Fourth Biennial EAAS Women’s Network Symposium Feminisms in American Studies in/and Crisis: Where Do We Go from Here? April 28 and 29, 2021 BOOK OF ABSTRACTS EAAS Women’s Network
[email protected] http://women.eaas.eu IN COLLABORATION WITH 2 INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM AND LITERATURE: THINKING THROUGH “UGLY FEELINGS”? Gabrielle Adjerad In light of what has been institutionalized in the nineties as “intersectionality” (Crenshaw, 1989), but emanated from a long tradition of feminism fostered by women of color (Hill-Collins, Bilge, 2016), feminist theory has increasingly shed light on the plurality of women’s experiences, the inseparable, overlapping and simultaneous differences constituting their identities, and the materiality of the various dominations engendered. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this paradigm seems compelling to address fictional diasporic narratives addressing the diverse discriminations encountered by migrant women and their descendants in the United States. However, adopting an intersectional feminist approach of literature, for research or in the classroom, raises methodological issues that this paper contends with. Some thinkers have considered the double pitfall of considering, on the one hand, the text as a mimetic document of plural lives and, on the other, of essentializing a symbolical “écriture feminine” (Felski, 1989). Some have highlighted the necessary critical movement between the archetypal dimension of gender and the social and historical individuals diversely affected by this ideology (De Lauretis, 1987). Yet, beyond this tension between an attention paid to abstraction on the one hand and experience on the other, we can consider that hegemony is made of different ideologies that may contradict one another (Balibar, Wallerstein, 1991).