Intersectionality

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Feminist Keywords, the podcast companion to our 2021 book, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, published with New York University Press. You don't need to have the book to listen, but if you wanna buy it or it was assigned for a class, it's available at all major online booksellers, including NYU Press at Keywords Word, which is also listed in the show notes. We created Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies as a readable source to bring important concepts and debates in feminist, queer, and trans theory, and politics to your kitchen table, classroom, discussion group, book club, or anywhere you want to engage in these conversations. We asked 77 leading thinkers to write on 70 terms, ranging from hashtag to intersectionality, reproduction to women. In Feminist Keywords, we expand on the book by interviewing our authors so you can hear them in their own voices, talk about the significance of their keyword. We hope that these interviews generate conversations, debates, and additional questions about the urgent issues that face you and your community. I'm your host, Amber Maser, Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and most recently, the author of Between Shadows and Noise Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined. And I'm a member of the Keywords Feminist Collective, which includes Kilo-Azonic Champions, Aron Azura, Amy Bong, Parmachavez, and Mishon Agonin. For this episode, my guess is Jennifer Nash, who is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Duke. Dr. Nash is the author of four books, The Black Body and Ecstasy Reading Base, Reading Pornography, Black Feminism Reimagined after intersectionality, birthing Black mothers, and the forthcoming, how we right now living with Black Feminist Theory. So welcome, Jen. How are you today? - I'm doing well. How are you, Amber? - Good. So why don't we start off by just having you tell us a little bit about yourself, your multiple selves, all of what you do, but your pronouns, what kinds of courses you teach, what sort of things you're interested in. - Yeah, sure. As you said, I teach at Duke. I usually hear pronouns. I also share the departments and my teaching is more reduced than it used to be. So this semester, I'm teaching the Graduate Feminist Theory class, and in the fall, I taught an undergraduate course on the politics of motherhood. I mostly write on Black Feminist Theory. I think a lot about politics of reproduction, think a lot about intersectionality, interested in race and the law. So that's what's been on my mind for the last decade. - Wonderful. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about this politics of motherhood course? - Yeah, so I think the class came out of writing my third book, Birthing Black Mothers. I wanted to teach an undergraduate class that was thinking about the political life of motherhood. And we've actually never offered a course in our department on motherhood. And it was super interesting because I think the students by virtue of their word motherhood in the title thought that it was going to be a course about what my mother would call home economics. 'Cause I think they thought it was gonna be a course about like how to fold diapers and how to fold onesies, right? And so I think they were quite surprised to find that it was actually a class about thinking with Adrian Rich, like how do we distinguish between motherhood as an experience and motherhood as an institution and reading a set of maternal memoirs that are trying to think about maternal ambivalence, thinking about race and maternal health, thinking about kind of popular representations of motherhood. So they all watched the Cosby Show, which was uncomplicated, affair to engage. And we talked about kind of representations of Claire Huckstable. We watched an 80 sitcoms. Like we really thought about how mothers are represented. We thought a lot about work and care. For me, it was actually like a really exciting group of students to think with and a really cool class to teach. So I'm excited to do it again. And I think one of the things the students kept saying and I think this speaks to being at like a kind of elite private institution was we don't see pregnant people. We don't see mothers. And I kept saying like well, some of that is just by virtue of being here at this institution. If you were at other institutions, you would have peers who are pregnant people or parents. But here, that's correct. And I think that really, it made them ask questions like, well, could Duke be hospitable to pregnant people? What would that look like? What would it mean for my colleagues to be parents? What would Duke need to do to facilitate that? So they get made them see their everyday life differently. - That's really, that's very cool. I feel like the natural segue there isn't just sort of like how you perform your feminism. But it feels like your teaching seems like one of those. - Yeah, that's a really complicated question, isn't it? - What I'd often try to say to my graduate students is like we're part of a cohort of people who are a professional feminist, right? We are paid to be feminists and we're paid to teach feminism. And that's an interesting moment to be in, where we're professionalized and there's a field and we're in demand in certain kinds of ways. And at the same time, we're asked constantly by our students to offer our feminist bonafides and to talk about how we perform our feminism. It's like, for me, I came across that question. I was like, that's a messy question. There are things I could say like, if I teach gender and sexuality studies classes, I organize my intimate life in certain ways. I think about motherhood and caregiving in certain kinds of ways. But I also realize, especially teaching graduate students that it's like it's a moment where I feel like I feel there's an intensity of student desires for us to perform politics in more explicit and over ways. And sometimes I find those demands challenging because I'm bivalent about what the content of feminist politics should be. I don't know what it should be. I think it's a messy and contested question. So, and I feel like we can segue into intersectionality more directly. But just thinking about like this question of what should versus the different kind of lived realities feels to me like one of the things that's at the core of your entry. So do you want to talk a little bit about, well, what intersectionality is and sort of how you approach writing this paper? I think the way that I would answer that now is that intersectionality is a set of black feminist theories and tools that helps us think about how power operates and that helps us think about how power is felt and experienced particularly by multiple marginalized subjects. And I think there is a strand of intersectionality theory that also wants to think about how systems like law that are designed seemingly to protect multiple marginalized people from harm and from discrimination actually operate to render the harms and violence that we experience invisible. But, as we know, as being a feminist in the world, right? Intersectionality travels in so many ways and has taken on so many other meanings in the US and globally. And I think has become this catch-all for so many feminist desires for a different kind of world that I think it often travels far from the kind of definition that I offered a minute ago. Do you want to give an example of some of those travels? Yeah, I'm sure I'm thinking about that phrase that we often hear or see movement signs. Like, my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit when you're just become a kind of refrain. And I think it's often taken as evidence that we need a feminism that is not so-called white feminism, that white feminism and intersectionality are opposites or maybe even that white feminism and black feminism are opposites. I think there's a sense that intersectionality is not just a mode of analysis. It's a truth. It's an ethic that we should be orienting ourselves or just the only right way to be feminist. We should have more of it and not less of it. intersectionality is not about a mode of analysis. We're a way of reading structures of domination. It's actually about orienting one's self and one's politics towards a set of beliefs, right? So I think that's been really interesting. It's interesting to see that phrase take off post 2016. I think it's actually obvious how to different kind of visibility post 2016. So that's one example that comes to mind. I will often ask students, did you know this term intersectionality before you came to the gender and sexuality studies classroom and they often say, of course, I know that term, right? Of course, I heard it in high school. I see it on bulletin boards. What does it mean? And I'll often say things like it means you have to show up for people. Or it means like you have to care about people who are marginalized. Or it means like feminism can't just be about gender. I think there's been elasticity to intersectionality that I think for some people is anxiety producing. And for others, it's just interesting. I wanted to ask a little bit about like the anxiety producing part of that. - There's a lot to say about that. Understandably and correctly, there are a number of black feminist scholars who insist upon a kind of politics of citation that roots intersectionality in black women's scholarly work. And so you have some folks who are like, it's really important that we know that intersectionality is Kimberly Crunchall's term or others who are like, no, it's Anna Julia Cooper's term. Or it's the Kompahi River Collective, they coined it. And I think what this group of scholars shares even if they might locate different scholars as the kind of origin point of intersectionality is a desire to really tether intersectionality of black women's intellectual production and to insist that when the term moves apart from citation or moves in ways to de-center black women that it's a kind of violence that needs to be made visible and remedied. I think there is a kind of tremendous anxiety about the ways that scholars from various disciplines and with various politics have laid claim to the term. I think there's also an anxiety about the way that institutions like the university have laid claim to the term and conflated it with diversity. So they'll have provost and deans talking about how intersectionality is now part of the mission of the university or at least it was before the downfall, the quick downfall of diversity equity inclusion. I think it generates a lot of anxiety for scholars feel like intersectionality was in part of particular. of logics of diversity and now gets completely conflated with diversity. I also am curious, I mean, I know one of the complicating things around like the development of the new AP history or Black history, of course I think it is, was that they had to cut intersectionality and so I'm just wondering if you have like thoughts on like that other side of anxiety around the term. Yeah. So intersectionality and critical race theory became these two buzzwords for the right which I think are about a larger suspicion about the university or maybe about the project of education more generally so that both critical race theory and intersectionality were imagined as ideological rather than intellectual and as tools that seek to indoctrinate students. So intersectionality is often described by the right as a kind of hierarchy of oppressions that fetishizes the most marginalized that tries to rank people's oppression and I think and here I'm thinking about like recent legislation in South Carolina and Florida really there's this anxiety that intersectionality is about producing guilt and bad feelings in white people and this sense on the right that education shouldn't be it you shouldn't feel bad right why should anyone be made to feel bad for their position or their privilege. And so of course so much of this is about like a deep misreading of what intersectionality is about or maybe like rendering it so elastic that it's unrecognizable to those of us who work in gender and sexuality studies but I do think it's also really interesting that in this moment it's knowledge produced by black women that has been marked as so deeply dangerous and anxiety producing for the right and as precisely what's being like literally erased from history books and curriculum. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a very damning or it feels like the politics of that are not that hard but cover. Absolutely. I think one of the things that you do that you talk about in your book on intersectionality is you recount a moment where people are debating whether or not it has utility anymore as a politics and so I'm wondering based on that if you have thoughts on its current application or possibilities given like all of these contested aspects of it. For me, one of the interesting things about intersectionality is seeing its global travels which actually makes me more excited and optimistic about its utility so I'm thinking in particular about seeing Indian feminist organize around politics of caste and gender using intersectionality as a framework for doing it and like being really careful about citational practices so like being very careful like I'm citing Crenshaw but I'm also thinking about structures of domination that Crenshaw could never have thought about or anticipated like caste. So I think it's for me been really interesting to see how the term moves globally and galvanizes really powerful social movements and activism so I think in that sense there's a tremendous amount of utility and I think in the intersectionality's call which I think is a longstanding call and feminist theory that we have to think about coalition and all of its complexities right that's like an ongoing through line and not in the kind of tradition of feminist theory. I think that's an important and still hard question for us right. I think that like Adrian Rich has that moment in notes towards a politics of location where she says who is we like even pronouns are a problem for feminist theory and I think that's an enduring question right like what do we mean when we say we how do we talk about a collective what is the collective if we all share different relationships to power how do we think about how power operates and so I think intersectionality invites us to think through those questions I think in one way I think in through those questions I don't think it's the only way I think it's one way. If you were to rewrite the entry now are there things that you would change amends yeah I mean I think I'd actually start with something that you brought up in one of the questions about the moment that we're in now and what it means that intersectionality generates feelings on the right and the left in the US and has been really marked as a kind of dangerous knowledge that I think we have to fight for right I think we actually have to as feminist scholars take a claim to these terms and traditions so I think that feels really important to me now and I think now when I teach intersectionality I'm really careful about rooting it in a kind of critical race tradition and helping students remember that in part the critical race tradition was born out of a critique of the politics of the university so while it was about the politics of law and the kind of fiction of this kind of American narrative of racial progress it was also very much a movement that came out of Harvard Law School and an ongoing debate about why Harvard couldn't find and tenure a black woman and those debates are ongoing so I think I really think it's important that students understand that so much of what we're talking about what's contested is a kind of like long-standing suspicion about education and knowledge in the US I mean I think that's one of the big political divides we see right now is like do we trust university do we think that there's something that should be invested in you hear this critique on the right that what happens in our classrooms is really just us filling students minds with propaganda right so we have to actually stake a claim to the university and insist that thinking is political and that thinking in public is political and that it matters and I mean I'm thinking about you're where we started the conversation with the class on the politics of motherhood and really thinking about like how institutions can be also more hospitable to different absolutely types of factors as well this is great thanks for these amazing questions I really appreciate it my pleasure it's always delightful to speak with you so I'm going to thank you so much for being here today Jen I would okay well I just said this but I would like to thank my guest Jennifer Nash at Duke University who is the author of the intersectionality entry I would also like to thank Professor Karen Thompson at USC for supporting this podcast series in audio engineer Allison Holly for producing this podcast this podcast is supported by the consortium for gender and sexuality race and public cultures and melon funded intersectional studies collective at the University of Southern California which brings together researchers working on gender race and sexuality in popular culture while also translating that research for the public square it is also funded and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo thank you for listening to feminist keywords the audio companion to keywords for gender and sexuality studies