Abstract
Since 2017 when the Me Too Movement started to be foregrounded in public consciousness, feminism has increasingly gained hypervisibility. While situated within a long tradition of the struggle for women’s rights, the proliferation of discourses on feminism at present forms a decisive moment. All the same, the Me Too Movement has been critiqued. The so-called whitening of the campaign highlights the heterogeneity of women’s experience and the power relations within feminism along other categories of identity, specifically race and class. This chapter explores these tensions and the question of analytic priority in identity politics through an engagement with intersectionality, a paradigm that analyzes the complex and diverse vectors that constitute identity and social relations. It inquires into the theoretical assumptions and main arguments of this emergent paradigm toward harnessing it as a resource in addressing the limitations of and charting possible trajectories for feminist theory and practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Milano , “If all the women.”
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
BBC News, “Harvey Weinstein timeline.”
- 4.
Vagianos , “The ‘Me Too’ Campaign”; Burke, “It made my heart swell.”
- 5.
Vagianos, “The ‘Me Too’ Campaign”; Milano, “I was just made aware.”
- 6.
Vagianos, “Tarana Burke Tells Black Women.”
- 7.
Kindig , “Introduction,” Loc. 97–99.
- 8.
Quoted in Sanghani , “The uncomfortable truth.”
- 9.
Adams , Women and the Vote, 10.
- 10.
Crenshaw , “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 153.
- 11.
Boissoneault , “The Original Women’s March on Washington.”
- 12.
Sanghani, “The uncomfortable truth.”
- 13.
Adams, Women and the Vote, 244.
- 14.
Hancock , Intersectionality, 71.
- 15.
See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”
- 16.
Ibid., 140.
- 17.
May , Pursuing Intersectionality, ix.
- 18.
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 150.
- 19.
Ibid., 148–9.
- 20.
Ibid., 149.
- 21.
Ibid., 154.
- 22.
Said , Orientalism.
- 23.
Mohanty , “Under Western Eyes,” 333.
- 24.
Ibid., 333.
- 25.
Ibid., 334.
- 26.
Ibid., 335.
- 27.
Ibid., 337.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Hancock, Intersectionality, 73.
- 30.
AlJazeera, “Who got the right to vote when?.”
- 31.
See Hancock, Intersectionality, chapter 3. She discusses the work of Maria Miller Stewart whose public lectures predated Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech. Stewart fought for stronger presence for black women, particularly in Boston’s political scene.
- 32.
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 104.
- 33.
Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 344.
- 34.
Ibid., 348.
- 35.
Hancock, Intersectionality, 79.
- 36.
Ibid., 78.
- 37.
Rita Dhamoon argues that the common framework of the fight for visibility in intersectionality studies in Canada marginalizes deaf people, positing hearing as normative. See Hancock, Intersectionality, 78–79.
- 38.
Hancock, Intersectionality, 95.
- 39.
Quoted in Hancock, Intersectionality, 96.
- 40.
Lorde , “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.”
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Bhattacharya , “Socializing Security, Unionizing Work,” Loc. 1099–1103.
- 43.
Ibid., Loc. 1123.
- 44.
Quoted in Bhattacharya, “Socializing Security, Unionizing Work,” Loc. 1130.
- 45.
Ibid., Loc. 1133–1134, 1151–1152.
- 46.
Ibid., Loc. 1174–1176.
- 47.
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 151.
- 48.
See Burris , “Reification: A Marxist Perspective.”
- 49.
Quoted in Hancock, Intersectionality, 115.
- 50.
Hancock, Intersectionality, 110.
- 51.
Ibid., 110–111.
- 52.
Lorde, “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.”
- 53.
Burke , “Tarana Burke Says,” Loc. 160–61.
- 54.
Ibid., Loc. 163–65.
- 55.
Chan , “Our Pain Is Never Prioritized.”
- 56.
See Deleuze and Guattari , “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.”
- 57.
Burke, “Tarana Burke Says,” Loc. 169.
- 58.
See Ricoeur , Freud and Philosophy.
- 59.
See Butler, Gender Trouble.
- 60.
See Barthes , “The Death of the Author.”
- 61.
Elliott and Attridge , “Introduction,” 3.
- 62.
See Anderson , The Way We Argue Now.
- 63.
See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure.
- 64.
Zima , Subjectivity and Identity, 1.
- 65.
Ibid., 5.
- 66.
For a succinct discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically the Symbolic Order, see Thomas , Ten Lessons in Theory.
- 67.
Zima, Subjectivity and Identity, 6–7.
- 68.
For a comprehensive discussion on cosmopolitanism, see Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, 69–92.
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Talaue-Arogo, A. (2020). #MeToo, but First: The Question of Analytic Priority in Identity Politics. In: Bardazzi, A., Bazzoni, A. (eds) Gender and Authority across Disciplines, Space and Time. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45160-8_5
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