlne Cixous, Michel de
Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancire, and Monique Wittig. Derrida, in
particular, would address the issue of discreteness as the problem of language
rather than the problem of a term. For instance, in her preface to Of
Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak points to Derridas interest in Heidegger as one
over the problem of definitions: in order for the nature of anything in
particular to be defined as an entity, the question of Being in general must
always be broached and answered in the affirmative (Spivak, p. xiv).
Whether the being in question is a social force, a mode of difference, a
historical period, language forces the speaker and the writer to engage that
being as if it were a discrete entity. This is partly what leads Spivak to
observe, In examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar
conclusions that our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us
(Ibid). The study of language since Saussure has been an effort to further
deliberate on the immutability and mutability of language. This observation
about language has real consequence for how we engage the category
intersectionality.

The Ontological Claim and the Transcendent Subject

The arguments about intersectionalitys ontological appropriateness and
inappropriateness have direct bearing on arguments about the problematic
nature of language in general. If the problem with language is reduced to the
nature of the categoryas in the case of the dominant objection to
intersectionalitythen perhaps theres a better category that will not be
bent and twisted. But as Spivak says, To make a new word is to run the risk
of forgetting the problem or believing it solved (Ibid, p. xv). As a
deliberation on language, deconstruction was in part a demonstration that
you could not circumvent the problem of discreteness or essentialism in
language through neologisms. The right word would not bring us to the
truth, would not permit us to transcend vulnerability. Again Spivak: That
the transformation of the language which contemplates the essence of Being
is subject to other demands than the exchanging of an old terminology for a
new one, seems to be clear (Ibid.).

Whereas intersectionalityfor the dominant objectionbecomes a
distraction from analytical exactness, the categoryfor the dominant
affirmationbecomes the purified [object] of scientific measurement
(Marcuse, p. 185). As the purified object of scientific measurement,
intersectionality and the methods used to assess it presume an analytical
enterprise that can knowin the most absolute waysthe facets of minority
life. In this sense, intersectionality is construed as a theory that is
ontologically suited for positivist errands that can demonstrate and facilitate
the incline of knowledge. Both the dominant objection and the dominant

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affirmation, thus, represent radical rejections of our vulnerability as the
subjects of knowledge.

As part of the poststructuralist meditation on vulnerability,
deconstruction would be a radical acceptance of our modern precariousness,
teaching us never to assume that we could extract ourselves from the
conflicts and the drama of language and encouraging usas Spivak says in a
later interviewto forge a practice that takes this into account (Spivak,
1990, p. 20). Such a practice is what deconstruction refers to as sous rature
or what Spivak translates as under erasure. Describing what it means to
hold things under erasure, she writes, This transformation should rather
involve crossing out the relevant old terms and thus liberating them,
exposing the presumptuous demand that thinking know the solutions of the
riddle and bring salvation (Spivak, 1976, p. xv). The study of language was,
thus, also the analysis of the artifices that constituted a supposedly
transcendent subject. Theorizing intersectionality might be another way to
consciously analyze that artifice.

Truth and PowerStill

Critical work on epistemological formations has also taught us that the will to
and the desire for truth is never simply a matter of getting it right. To this
end, the struggles over the category intersectionality are much more than
efforts at empirical and theoretical precision; they have become the settings
for battles over truth and power. Discussing the relationship between truth
and power, Foucault said, Truth is to be understood as a system of ordered
procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and
operation of statements (Foucault, 1980, p. 133). Both the hegemonic
affirmation and the hegemonic objection to intersectionality represent
attempts to control the production, regulation, distribution, and circulation
of intersetionality as a category and statement, managing it so that it yields
through itself or by its dismissalsome essential truth. In his theorization of
truth as a mode of power that works to distinguish what is accepted from
what is dismissed, what is accurate from what is false, Foucault argued,
There is a battle for truth, or at least around truthit being understood
once again that by truth I do not mean the ensemble of truths which are to
be discovered and accepted, but rather the ensemble of rules according to
which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power
attached to the true, it being understood also that its not a matter of a battle
on behalf of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the
economic and political role it plays (Ibid, p. 132). We can think of the
hegemonic affirmation and objection to intersectionality as different effects
of power, ones that attempt to shape an economy and politics of knowledge
around who can speak with authority about the simultaneity of race, gender,
sexuality, class and so on.

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The Writerly Potentials of Intersectionality

A critique of intersectionality that takes the category as ontologically
problematic or certain is the stage for the entrance of a transcendent subject
or subjects. As long as we read intersectionality as an immutable sign, we will
always presume that we know what the category means before we even take
the time to come to terms with its deployment within a particular text. It
becomes a way of denying the writerly potentials of the category.

In S/Z, Roland Barthes distinguished between the readerly versus the
writerly aspects of a text. He said about the writerly text, It is ourselves
writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected,
stopped, plasticized by some singular system which reduces the plurality of
entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages (Barthes, p. 5).
The readerly text is precisely the one that is reduced to a singular meaning,
the one whose goal is to produce a product rather than to facilitate a
production. If we interpret intersectionality as a readerly text that embodies a
singular meaning rather than a writerly text that has a plurality of doorways
and openings, then we can only commit ourselves to a pessimistic vision
about what it is possible to do and to thinkwith that category and possibly
others as well. By doing so, we place a ban on the kind of intellectual and
political subjectivities that might emerge from how we play with language.
Indeed, anti-racist feminist and queer work has to be an insistence on that
sense of play, a sense of play that is absolutely vital for the emergence of new
kinds of political and intellectual subjects.

One of the most exciting occurrences is the emergence of work that
addresses intersectionality as a flexible sign that captures not only practices of
signification but relations of power as well. This is work that also refuses to
engage intersectionality as naturally problematic or as part of an empiricist
and positivist errand that attempts to reveal the fact of minority life and
the truth about heterogeneity. For instance, by engaging intersectionality as
a mode of analysis that insists on the importance of race, class, gender, and
sexuality as interlocking and mutually exclusive, Grace Kyungwon Hong in
The Ruptures of American Capital Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of
Immigrant Labor theorizes women of color feminism as a reading practice that
reveals the contradictions of the racialized and gendered state (Hong, p. x).
In a similar fashion and building on the work of Kimberl Crenshaw,
Chandan Reddy in Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State
suggests that we might engage intersectionality as a critique of the material
limitations of placing women of color (and queer of color) political and
intellectual interventions in ideologies of discreteness. As he observes,
Within the juridical context, black womens acts of representation were
either elided, silenced, neutralized, or contradicted through their assimilation
into existing so-called race- and gender-specific standpoints within the law, or,
in an anxious act of supplementation, figured as a distinct standpoint within
the existing legal account of social relations, with sharply restricted meaning
(Reddy, p. 31).

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Reading intersectionality as a retheorization of materialist critiques of
culture, Jodi Melamed, in Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New
Racial Capitalism, addresses literature as a globally inflected racial project that
has proven crucial for various liberal and neoliberal formations. Discussing
women of color feminisms elaboration of intersectional analysis as a project
that targeted aesthetic and state practices, she states, for instance, the
functions and values that women-of-color feminism ascribed to literature
stood in sharp contrast to the notions of literary value that emerged out of
the canon debates and stabilized liberal multiculturalism as a regime of
official antiracism (Melamed, p. 104).

In Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, Erica R. Edwards deploys
intersectional frameworks as way to mobilize black feminist critique as an
intellectual mode that has been able to hold in tension a critique of
dominant structures and a critique of how ethnic nationalism compromises
with [those] structures... (Edwards, p. xviii). Intersectionality, in this sense,
becomes deployed as a politico-theoretical analysis of the unlikely collusions
between the dominant and the radical.

Lastly, in Fatima El-Tayebs European Others: Queering Ethnicity in
Postnational Europe, intersectionality becomes a way to imagine a coalition
politics as part of a comparative analytical agenda. She writes, In pushing
beyond binary, essentialist notions of identity, women of color feminism
initiated a shift in paradigms, lastingly shaping the search for methodological
tools that allow for fuzzy edges and intersections rather than depending on
the creation of boundaries, making possible the exploration of commonalities
while paying close attention to specific circumstances (El-Tayeb, pp. 47-48).
As such, El-Tayeb deploys intersectionality as a comparative and diasporic
reading practice for local and global processes that impact European
communities of color. For El-Tayeb, Edwards, Melamed, Reddy and Hong,
intersectionality is not maneuvered to fix the meanings or exact the truth of
women of color or queer of color bodies and experiences. Each of these
theorizations differently work the mutability of the sign of intersectionality,
maneuvering the categorys variability to account for modes of power as they
are articulated in the terrains of culture, nation, and capital.

To read intersectionality as a category that can only muster a univocal
meaning is to ignore the innovative work that countless people have done.
As a theoretical practice, the category arises out of women of color and queer
of color formations, formations that were not themselves univocal. Ifas
the modern study of language suggestslife and language are standardized
in relation to one another (Meisel and Saussy, p. xviii), presuming the
potential dynamism of that category is also a way of assuming the vitality of
the social formations that occasioned it. In other words, how we read the
intellectual production of minoritized life is a measure of how well we
appreciate the complexity of minoritized life.

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Its important to remember that within the history of the social
movements that occasioned interdisciplinary interventions within and outside
the academy that those movements, like particular theorizations of language,
disrupted the notion that certain modes of difference were immutable. In
doing so, they demonstrated the arbitrariness of articulations of gender, race,
class, and sexuality. As such, they underlined the mutability of the sign of
difference. Approaching the categories of feminist, queer, and anti-racist
analysis as mutable signs is a way of acting not only in concert with theories
of language that allow for new associations and new redistributions of what
is sensible. They are also ways of acting in concert with the epistemological
dynamism of radical movements of that moment. They too wereto
paraphrase Barthess remarks about writerly textsnovelistic without the
novel, poetry without the poem, writing without style, production without
product, structuration without structure (Barthes, p. 5).

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Works Cited
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ing, 1974. W

Edwards, Erica R. Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership.

inneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012. M

El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Post-National

Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Hong, Grace. The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color

Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. Minneapolis: University of
innesota , 2006. M

arcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1968.

Meisel, Perry and Haun Saussy. ""Introduction: Saussure and His Contexts"."
aussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics S . Trans. Wade Baskin.
ew York: Columbia, 2011. N

Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New

Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011.

Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State.
urham: Duke University, 2011. D

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Perry Meisel and
aun Saussy. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia, 2011. H

Spivak, Gayatri. ""The Post-Modern Condition: The End of Politics?"." The

Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym.
ew York: Routledge, 1990. N

Spivak, Gayatri. "Translator's Preface." Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology.

Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976.


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