Abstract
In Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Jennifer Nash historicizes and contextualizes both the larger discourse around intersectionality in academia as well as the black feminist response of defensiveness in the context of its perceived misuse and misinterpretation. She posits that black feminist scholars have been employing defensiveness as a tool to (re)claim intersectionality and to maintain its genealogical and epistemological origins. Attending to the precarious and often conflicting histories of black feminism and black feminists within the field of women’s studies, Nash points out that black women themselves are often considered and treated as disposable, whereas their ideas and knowledges are viewed as guideposts for perceived progress in the arena of racial equity. Therefore, she reimagines black feminist theory and practice as “expansive, welcoming to anyone with an investment in black women’s humanity, intellectual labor, and political visionary work […]” (p. 5). Based on this idea, the black feminist knowledge-production Nash envisions is less tied to bodies that are racialized as black and gendered as woman, but rather to the labor that aligns with black feminist traditions. Further, by reimagining black feminism, Nash argues, black feminists no longer have to hold onto intersectionality as black feminism’s primary contribution to the field of women’s studies. However, she notes that it is this defensiveness that keeps intersectionality from being developed productively. Thus, Nash historicizes, contextualizes, and critiques intersectionality and the politics of originalism and defensiveness throughout the book’s chapters.
In Chapter 1, Nash describes her own positioning as a critic of intersectionality to enter a larger discussion related to the stories black feminists tell about intersectionality, who may or may not use it as a theory and analytical frame, and what the analytic project can or cannot achieve. She deconstructs the various ways in which black feminist scholars engage in “practices of holding on” to protecting intersectionality from the nefarious figure of the “dangerous critic” (p. 35). This defensive stance, she notes, also protects intersectionality as a concept from nuance and development.
Chapter 2 discusses the politics of reading that drive some of the defensiveness among black feminist intersectionality theorists, particularly as they relate to the discourse that a particular kind of “care” is required to engage in respectful readings of intersectionality’s canonical texts to remain faithful to its original meanings. In this vain, Nash argues, critiques are often considered misreadings of canonical texts, and intersectionality is positioned as vulnerable and in need of rescue from misuse. However, she notes that because all readings are interpretations, this type of “originalism” and its efforts to thwart critique have worked to shift intersectionality from an analytic invested in multiply marginalized people, specifically black women, to a frame that must account for all subjects and social locations.
The third chapter highlights the ways in which women’s studies as a field has adopted intersectionality as a framework that addresses its history of racism and exclusion in a way that had previously been occupied by transnationalism and “the global.” Rather than reading the analytics alongside each other, as Nash suggests, she notes that the field of women’s studies has been positioning these frameworks as mutually exclusive interventions of women of color, which serve the purposes of different groups of marginalized subjects (black women and Southeast Asian women). Nash ascribes the popularity of each analytic during a particular time to institutional and geopolitical contexts that worked “to make particular concepts desirable in certain moments […]” (p. 91). However, reading transnationalism and intersectionality together, Nash argues, would enable women of color to build intimacies among each other and render the analytics permeable by centering their world-making potentials.
Given the ubiquity of intersectionality as a term, area of study, and analytic across numerous disciplines, including the field of social work, this book offers a concise and important argument regarding the ways in which intersectionality has become politicized within academia and affiliated with particular bodies, genealogies of knowledge, and discourses that work to “trap black feminism, hindering its visionary world-making capacities” (p. 3).
