“Post-Post-Intersectional” Glimpses in Decolonial Feminism
Anna Carastathis
This chapter examines Lugones’s germane and insightful attempt to theorize “intermeshed oppressions,” which, she argues, have been (mis)represented in women of color feminisms by the concepts of “interlocking systems of oppression” and, more recently, “intersectionality.” The latter, intersectionality, introduced by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw as a metaphor (1989) and as a “provisional concept” (1991), has become the predominant way of referencing the mutual constitution of what have been theorized as multiple systems of oppression, constructing the multiplicity of social identities. But Lugones’s analysis, which maintains subtle but important distinctions among the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions, shows that intersectionality theory often conflates fragmentation with multiplicity, and—by reifying “intersectional identities”—reproduces social-ontological fragmentation at the political and perceptual-cognitive levels of representation. Intersectional accounts redeploy unitary categories (e.g., race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) that are defined to the exclusion of each other by privileging the identities of normative group members. Consequently, they remain within what Lugones calls the “logic of purity,” which erases “curdled,” impure, category-transgressive, border-dwelling, mestiza subjects. Although, according to Lugones, intersectionality enables us to discern how the logic of purity produces “women of color” as impossible beings, she argues that the liminal identities of subjects dwelling in categorial interstices can be made visible only by conceptualizing oppressions as fused or “intermeshed.” However, as I interpret her, Lugones is not merely criticizing intersectionality or seeking to transcend its conceptual limitations by proposing an alternate concept. Rather, the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions do significantly different work in her account and illuminate different aspects of the social ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology of resistance to oppression.
First, I situate Lugones with respect to the current conjuncture in intersectionality studies, in which some scholars are calling for a post-intersectional turn. Then, I reconstruct Lugones’s complex account of intermeshed oppressions, interlocking oppressions, and intersectionality. Finally, I discuss the status of intersectionality in the shift in Lugones’s work from “women of color feminisms” to “decolonial feminism.” Intersectionality is now routinely invoked as a representational theory of multiple identities, but Lugones’s heterodox interpretation helps us to see that it is best understood as a critique of representations based on the logic of purity: specifically, of how categorial axes of oppression (mis)represent intermeshed oppressions. Lugones’s triadic distinction (intersecting/interlocking/intermeshed) points toward a provisional usage of intersectionality, namely, to diagnose the fragmentation of social experiences of multiplicity (which, I would argue, is more consistent with the concept’s original aims). In her visionary philosophy, which attempts to theorize resistance against the grain of fragmentation from a conceptual space outside of the “logic of purity,” we find “glimpses” of a nonfragmented account of oppression, and praxical possibilities for liberatory, decolonial feminist coalitions.
In the quarter-century since the publication of Crenshaw’s work, intersectionality has been “mainstreamed” and “institutionalized” in the interdisciplinary field of “intersectionality studies” and in international human rights and state discourses (Dhamoon 2011; Nash 2014). While intersectionality’s ascendancy has been celebrated, a recent wave of critical engagement offers reasons to regard the institutionalization of intersectionality with a dose of “analytic skepticism” (Bilge 2013; Nash 2010). Increasingly, calls to “go beyond intersectionality” question the adequacy of the metaphor to the complexities of lived experiences; critique the concept’s reliance on and reproduction of ossified identity categories; and problematize the epistemic violence inherent in the appropriation and commodification of Black feminists’ intellectual labor in the simultaneous fetishization and erasure of Black women within “intersectionality studies” (Kwan 2002; Nash 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014; Puar 2007).1
While some criticisms of intersectionality’s deployments are well taken, the post-intersectional move arguably makes a critical error: it reduces intersectionality to the predominant, positivist interpretation of the concept, evading a close reading of Crenshaw’s work. Specifically, most proponents of intersectionality and many post-intersectional critics routinely ignore that Crenshaw proposed intersectionality as a “provisional concept,” conceding, at the outset, its inherent limitations. While intersectionality admittedly engages dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories, its ultimate goal is to disrupt the cognitive habit of seeing them as mutually exclusive or even separable (Crenshaw 1991, 1244–45n9). However, as intersectionality was mainstreamed and institutionalized, it was heralded as just that methodology which, by theorizing the co-synthesis of multiple axes of oppression, overcomes unitary models that falsely separate them. Indeed, Robyn Wiegman characterizes intersectionality as “the primary figure of political completion in U.S. identity knowledge domains” (2012, 240). Celebrants of intersectionality evacuate the provisionality of the concept while extolling the “arrival” of feminism at a postracial, inclusionary telos. Critical attempts to “go beyond intersectionality” fail to grapple with its role in effecting the conceptual transition between essentialist, analytically discrete categories and a nonfragmented account.
In a recent lecture, Crenshaw expressed a “hope and an aspiration” for “a neo-intersectionality, a post-post-intersectionality, an erasure-of-the-‘post’-intersectionality,” based on a recognition of the fact that, “if anything, we are pre-intersectional” (2014). In this chapter, I attempt to read Lugones’s work in relation to the present conjuncture in intersectionality theory, showing how her deflationary approach to intersectionality that critically assesses the scope of the concept—as opposed to mobilizing the term (often anachronistically) as a “catch-all” for any integrative theory of multiple oppressions—will yield greater analytical clarity and open a broader epistemic space for the articulation and appreciation of the diversity of historical and contemporary Black feminisms, women of color feminisms, and decolonial feminisms.
It is surprising that Lugones’s layered contributions to intersectionality scholarship have not been thoroughly analyzed.2 I say that her thought is “layered” because, surveying Lugones’s oeuvre, I discern at least three levels to her efforts to conceptually and practically transcend the fragmenting effects of what she calls “the logic of purity.” First, Lugones proposes a distinction between intermeshed and interlocking oppressions, which corresponds to the ontological difference between multiplicity and fragmentation in her account. Lugones argues (particularly in her later work) that the concept of interlocking oppressions—an antecedent concept to “intersectionality” introduced (at least in print) by the Combahee River Collective in A Black Feminist Statement (1978)—disguises multiplicity and fragments oppressed groups and individuals (TSC 223–24). However, this does not mean that “interlocking oppressions” is a “bad concept”: Lugones clarifies that it is “not merely an ideological mechanism, but the training of human beings into homogeneous fragments” (224). In other words, “interlocking” does capture one aspect of the functioning of oppression—the categorial fragmentation of multiplicitous heterogeneity into discrete, homogenized social groups, which entails the simultaneous erasure, reduction, and hypostatization of difference as a threat to unity, sameness, and identity. If the interlocking of oppressions names a material process based on a logic of purity through which multiplicity is reduced to fragmentation, it also conceals the functioning of intermeshed oppressions that are concretely, simultaneously experienced by “curdled beings” but that are cognitively distorted through categorial politics that divide, select, and prioritize among them.
At the second level of her analysis, Lugones argues that “interlocking oppressions” and “intermeshed oppressions” function jointly, creating “a conceptual maze that is very difficult to navigate” (TSC 224). Intermeshed oppressions are misrepresented as interlocking, both by systems of domination and by social movements that “contest univocally along one axis of domination” (222); “everywhere we turn we find the interlocking of oppressions disabling us from perceiving and resisting oppressions as intermeshed” (224), mystifying the fact that oppressed people’s lives and struggles are interconnected.
Finally, at the third level of the analysis, Lugones offers a “theory of resistance to both the interlocking of oppressions and to intermeshed oppressions” (TSC 208). Lugones refuses to “mythify territorial enclosures and purities of peoples, languages, traditions” (220); rather, she traces dwellings in heterogeneous, subaltern, “resistant worlds of sense” and crossings back and forth from these to dominant worlds. In Lugones’s view, oppressions function materially in a dual way: on the one hand, oppressions are intermeshed—through a historical process of “persistently violent domination that marks the flesh multiply by accessing the bodies of the unfree in differential patterns devised to constitute them as the tortured materiality of power” (HGS 188). On the other hand, this multiplicity itself is suppressed or fractured through unitary if interlocking systems which fix, isolate, and determine subjects through objectifying processes. It is important to notice that interlocking oppressions constitute both a process of systemic fragmentation and antisystemic resistance; the fragmentation and dissimulation of intermeshed oppressions by analyses and activisms that rely on the concept of interlocking (or, for that matter, unitary) oppressions is part of the process through which curdled beings are relegated to margins, to intersections or interstices, to spaces of social invisibility.
If intermeshed oppressions and interlocking oppressions collaborate to fix, reduce, and injure, what is the role of intersectionality in Lugones’s theory of resistance? Interestingly, in many places, the word intersection appears to signify the “crossings between worlds of sense” (ED 197, 201; TSC 220). For instance, Lugones writes: “sometimes it is levels in the sense of meanings that erase other meanings, which, in turn, seek an intersection to find a worldly voice” (IP 3). The intersection—constituted by the logic of purity, of domination—enables the (mis)communication of meanings generated in resistant worlds of sense, but not without distortion, erasure, and reduction. In another usage that invokes the spatial terrain of Crenshaw’s intersection metaphor (1989, 149), Lugones asks us to “visualize … a map that has been drawn by power in its many guises. Your life has been spatially mapped by power. Your spot lies at the intersection of all the spatial venues where you may, must, or cannot live or move” (IP 8). Lugones is clear that at the intersection constituting one’s social location there is “no ‘you’ there” except “as thoroughly constructed by power”; accordingly, “you may not go there in resistance to domination” (9). This spatially mapped intersection cognizes and admits only the ascriptive dimensions of identity as understood through the dominant logic. In Crenshaw’s original use of the intersection metaphor, this logic was embodied in juridical frameworks that precluded the remedying of discrimination in cases where the plaintiff’s identity was not marked by the relative privileges of whiteness and masculinity. In other words, the categories deployed in antidiscrimination law reproduce rather than undermine privilege, precisely through fragmenting the “multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences” of discrimination using mutually exclusive categories which rely on whiteness and maleness to define “normative” experiences of discrimination that exclude Black women by design (Crenshaw 1989, 140, 148).
Lugones’s interpretation of the “intersection” metaphor seems to restore it to its original meaning in Crenshaw’s 1989 essay, liberating it from the positivist significations that it has subsequently acquired. Lugones rejects a positivist, identitarian deployment of intersectionality that reifies axes of identity, constructing the intersection as the site of a politics of location for multiply oppressed subjects. Black women, on this view, are purported to have “intersectional identities” made visible by an intersectional politics. However, Lugones argues that their intersection does not represent women of color; rather, given the logic of purity informing the categorial construction of axes of “race” and “gender,” the intersection functions as an index of their invisibility. She concludes, “once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the intersection,” to “perceive gender and race as intermeshed or fused” so “that we actually see women of color” (ED 193). Intersectionality is not the theoretical solution to intermeshed and interlocking oppressions (as it is generally re-presented), the arrival of an inclusive feminism, or the paradigm case of political completion; rather, in showing us what is missing, it constitutes the point of departure for a liberatory, coalitional project of decolonizing gender (HGS, TDF). Lugones reads the intersection as a space of violent reduction, of invisibility, and of desubjectification. However, this categorial invisibility is made visible through the intersection of “pure” categories; in that sense, intersectionality constitutes an important intervention.
To better understand Lugones’s intervention in intersectionality theory, we must briefly explain her ontological concepts of multiplicity, impurity, and “curdling.” Lugones articulates a critique of the logic of purity from the perspective of being (and being among and aligned with) “mestizaje, of curdled beings” (PIS 126). Rejecting a holist ontology based on a logic of purity that assumes that, fundamentally, “there is unity underlying multiplicity” (126), Lugones offers an impure logic of curdling, according to which “the social world is complex and heterogeneous and each person is multiple, nonfragmented, embodied” (127). While holism is often taken to entail a commitment to anti-reductionism, or to nonseparability, Lugones argues that “fragmentation is another guise of unity,” so that “according to the logic of purity, the social world is both unified and fragmented, homogeneous, hierarchically ordered” (127). For something to be fragmented it has to be unified, one. Think of a pane of mirrored glass shattered into broken shards, which reflects an object in front of it only partially, distorting and occluding it. By contrast, think of a prism, which is inherently multiplicitous, but which diffracts light into its different constituent colors in a nonfragmented way.3 Crucially, Lugones distinguishes between fragmentation and multiplicity as ontological conditions, and argues that while “fragmentation follows the logic of purity, multiplicity follows the logic of curdling” (PIS 126).
While “each person is multiple, nonfragmented, embodied,” multiplicity is “trained” “into fragmented unities” (128). To say that one is “fragmented” means that one’s “parts” lie in “pieces,” and that these “parts … do not fit well together,” or are “taken for wholes,” so that one becomes a “composite, composed of parts of other beings, composed of imagined parts, composed of parts produced by a splitting imagination, composed of parts produced by subordinates enacting their dominators’ fantasies” (127). The fragmentation of oppressed individuals and groups results from the “politics of marginalization,” which through the erasure of nonnormative members of social groups falsely homogenize and universalize the essentialized experiences of normative members (140). From the point of view of the logic of purity that presupposes unity as a naturalized ontological condition, multiplicity and fragmentation are often conflated; but Lugones argues that multiplicity—the existence of multiple realities—is erased through social fragmentation. This is crucial to the distinction Lugones draws between interlocking and intermeshed oppressions, and to the possibilities for collective resistance intimated by each concept. Lugones relates purity/fragmentation and impurity/multiplicity to two distinct kinds of separation, which we can understand both in ontological (descriptive) and political (normative) terms: these are split-separation (maintaining the boundaries of a pure category) and curdle-separation (coalescence in and through differentiation). The distinction between these two meanings of separation came to Lugones in a dream of “mayonnaise curdling,” which recalled a childhood memory of her gender “ambiguity,” her “standing in the middle of either/or” (IP 34). She explains that “mayonnaise is an oil-in-water emulsion,” inherently “unstable”:
When an emulsion curdles, the ingredients become separate from each other. But that is not altogether an accurate description: rather, they coalesce toward oil or toward water, most of the water becomes separate from most of the oil—it is, instead, a matter of different degrees of coalescence. The same with mayonnaise; when it separates you are left with yolky oil and oily yolk. (PIS 122)
The impure, curdle-separation that results in “different degrees of coalescence” of “yolky oil and oily yolk” differs in kind from that mode of separation that aims at splitting something into discrete, pure parts (for instance, separating the white from the yolk of an egg). Educated into categorial thinking, we are habituated into thinking of separation in the latter sense of split-separation, but Lugones offers the concept of “curdling separation,” or “mestizaje” (mixing) as a form of impure resistance to social fragmentation (122–23). Rejecting an ontology in which sameness precedes difference, and unity precedes fragmentation, Lugones argues that the impure, curdled state of multiplicity is the original state; yet multiplicity is not conceptualized in terms of “pure parts” (123). Rather, Lugones enjoins her readers to “superimpose” the “world of mestizaje, of curdled beings” onto “the conceptual world of purity” in order “to see ambiguity,” to “see that the split-separated are also and simultaneously curdled-separated” (PIS 126).
If “multiplicitous subjects are rendered anomalous by unity” (PIS 133), they are “trained” by the logic of purity into fragmented, distorted versions of themselves, “altered to fit within the logic of unification”—or, what amounts to the same thing, they are “split over and over in accordance with the relevant dichotomies of the logic of unity” (133). According to Lugones, “the interlocking of oppressions is a central feature of the process of social fragmentation,” which “requires not just shards or fragments of the social, but that each fragment be unified, fixed, atomistic, hard-edged, internally homogeneous, bounded, repellent of other equally bounded and homogeneous shards” (TSC 232n1). Intermeshed oppressions are misrepresented as interlocking—as constituted through pure categories of identity that define one in terms of race, gender, sexuality, nation, class, disability, and species—but “representation” is not merely an ideological process. Intermeshed oppressions are socially, discursively constructed—by systems of dominance and by single-axis social movements—as separable, distinct phenomena, affecting discrete groups with divergent political agendas. In other words, the interlocking of oppressions obscures the simultaneity of experiences of multiple, intermeshed oppressions, and dissimulates the necessity of contesting and resisting multiple oppressions simultaneously. The very fact that we conceptualize oppressions as interlocking presupposes the fragmentation of simultaneous experiences of “multiple oppressions.” In “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker/Estrategias Tácticas de la Callejera,” Lugones more fully develops the qualitative distinction between intermeshed and interlocking oppressions:
[O]ppressions interlock when the social mechanisms of oppression fragment the oppressed both as individuals and collectivities. Social fragmentation in its individual and collective inhabitations is the accomplishment of the interlocking of oppressions. Interlocking is conceptually possible only if oppressions are understood as separable, as discrete, pure. Intermeshed oppressions cannot be cogently understood as fragmenting subjects either as individuals or as collectivities. Thus, the interlocking of oppressions is a mechanism of control, reduction, immobilization, disconnection that goes beyond intermeshed oppressions. It is not merely an ideological mechanism, but the categorial training of human beings into homogeneous fragments is grounded in a categorial mind frame. Interlocking is possible only if the inseparability of oppressions is disguised. The politics of disguising intermeshed oppressions through interlocking discrete fragments of subjected subjects, are disabling. (TSC 223–24)
Lugones’s point is not just the semantic objection to the prefix “inter-” in interlocking which, as Marilyn Frye apparently insisted to Lugones, implies “two entirely discrete things … that articulate with each other” (PIS 146n1), but whose articulation “does not alter the monadic nature of the things interlocked” (TSC 231–32n1).4 After all, Lugones concedes that intermeshed—which shares the same prefix—implies “still too much separability” (TSC 231–32n1). By offering intermeshed oppressions as a new term, Lugones is not trying to “one-up” the existing concept of “interlocking oppressions” and the theorists who invoke them. On the contrary, Lugones describes her reluctance “to give up the term because it is used by other women of color theorists who write in a liberatory vein about enmeshed oppressions” (PIS 146n1). Although in her earlier work she is searching for “better images” to render the simultaneity of multiple oppressions, as her thought progresses, I think she diagnoses different political conditions requiring different conceptualizations and resistances, to be signified by different terms. Otherwise, a sentence conveying the “recognition of the obscuring of oppressions as intermeshed by the interlocking of oppressions” would carry no semantic weight (IP 32). It is not just that “intermeshed oppressions” is a better concept for the same phenomenon that “interlocking oppressions” names; rather, “intermeshed oppressions” signifies an ontological, existential, and social condition of multiplicity that has been discursively and materially obscured through a systematic social process of material and conceptual fragmentation—that is, through the interlocking of oppressions.
In a sense, this is not a new claim; it could be interpreted as a heterodox elucidation of the Combahee River Collective’s concept of “interlocking oppressions,” the impetus for which was the contestation of social fragmentation in political movements through a radical act of curdle-separation as Black feminists. They write: “[I]t was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of Black and white men” (1978, 363). Oppressions were fragmented through their split-separation in mutually exclusive liberation movements that understood their political tasks as distinct and discrete of one another. Famously, in response to this fragmentation, the Combahee River Collective articulated as their “particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (362). The question is: Is the Collective’s claim that oppressions interlock just the same claim as the experience of the simultaneity and synthesis of oppressions?5 Does the concept of “interlocking oppressions” reveal or conceal the knowledge of “racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, such as, the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression” (365)? Could it be that in order to give this “integrated analysis” a proper name and a proper object, it was conflated with the claim that oppressions “interlock” (or, later, that they “intersect”)?
As the project of developing “multi-axial” theories of oppression has been institutionalized under the banner of “intersectionality,” the distinctions in the threefold definition of the concept that Crenshaw offers, not to mention the differences between concepts bearing the prefix “inter,” have been flattened. Crenshaw distinguishes between “structural,” “political” and “representational” intersectionality. Structural intersectionality refers to the qualitative differences in experiences produced by the structural location of women of color, “the ways in which the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively different than that of white women” (1991, 1245). Political intersectionality describes the fact that, historically, feminist and antiracist politics in the United States “have functioned in tandem to marginalize issues facing Black women” (1245). Consequently, political struggles against oppression are fragmented: “women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas” (1252). Neither agenda is constructed around the experiences, needs, or political vision of women of color; to the extent that antiracism reproduces patriarchy, and feminism reproduces racism, women of color are asked to choose between two inadequate analyses, each of which “constitutes a denial of a fundamental dimension of our subordination” (1252). Finally, representational intersectionality concerns the production of images of women of color drawing on sexist and racist narratives, as well as the ways that critiques of these representations marginalize or reproduce the objectification of women of color (1283). The most frequently invoked aspect of Crenshaw’s threefold definition of intersectionality is structural intersectionality, which is generally construed as a descriptive claim about social location at the convergence of various systemic axes of oppression and is assumed (in true positivist fashion) to have causal priority over political and representational dimensions of intersectionality. However, one implication of Lugones’s unique use of the term interlocking in contrast to intermeshed to describe oppressions is that the phenomenon that Crenshaw terms “political intersectionality”—the fact that liberation movements have functioned in tandem to exclude women of color—is not just an epiphenomenal manifestation of “structural intersectionality,” or of identities too “complex” to be represented by extant political discourses. Instead, political intersectionality constitutes part of the causal history of structural intersectionality, a location of social invisibility that we might characterize as “liminal.” In other words, although it is usually assumed that political intersectionality follows from structural intersectionality—that the multiple identities of women of color are too “complex” to be adequately represented by the available political discourses—Lugones’s distinction between fragmentation and multiplicity helps us see that anti-oppressive discourses that contest only one form of oppression fragment multiplicity at the individual and at the group level, and in the process produce “intersectional” identities.
If oppressions intermesh but are represented as interlocking, oppressed people are categorially lumped together and categorially broken from each other. Then, if the resistances are not going to follow the logic of representation—a logic tied to purity as an instrument of social control—the resisters must be ready to intervene in the categorial separations and the categorial lumping together of peoples in a struggle to connect with each other. (IP 3)
The theory of representation that underlies this claim is not a correspondence theory, in which reality exists outside representation and is variously well or badly reflected in it. Instead, Lugones’s account offers a richly materialist conception of representation that enables us to make sense of the claim that group and individual identities are historically formed through the discursive production of what are represented as discrete social groups. Thus, since interlocking oppressions both perceptually/cognitively and materially fragment social reality, identities, and experiences of intermeshed oppressions, the concept of “interlocking oppressions” both adequately describes certain material phenomena of oppression and misrepresents oppression, in its intermeshedness.
A further distinction Lugones makes between “transparent” and “thick” members of groups helps us understand and intervene in the processes of “categorial lumping and breaking” that result in social fragmentation. “Transparent” group members are those who perceive themselves as paradigmatic of the group, a perception that is generally confirmed and “becomes dominant or hegemonical in the group” (PIS 140). By contrast, “thick” group members are those who are made aware of their “otherness,” of being outsiders within a group, and who are continually relegated to the margins in intragroup politics (140). The false universalization of “transparent” members’ interests as representative of the entire group marginalizes “thick” members “through erasure.” The consequence is that “thick members of several oppressed groups become composites of the transparent members of those groups” (140). Thus, Lugones identifies an “insidious dialectic” (141) between the fragmentation of individuals and groups: persons are fragmented because society is fragmented into homogenized groups that are constructed as pure. Every group is structured through a normative affiliation to its transparent members. This structure of affiliation fragments persons who are torn in several different directions to separate groups; importantly, however, identification with curdled, thick members is foreclosed through this process of collective and individual identity formation. The exclusions of thick members based on the logic of purity “cross-fertilize” the disconnection of oppressions (141). In other words, a dialectic process of fragmentation at the individual and group level results in the material phenomenon of interlocking oppressions and disjointed resistances, precisely because groups are imagined as the homogeneous, collective personifications of the identities of their normative, “transparent” members. To the extent that monistic oppressions based on race, class, gender, disability, nation, citizenship, religion, sexuality, or species are viewed as the reflections of the experiences of “transparent” subjects, their interlocking dissimulates the intermeshed oppressions based on the “prismatic identities” (López 2014) of “thick” subjects. Lugones reaches a very important normative conclusion about the politics of representation: unless we reconceptualize groups as “embracing a non-fragmented multiplicity” the representation of ostensible “group interests” will not actually benefit most group members, since these interests reflect only “transparent” members, whose very identities “embody the marginalization of thick members and contain their fragmentation” (PIS 141).
Lugones’s explicit critique of the prevailing understanding of intersectionality is that it reproduces the “categorial separation” of categories based on the invisibility of women of color (HGS 192–93). Rather than making our experiences visible, as has been widely imputed to intersectionality, the intersection of these categories reveals the failure of representation—the absence of concepts adequate to the lived experience of simultaneous oppression(s).6 In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Lugones continues to insist on the distinction between the intersection and the intermeshing of oppressions and writes,
Intersectionality reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each other … the logic of categorial separation distorts what exists at the intersection, such as violence against women of color. … So, once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the intersection so as to avoid separability. It is only when we perceive gender and race as intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color. (HGS 192–93; emphasis added)
While this may be read simply as a critique of intersectionality, I think it is more productive to view it as a heterodox interpretation, which delimits the scope and intent of the concept to reveal the theoretical and political work that still lies ahead, an interpretation not inconsistent with Crenshaw’s own characterization of intersectionality as a provisional concept in her early work. In this respect, my reading of Lugones differs from Ann Garry’s and Kathryn Gines’s respective assessments of her analysis of intersectionality. Garry places intersectionality on a spectrum with Lugones’s concept of the colonial/modern gender system, arguing that, as conceptualizations that aim to “make women of color visible,” they each participate to different extents in the logics of purity and impurity (2012, 508–10). Garry seems to reject Lugones’s critique that intersectionality commits categorial separations that render visible the invisibility of women of color because, Garry contends, intersectionality’s intervention into categorial thinking has changed the nature of the categories in question (510). Specifically, she argues intersectionality has decisively undermined an “essentialist” understanding of categories of oppression, even if they are not quite “as impure as Lugones desires” (510). In fact, Garry disputes any necessary connection between intersectionality and the logic of purity. Since it can simultaneously be useful “within both curdled and pure logics,” paired with a family resemblance theory of categories, Garry advocates preserving intersectionality. Given Lugones’s abiding concern with fragmentation, it seems a bit odd that Garry indicts her decolonial account of intermeshed oppressions on these grounds, arguing that the thesis that the colonial/modern gender system produces multiple (as opposed to binary) racialized genders “promotes fragmentation” (513). I think that Garry’s interpretation—apparently motivated by a desire for a singular, unified (if heterogeneous) category of “women” who “share a gender” as the ground for feminist politics (516)—conflates multiplicity with fragmentation, and for the same reason, does not fully appreciate the distinction between intermeshed and interlocking oppressions.
Something similar could be said about Gines’s analysis, who concedes that “some may interpret Lugones to be taking a position against intersectionality,” but contends that “her uses of concepts like multiplicity, mestizaje, curdled, impure, and intermeshed” are “compatible with concepts like intersectionality, matrices of domination, and interlocking systems of oppression” (2012, 11). Like Garry, Gines attempts to recuperate the concept of intersectionality against criticisms that have been levied against it; but in the process, she flattens important theoretical differences between the concepts of interlocking, intersecting, and intermeshing oppressions that, particularly in her later work, Lugones is careful to differentiate and deploy with specific purpose. For Lugones, as I read her, intersectionality fails precisely at giving an account of the concrete, interstitial social location that women of color occupy, and of the intermeshed oppressions that construct this location—but this “failure” is precisely its function as a provisional concept.
The question, it seems to me, is whether intersectionality—for Lugones, but also for Crenshaw—constitutes a representational theory of identity, or whether it functions as a critique of representations using categorial axes of oppression. In “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Lugones indicates the latter, arguing that
modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogeneous, separable categories. If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories, then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence. (TDF 742)
The intersection of unitary categories fashioned through the logic of purity reveals that they render multiplicity invisible. Insofar as it preserves these categories, intersectionality anticipates and illuminates the task of conceptual transformation and “impure resistance”; but it does not entirely transcend colonial/modern cognitive limitations. Nevertheless, intersectionality reveals something important: inasmuch as we are trained into perceiving and thinking through the logic of purity, we are not habituated into seeing race and gender as “intermeshed or fused.” To the extent that multiple oppressions are understood through “pure” concepts and resisted through interventions that “contest univocally along one axis of domination” (TSC 222), social movements contribute to social fragmentation at least as much as they combat it. A “dichotomizing imagination” is “one impelled by the need to control or by the internalization of domination” (ED 196). By contrast, “impure” perception resists the effects of domination on the imagination by disrupting dichotomies (196).
Identifications, affinities, and alliances are neither natural nor inevitable, but have to be forged through coalitional, curdled, impure resistance (198). For curdled beings, thick members of fragmented groups, who are vulnerable to erasure, it is particularly important to reimagine their affiliations that are normatively directed toward transparent members, and away from other curdled subjects, both within and outside their ascribed identity groups (PIS 143). “The fragmentation of perception disempowers our resistance by making deep coalitions logically impossible,” writes Lugones (BP 160). She interprets coalition as a horizon of meaning that orients us toward possible alignments, identifications, and solidarities (IP ix). Lugones’s methodological shift from women of color feminisms to a decolonial feminism in her recent work radicalizes her insights about curdled, coalitional, impure resistance to the violences of fragmentation and multiple oppressions that she articulates throughout her oeuvre (TDF 746). Defining decolonial feminism as “the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender,” that is, “racialized, capitalist gender oppression” (747), Lugones describes it as a “movement toward coalition that impels us to know each other as selves that are thick, in relation, in alternative socialites, and grounded in tense, creative inhabitations of the colonial difference” (748).
If women of color feminisms have become nearly synonymous with an identitarian project of intersectionality, decolonial feminism unravels the historical production of racialized gendered identities. Lugones argues for a synthesis of an intersectional awareness of multiplicity that the colonial/modern logic of purity renders invisible through categorial fragmentation with a theorization of the coloniality of power (ED 188–89). Intersectionality, writes Lugones, remains useful “when showing the failures of institutions to include discrimination or oppression against women of color” (TDF 757n9). But the emphasis of a decolonial feminism shifts from explicating the logic of domination to perceiving both oppression (“the coloniality of gender”) and resistance (“the colonial difference at the fractured locus”) that women of color, indigenous women “fluent in native cultures,” and colonized women embody (758n9). In this respect, decolonial feminism advances Lugones’s abiding concern with the generative tension between oppressing ← → resisting that conditions active subjectivity, as well as her epistemological commitment to liberatory theory—for even when we “unravel … the logic of the oppressor’s gaze” and “discover its irrationality we are not on our way towards a resistant subjectivity. That requires a different logic” (BP 156). If intersectionality reveals an absence constructed in and through the logic of purity, the concept of intermeshed oppressions seeks to make visible those liminal existences violently disarticulated by the dominant logic.
One of the challenges that Lugones issues to her readers in “worlds of resistance” is that we must “get ready to intervene at the level of meaning” (IP 3). She writes that “the question of inter- and intraworld communication is central” and made difficult by domination, which “fragments the social” and undermines resistance through the enactment of “power differentials, collaborations and betrayals” in the process of “resistant sense-making” (IP 26). One of the most courageous aspects of Lugones’s thought, to my mind, is that in intervening at the level of meaning, she has “little expectation of being understood”: her creative practices of meaning-making are deliberatively “tentative,” exceed a “common language” and “common expectations,” and refuse refuge in a “comfortable womb-warm sense of safety and of having come home” (TSC 229). Uncertainty, risk, and tentativeness form part of the terrain of conceptual and social transformation, which offers no guarantees of legibility, reciprocity, or safety; for a curdled being looking for company, it can be an epistemologically lonely road.
Until fairly recently, few sustained critiques of intersectionality existed, and arguably those that were raised were unconvincing from the point(s) of view of women of color feminisms (assuming, for instance, the genericity of whiteness and other bases of privilege in the construction of gendered identity).7 The relative absence of critiques of intersectionality was, in my view, symptomatic of a superficial, if celebratory engagement. However, given the paucity of antiracist commitment within mainstream feminism, it is not clear how one ought to critique intersectionality, or whether it is timely to seek to go “beyond” it. Indeed, if intersectionality signals the need for a conceptual transition between essentialist, categorially discrete concepts that fragment oppressions, then the call to “go beyond” intersectionality is premature. For this reason, it seems to me that there is something utopian about “post-intersectionality,” and Lugones advises us not to think what we “cannot practice” (IP 5), but rather to “live differently in the present, to think and act against the grain of oppression” (5). Honing our resistant perception against our being tortured “into simple fragmented identities” opens up a space for “rearranging one’s own identity, for making the complexity of one’s own subjectivity explicit, for articulating it, for making it public” (MSR 50–52). Intermeshed oppressions, violently forged through a colonial/modern gender system, are interlocked through categorial and social fragmentation, a process that the multiply oppressed, curdled being, the “streetwalker theorist” concretely “comes to understand through a jarring vivid awareness of being broken into fragments” (TSC 231). Lived experience also discloses “that the encasing by particular oppressive systems of meaning is a process one can consciously and critically resist with uncertainty,” through a collective, decolonial coalitional praxis, or one “to which one can passively abandon oneself” (231), dwelling invisibly in a deadly intersection.
1.On this last point also see Alexander-Floyd, who does not position herself as a “post-intersectional” theorist, but diagnoses a “post-black feminist approach … on intersectionality within the social sciences … that disappears or re-marginalizes black women” and argues for a disruption of the “(neo)colonization of intersectionality by centering the voices of black women and other women of color” (2012, 9, 1, 19).
2.Two important exceptions are Garry (2012, 504–10) and Gines (2012, 11–14).
3.I borrow the terms of this example from Leonard López (2014) who uses the metaphors of the mirror and the prism to describe Lugones’s account of the fragmentation of identity into identities, and offers the notion of “prismatic identity” to capture the inherent multiplicity of the gay Chicano subject who is categorially fragmented through hate crimes law that cannot cognize the dimensions of injuries “based” on his multiplicitous identity.
4.In these two notes, Lugones paraphrases Frye’s objection to the term interlocking, presumably made in personal communication.
5.“We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously” (Combahee River Collective 1978, 365).
6.Interestingly, Lugones writes that she was alerted to the need to address the “categorial separation” reproduced by intersectionality in part by its apparent inadequacy to “arouse in those men who have themselves been targets of violent domination and exploitation any recognition of their complicity or collaboration with the violent domination of women of color” (HGS 188).
7.The false universalization of relatively privileged (“transparent”) group members’ experiences of oppression as definitive of the entire group proceeds through the construction of such experiences as “generic,” “essential,” or “unmodified,” and of subordinated (“thick”) members as “specific,” “nuanced,” “complex.” This purported genericity or “invisibility” of privilege may come into relief, but is not displaced, through the intersection of categories of oppression and privilege that, in an important sense, through their mutual exclusion already negatively construct each other.
Alexander-Floyd, Nikol G. 2012. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations 24(1): 1–25.
Bilge, Sirma. 2013. “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Intersectionality Studies.” Du Bois Review 10(2): 405–24.
Combahee River Collective. 1978. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein, 362–72. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67.
———. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–99.
Dhamoon, Rita Kaur. 2011. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.” Political Research Quarterly 64(1): 230–43.
Garry, Ann. 2012. “Who Is Included? Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender.” In Out from the Shadows: Analytic Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, edited by Sharon Crasnow and Anita Superson, 493–530. Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
Gines, Kathryn T. 2012. “The Politics of Intersectionality and the Import of Transnational and Decolonial Feminisms.” Paper presented at the workshop on “Women’s Movements and the Politics of Intersectionality: Colonial Legacies” XXII World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Madrid, July 8–12. Accessed June 2, 2014. paperroom.ipsa.org/papers/paper_21667.pdf
Kwan, Peter. 2002. “The Metaphysics of Metaphors: Symbiosis and the Quest for Meaning.” UMKC Law Review 71: 325–30.
López, Leonard P. 2014. “Chicano Mens: Hate Crime, Coloniality, and the Critique of Rights.” Master’s Thesis, California State University, Los Angeles.
Nash, Jennifer C. 2014. “Institutionalizing the Margins.” Social Text 32(1): 45–65.
———. 2011. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians 11(2): 1–24.
———. 2010. “On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor.” The Scholar and the Feminist Online 8(3).
———. 2008. “Re-thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89: 1–15.
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.