What Can Feminist Historians Do with Intersectionality?
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WHAT CAN FEMINIST HISTORIANS DO WITH INTERSECTIONALITY? Zora Simic University of New South Wales The 2016 Australian Women’s History Network Conference on the theme ‘Intersections’ was memorable for a number of reasons, including in providing the opportunity to honour and celebrate one of Australia (and New Zealand’s) most trailblazing women’s historians Patricia Grimshaw. In a characteristically rip- snorting closing address, she challenged any suggestion that feminist historians have been late to the party when it came to intersectionality by pointing out some of us have been doing it for ages though to call it that does not quite work either given the highly specific archival and contextual work that we do. Consider, for instance, Grimshaw’s own work on gender and colonialism in the Pacific which, she argued, reveals the limits of the race-class-gender matrix most often associated with intersectionality. In the Pacific context, ‘status’ is a salient social marker that does not shore up neatly with ‘class’ and has very particular associations with the other assumed core ‘intersections’ of gender and race.1 Many other participants made similar points and the general consensus seemed to be that intersectionality—as a theory, framework or approach, as well as politics—is already practiced by feminist historians, just not slavishly or explicitly so. Compared then to scholars in other disciplines or fields in which intersectionality has been zealously and/or crudely applied, or too strongly rejected, historians resist the totalising effects of theory via their own methodologies and abiding commitment to context. If the conference had a t- shirt, it would have read ‘Intersectionality—historians just do it’. Yet there was also a palpable resistance to intersectionality—evident in prefaces to papers, in conversations over tea and coffee, in questions and comments from the floor, and in both opening and closing plenary panels—that suggests more was at play than simply a shared view that feminist historians have being ‘doing intersectionality’ for a while now, without having to call it that. And while the general aversion, or scepticism of, theory among historians offers some explanation, it is not a wholly satisfactory one either, especially considering feminist/women’s/ gender historians are comparatively open on this front. What was most striking to me—as a feminist historian who also works in the interdisciplinary field of gender studies, in which intersectionality has been described as the ‘most influential theory’ thus far2— is how vaguely acquainted many participants seemed to be with the very concept, let alone the wider debates that rage around it. If in other fields of feminist scholarship, intersectionality is now (contentiously) discussed in the past tense as an influential paradigm,3 or in terms of ‘post- 1 For an example of Patricia Grimshaw’s earlier reflections on gender, colonialism and the Pacific, see Patricia Grimshaw ‘Gender, race and American frontiers: The Hawaiian case’, Australasian Journal of American Studies 7, no. 1 (1988): 32-9. 2 Leslie McCall, ‘The complexity of intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771. 3 For debates about intersectionality within feminist philosophy see: Vivian M. May ‘“Speaking into the void”? Intersectionality critiques and epistemic backlash’, Hypatia 29, no. 1 (2014): 94-112. 16 Simic, ‘What can Feminist Historians do with Intersectionality?’ intersectionality’, the general impression that emerged from the ‘intersections’ conference was that intersectionality had yet to arrive. In making this observation, I do not exempt myself. As a gender studies scholar and teacher, I was late to the party. I came to intersectionality via contemporary feminism first, teaching gender studies second, and as a feminist historian third. In my gender studies classrooms intersectional feminism is claimed more than any other sort and has probably revitalised and extended feminist identification more than any previous feminisms thus far. For these internet-savvy first world students—a significant chunk of them from minority backgrounds—intersectionality must be reckoned with. One way I extend what they already know about intersectionality is as a historian of feminisms. Intersectional feminism is understandably interpreted by many of my students as a critique and rejection of white liberal feminism and accordingly is taken to be a wholesale rejection of earlier ‘waves’ of feminism as well as contemporary White Feminism; the latter exemplified in the mantra ‘your/my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’.4 Yet in this disavowal there is little knowledge of recognition that those waves—putting aside for a moment, the periodisation problem of the ‘waves’ model of feminist history—also contained within them alternative feminisms and their own critiques of mainstream feminism. Still teaching intersectionality via the history of feminism is not quite the same as taking an intersectional approach in historical research or properly engaging with literature on intersectionality. This reflective article takes up the question of what women’s and feminist historians can do with intersectionality. A related enquiry is to consider feminist history’s peculiar placement in relation to intersectionality. Unlike other disciplines, feminist historians—and historians of feminism in particular— run up against the historical emergence of intersectionality. Thus from this angle, intersectionality becomes something to be accounted for and historicised, rather than applied. In exploring this question, my aim is not prescriptive—that is, I am not insisting that feminist historians should engage with intersectionality. However, given feminist and women’s history’s long-proclaimed links with contemporary feminisms it would seem to be a good idea to at least grasp the political implications, including in terms of our own field. As the closing panel at the ‘Intersections’ conference discussed, the Australian academy, including women’s history, still remains an overwhelmingly white place and intersectionality does offer a vocabulary with which to discuss and challenge this.5 Yet, while the theory has generated or inspired intersectional feminism, intersectionality is also more or other than feminist politics. If one of the dominant modes of feminist historians ‘doing’ intersectionality so far has been to give it a history, this is also not exclusively the case. As Joanna de Groot noted in a recent critical appraisal of the current state of women’s history globally, intersectionality has been taken up as an analytic tool by historians working on a wide range of societies and on concepts or comparative studies of empire and nation. She argues for the dynamism and explanatory power of intersectionality, because it allows historians to analyse different markers and relations of power without ‘retreating into descriptive empiricism’.6 However, while examples of women’s and feminist historians ‘doing’ intersectionality continue to proliferate, an ongoing disquietude about its potential for historical work continues. At least a small 4 The line ‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ is the title of a 2011 blog post by Flavia Dzodan, prompted by her anger at sign carried by a white feminist at New York City’s Slutwalk that year that read ‘Woman is the N* of the World’. See Flavia Dzodan, ‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’, Tiger Beatdown, 10 October 2011, http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/10/my-feminism-will-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/ 5 See ‘Intersectionality, Resistance, and History-Making: A Conversation between Carolyn D’Cruz, Ruth DeSouza, Samia Khutan, and Crystal McKinnon’, Facilitated by Jordana Silverstein, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 23 (2017): 15-22. 6 Joanna de Groot, ‘Women’s History in Many Places: reflections on plurality, diversity and polyversality’ Women’s History Review 27, no. 1 (2018): 109-19. 17 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018 part of this resistance is about the terms by which intersectionality is understood. Variously defined as an approach, an analytical lens, a framework and a method/ology (to cherry pick from the obvious) that is useful for comprehending individual lives, groups and/or societies in relation to multiple axes of social division (to put it crudely), intersectionality’s capaciousness makes an abiding definition impossible—and compounds the challenge of exploring its utility for feminist history. At the ‘Intersections’ conference, an implicit working definition seemed to be that intersectionality is an updated version of, or word for, analysis that brings together ‘sex/gender, race and class’—and following from this, even if we update according to new twenty first century categories and preoccupations, historians already do this, and ideally we do it as Joan Scott recommended, that is, by historicising categories rather than uncritically reproducing them. So, put that way—yes, feminist historians already do intersectionality (or some of them anyway). But as its many interlocutors tell us, intersectionality encompasses more than, or is not simply reducible to, historical analysis of interlocking categories of oppression and social division. Indeed, its most persuasive current defenders emphasise that intersectionality has the capacity to analyse both structural power and its impact on individual lives or particular groups, a task conducive to historical