Multiplicities of Power – Multiplicities of Struggle. Intersectional Movements and Feminist and Queer Grassroots Activism

Abstract

In this chapter, I propose that we have much to gain analytically and politically from taking a step beyond intersectionality as an issue of multiple identities, moving closer to broader, and more challenging, understandings of intersectionality. Rooted in the theoretical contributions of Black feminist and queer critical race understandings from the 1960s, -70s, and -80s, I highlight the multiple genealogies of intersectional struggles and illuminate the central theoretical contribution of this approach. I hope to give a sense of the complexities and tensions of intersectionality, rather than attempting to resolve them. My conceptualization of intersectionality is situated in a materialist framework, recognizing social and historical conditions that give rise to hierarchies and domination. This involves locating conditions in a broader setting that attends to both spatial and temporal dimensions. As I revisit the debates on intersectionality, I will highlight the critique raised against intersectionality’s reinvestment in the individual subject, and argue for understanding intersectionality as event, that is, emerging in fragile, hybrid and unpredictable encounters, rather than from a set of stable identity categories fixed, or frozen, in time. Within this discussion, I will attend to the historical continuities of present-day intersectional struggles for social justice and bring forth the potentials and ambivalence of the body as both a site of social control and a site of agency. I will argue that this approach offers not only a broader, but also a potentially more far-reaching challenge to relations of power in its insistence on the need for broad-based organizing across identity borders to resist the multiplicities of relations of power.