Intersectionality has become the primary analytic tool that feminist and anti-racist scholars deploy for theorizing identity oppression. This paper exposes critically interrogates assumptions underpinning intersectionality by focusing on four tensions within scholarship: lack of a defined intersectional methodology; use black women as quintessential subjects; vague definition intersectionality; empirical validity intersectionality. Ultimately, my project does not seek to undermine instead, I...

Abstract This article examines the consolidation of love into a black feminist politics during second-wave feminism. By reading love-politics as both practice self and nonidentitarian strategy for constructing political communities, I argue that feminism's suggests way doing transcends pitfalls identity politics, particularly intersectionality.

Intersectionality and Its Discontents Jennifer C. Nash (bio) Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. By Anna Carastathis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 300pages. $55.00 (cloth). (Key Concepts). Patricia Hill Collins Sirma Bilge. New York: Polity, 256pages. $69.95 $24.95 (paper). Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. Vivian May. Routledge, 2015. 286pages. $116.00 $37.56 These are anxious times for intersectionality its practitioners. For...

This article examines the growing body of commemorative feminist work on intersectionality – myriad journals and books that have marked intersectionality’s twentieth anniversary celebrated analytic’s field-defining status cross-disciplinary circulation. I argue this scholarship is by its own genre conventions, including emergence originalism, an investment in returning to ‘inaugural’ intersectional texts namely Crenshaw’s two articles (1989, 1991) assessing later fidelity those texts. The...

Abstract This article studies love as a distinct, transformative, and radical Black feminist politic. By closely sitting with the work of Alice Walker, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, this treats love-politics another political tradition that has emerged from within parameters thought, one challenges most associated thought: intersectionality.

"Writing Black Beauty" argues that contemporary black feminist theory is marked by a new form of writing—beautiful writing—that makes visible the centrality loss to theorizing female subjectivity. Drawing on work Christina Sharpe and Nicole Fleetwood, article contends commitment beautiful an attachment ethics risk disclosure practices nonlinearity, resonance, echo.

What does it mean that in a moment when black motherhood is incessantly sutured to grief, anticipated death, and mourning, Serena Williams Beyoncé Knowles proffer very different vision of maternity, one emphasizes abundance, visibility, even spirituality as maternal ethics? I argue this aesthetic—one at times takes up, refuses death the condition life—uses its explicit commitment aesthetics cloak political ethical work. This article develops conception read "masters self-fashioning" who...

Saartjie Baartman's story has become central to black feminist theory and politics, serving as the primary analytic vehicle for explaining violence that dominant visual field inflicts on female bodies. The re-telling of also provided feminists with tools grappling racialized pornography, which is thought re-enact violent exhibition by rendering women objects white male spectators' consumption. This article argues constant invocation allowed an anti-pornography formation flourish within...

"Citational Desires" treats the growing celebration of a "Black feminist politics citation" as indexing Black theory's anxiety around its institutionalizationand usage by an array scholars varied identities and with varying investments in praxis ethics. In this article, I interrogate argument that certain forms citation reveal ethical theory others index non-ethical usage. My venture here is to treat preoccupation one myriad ways invests itself intellectual property, terrain must be defended...

Abstract This article develops the idea of slow loss as a relationship to time, space, and feeling that Black feminist theory has described in distinctive ways, helping readers consider both female subjectivity stakes anew. travels with central undertheorized place theoretical archive at least part because desire emphasize theory's long-standing investment understanding describing subject position woman.

“Institutionalizing the Margins” treats intersectionality as a feminist orientation in time, an analytic that powerfully describes both what women’s studies could be and has already become, speaks about discipline’s aspirations progress. The paper traces two ways is used by scholars to speak time: movement of toward inevitable future (what I call feminism-future) location transcended past feminism-past). argues logics feminism-future feminism-past share often-invisible racialized ideologies:...

Introduction:Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens The term corporate university—and a host of other terms that have developed to describe this institutional moment, including neoliberal university academic-industrial complex—fails do justice what Kathleen Stewart (2007, 4) describes as “situation we find ourselves in.” articles special issue explore how its attendant formations, adjunctification, debt, precarity,...

Rage, we argue, has been vividly constructed in multiple academic and popular feminist forums as specifically directed at white women. White women are both the object of rage readership that must witness “eloquent rage”—and perhaps even be disciplined by it—in order to transform themselves into good political subjects. In this essay, examine Black constructions uses “intelligent rage” alongside other moments feminists’ reckoning with problematic contextualize make visible long genealogy...

Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajectory rarely invokes dominance feminism, often positions itself a critique of feminism’s imagined conception gender white, one that thought to be most emphatically announced in work scholars like MacKinnon who invest binary, women’s oppressed...

TheorizingPleasure: New Directionsin Black FeministStudies Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Article Erotic Revolutionaries: Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture. By Shayne Lee. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2010. Beyond the Lady: Sexuality African American Middle Class. Lisa B. Thompson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Unequal Desires: Race Capital Stripping Industry. Siobhan Brooks. Albany: State York Mutha Is Half a Word: Intersections Folklore, Vernacular, Myth,...

This paper traces three tensions that undergird contemporary doula practice: questions about training and professionalization, the meanings of medicalization, exceptionality birthing. In all cases, while doulas are called upon to be agents crisis mitigation, particularly in relationship black women, use togetherness mediate obstetric violence, these complicate efforts "resolve" mothers face, at times further suture maternal bodies crisis, placing as space need remediation, repair, transformation.