WHAT CAN FEMINIST HISTORIANS DO WITH ?

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 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 , 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 see: Vivian M. May ‘“Speaking into the void”? Intersectionality critiques and epistemic backlash’, 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 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 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 and accordingly is taken to be a wholesale rejection of earlier ‘waves’ of feminism as well as contemporary ; 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 —also contained within them alternative feminisms and their own critiques of mainstream feminism. Still teaching intersectionality via the 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 ‘ 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 analysis.7 By starting from the premise of both intersectionality’s rich potential and possible limits, I want to take seriously both intersectionality and criticisms of it, including from within women’s and feminist history and particularly from Australian women’s and feminist historians who join Aboriginal feminists such as in raising concerns about the capacity of intersectionality to adequately analyse the past and present dynamics of Australian settler colonialism.8 To do this, some basic parameters are first necessary.

The Basics: Definitions and Debates In their recently published and highly useful primer, and Sirma Bilge explain intersectionality as an analytic tool; a form of critical inquiry and praxis; as a (sometimes misunderstood) theory of identity, both personal and collective; in relation to global social protest and critical education; as globally dispersed via human rights venues, the internet and in scholarship; and as rooted in the history of social movement activism of the 1960s and 1970s—of African American women (the most oft-cited general ‘origin’ of intersectionality), but also of Chicanas and Latinas, Native American women, Asian- American women, of British women of South Asian, African and Caribbean descent who mobilized around the political identity of ‘black’, and of Native/Aboriginal/Indigenous feminists. For Collins and Bilge, legal and critical race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s agenda-setting articles of 1989 and 1991, particularly the latter, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and of Colour’, published in the prestigious Stanford Law Review, were part of the first wave of intersectionality’s institutional incorporation in the 1980s and 1990s first via new interdisciplinary programs such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, LGBTQI studies and African-American studies. Refuting the commonplace view that Crenshaw ‘coined’ the term intersectionality, Collins and Bilge instead argue that her contribution was far greater than this—Crenshaw translated already existing understandings of intersectionality from and related social movements to the academy, facilitating its growing acceptance there and its reconfiguring as a form of critical inquiry and praxis.9 More specifically, Crenshaw challenged a ‘single-axis framework’ in which ‘race and gender [are treated as] mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’ and argued instead that the ‘intersectional

7 For example, May argues that intersectionality can ‘account for multiple forms of power and inequality … in ways that account for the particular and the universal simultaneously’. May, 96. 8 Celeste Liddle, ‘Trouble at the Intersection’, Speech at Anarchist Book Fair, Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist, 20 August 2017, http://blackfeministranter.blogspot.com.au/. 9 Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), 81.

Simic, ‘What can Feminist Historians do with Intersectionality?’ experience’ of black women ‘is greater than the sum of racism and ’ and that ‘any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which black women are subordinated’.10 She also identified and distinguished between ‘structural intersectionality’, referring to ‘race, gender and class domination’ via social institutions and interventions,11 and ‘political intersectionality’ in which ‘women of colour are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas’.12 Further, Crenshaw insisted that she was not advancing a ‘new totalizing theory of identity’13—a clarification she has continued to make at regular intervals ever since, in response to ongoing criticisms that intersectionality is primarily concerned with identity formation and politics, analogous to or ultimately indistinguishable from black feminist standpoint theory. Crenshaw’s essays were focussed primarily on black and Latina women and their encounters with the law in the United States, as well as the inability of various forms of otherwise progressive legislation to adequately address their specific needs as women of colour. It was within those parameters that the first impact of her work was felt. Yet intersectionality quickly became a ‘traveling theory’, moving from ‘Black and Third World feminism to feminism as a whole, and then from feminism in the Global South to feminism in the Global North’. Or, intersectionality moved from radical theory from the margins through to mainstream absorption and dilution in which intersectionality has become a ‘catch-all’ approach with the elastic capacity to address all sorts of phenomena and arguably less radical as a result.14 In this process, regardless, or because of, the mutations of ‘traveling theory’, intersectionality has been acclaimed as the ‘most visible and enduring contribution that feminism, and in particular, black feminism has made to critical social theory in the last quarter century’.15 Since at least 2013, when feminist journal Signs devoted a special issue to it, intersectionality is also its own field, consisting of three ‘loosely defined sets of practices’:

applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions employing an intersectional lens.16

The dizzying array of applications, locations and trajectories briefly sketched above accounts for some of the confusion about what intersectionality actually is, and also resistance to it, on an even greater number of grounds. These range from the relatively benign, if nitpicky—intersectionality is an inelegant word, or a clumsy metaphor—to the dismissive—‘intersectionality’ is merely a new academic buzzword for what used to be called ‘difference’ or ‘identity politics’. More substantial critiques include serious concern about the ways in which intersectionality has been seemingly co-opted and excavated of its radical potential by neoliberal institutions and discourses, including liberal feminism. This latter critique has been central to ‘post-intersectionality’ literature, which collectively argues that it is either time to move

10 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti- Discrimination Doctrine, , and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, (1989): 140. 11 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour’, Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1994): 1246. 12 Ibid., 1252. 13 Ibid., 1244. 14 Sara Salem, ‘Intersectionality and its discontents: Intersectionality as traveling theory’, European Journal of Women’s Studies (2016): 2-3. 15 Brittney Cooper, ‘Intersectionality’ in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, The Oxford Book of Feminist Theory, Oxford Handbooks Online, August 2015, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.20, 2. 16 Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, ‘Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785.

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Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018 on from intersectionality or at least concede its perceived limitations. Other charges include that intersectionality is inattentive to power or that is too wedded to an outdated notion of the modern subject or more particularly the ‘paradigmatic black female subject’, criticisms that have in turn raised troubling questions about why it is that black women’s experiences can or cannot be ‘the foundation on which broadly applicable theoretical frames can be built’.17 To those feminist scholars who continue to work productively with intersectionality, declarations of ‘post-intersectionality’ are revealing of how feminist knowledge—in this case originating among women of colour in the United States—can be commodified, fetishised, depoliticised and ultimately discarded as a passé analytic, for instance by the corporate university in which there is no profit to be made for ‘sitting’ with the vast literature of intersectionality (or for ‘slow scholarship’ in general) and/or black women are considered ‘too particular’ or embodied to produce knowledge that can transcend identity.18 The precis I have provided thus far of intersectionality stresses its US-origins and trajectory and not surprisingly, one common reservation about intersectionality as a framework of analysis is its alleged US-centrism. As queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar has argued, ‘nation’ is the ‘least theorized of intersectional categories’. Further, the US is ‘reproduced as the dominant site of feminist inquiry’, and the ‘Euro- American bias of women’s studies and history of feminism is ironically reiterated via intersectionality, eliding the main intervention of transnational and postcolonial feminist scholars’, the destabilising of the nation-centred production of the category ‘WOC [Women of Color]’.19 For Puar, the ‘categories privileged by intersectional analysis do not necessarily traverse national and regional boundaries’ and even more problematically, ‘many of the cherished categories … are the product of modernist colonialist agendas and regimes of epistemic violence’.20 Puar’s critique has had enormous traction, adding extra substance to an already established distinction oft-made between intersectionality as a domestic, nation- based analytic (and a suspiciously hegemonic one at that) and and transnational frameworks as more widely applicable and useful. While Puar, and the general intersectionality-is-only- applicable-to-the-United-States thesis, have been persuasively challenged on a number of fronts— including on the basis that intersectional and transnational (or postcolonial) frameworks need not be opposed21—the issues identified by Puar have particular salience to the field of women’s history in which transnational frameworks have been far more enthusiastically embraced and explicitly claimed than intersectionality. Most of the criticisms and critiques canvassed so far were posed at the conference, in some form or another, and taken together affirmed the majority but hardly uniform view that feminist historians already do intersectionality. Or, at least, historians do it our way, at a remove from the internecine debates that have consumed other disciplines and fields. But also raised more than once was the question of what intersectional analysis and politics is asking of us as feminist or women’s historians. Does it mean that we are to give equal weight to race as to gender, asked one younger participant, presumably new to these questions. Yet there’s a long history of similar and related questions and debates at women’s and feminist history conferences going back decades now, in Australia and elsewhere, variously animated by local and wider concerns and politics. Indeed, as Jane Carey so vividly traces in this current issue, some of these themes are documented in back issues of Lilith, including in powerful critiques by Aboriginal and non- Anglo women as paradigmatic instances of white feminist discourse, from which feminist history has

17 Cooper, ‘Intersectionality’, 17. 18 Tiffany Lethabo King, ‘Post-Identitarian and Post-Intersectional Anxiety in the Neoliberal Corporate University’, Feminist Formations, 27, no. 3 (2015): 114-38. 19 Jasbir K. Puar, ‘“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory’, philoSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): 55. 20 Ibid., 54 21 Cooper, ‘Intersectionality’, 15; see also Barbara Tomlinson, ‘To tell the truth and not get trapped: Desire, distance, and intersectionality at the scene of argument’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 993-1017.

Simic, ‘What can Feminist Historians do with Intersectionality?’ hardly been exempt. Questions of ‘difference’ might have come to a productive head at Lilith conferences back in the 1990s—the 1992 Conference on ‘Dealing with Difference: Feminism and Ethnicity’ was a watershed, as Carey notes, and a culminated in a 1993 issue dominated by Aboriginal and ‘non-Anglo’ perspectives22—but the problematisation of race vis a vis gender at the 2016 conference suggests that they were hardly resolved, and are ongoing. Or at the least, it tells us that not all feminist and women’s historians ‘do’ intersectionality, of which one starting point is race or gender and, not either/or. In other respects, the conference was a fresh reminder of new directions in Australian feminist history, and Australian history in general, since the 1990s. Some participants did not so much reject intersectionality as a lens through which to comprehend ‘intersections in history’ as argue for alternative epistemologies, including Indigenous ones. To those who interpret intersectionality as primarily a critique of white feminism (which it is not), Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, and in particular Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (first published in 2000 and republished five times since), as well as earlier critiques from and Pat O’Shane, among others, are more directly applicable to Australia, including for their emphasis on Indigenous sovereignty.23 Such observations reflect an intensified focus on settler colonialism—as both topic of historical inquiry and analytic framework—in Australian historiography and the particular trajectory of whiteness studies in Australia. To make an obvious point that is perhaps still not made often enough, women and feminist historians arguably dominate settler colonial and Indigenous studies in this country, including Lynette Russell and Ann Curthoys, two of the keynote panellists, as well as Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, Lyndall Ryan, Angela Woollacott, Fiona Paisley, Victoria Haskins, Jane Lydon, Katherine Ellinghaus, Jane Carey, Penelope Edmonds and the much-missed Tracey Banivanua-Mar. All of these historians have brought gender to the fore of settler colonial and Indigenous studies in various ways, though as Carey and Edmonds point out with reference to settler colonial studies, the major contributions of women have thus far been marginalised or not sufficiently recognised and gender remains comparatively neglected within it.24 The important questions raised at the conference about the limits and possibilities of intersectionality in a settler colonial context are pertinent to current transnational debates about intersectionality, settler colonialism studies and decolonial/Native feminisms.25 So far, however, Australian women’s and feminist historians have not engaged in any significant way with these debates, though they are very well- positioned to do so. Perhaps then the debate within intersectionality studies that is most pertinent to Australian feminist historiography—and to which Australian feminist scholars are well positioned to make meaningful interventions—is that the ongoing one about intersectionality’s capacity to challenge rather than reproduce colonial power. As Anna Carastathis has pointed out, the segregation of intersectional from transnational feminisms in the academic context also produces a third division, Indigenous feminisms. She persuasively argues that this produces a series of false distinctions, which serve to naturalise ‘the coloniality of the United States and other white settler state formations’.26 Without insisting

22 See Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 8 (1993). 23 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the white woman: Aboriginal women and feminism (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000); Pat O’Shane, ‘Aboriginal Women and the Women’s Movement’, Refractory : A Women’s Studies Journal 12 (1976), republished in Refracting Voices: Refractory Girl: A Women’s Studies Journal, 44-45 (1993): 69-75; Jackie Huggins, ‘Black Women and Women’s Liberation’, Hecate 13, no. 11 (1987): 77-82. 24 Penelope Edmonds and Jane Carey, ‘Australian Settler Colonialism over the Long Nineteenth Century’, in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, eds. Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 372. 25 For example, Rita Dhamoon, ‘A feminist approach to decolonizing anti-racism: Rethinking transnationalism, intersectionality, and settler colonialism’, Feral Feminisms 4 (2015): 20-37. 26 Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 200. 21

Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018 on the compatibility or incompatibility of these projects, or the assimilation of Native feminist theorising into white-dominated feminist thought, Carastathis nevertheless finds some potential in intersectionality as a ‘provisional theory’ that can aid decolonising methodologies, as well as illuminate the gendered dimensions of historic and ongoing colonial power—even if hitherto, its institutional deployment has mostly been directed at defusing rather than challenging ‘the prevailing material and ideological colonial, white, supremacist, heteropatriarchal orders’.27 Recently, Jennifer C. Nash—who has for a decade now offered what she calls a ‘kind of loving critique’ of intersectionality28—identified Carastathis’s work as part of a new strand of intersectionality literature—to which Collins and Bilge also belong—that aims to ‘correct’ misunderstandings of it by using a range of historical methods, whether by deepening and expanding intersectionality’s genealogies (as Collins and Bilge do) or via close re-reading of Crenshaw’s essays which open up intersectionality’s potential rather than consign it to the past as an outdated theory.29 Crucially, the ‘historical’ or ‘revisionist’ turn in intersectional studies aims to reassert the radical roots of intersectionality; challenge and critique dismissals of it by other feminist scholars (most of them white); and to make the case for intersectionality as a ‘provisional’ or what Barbara Tomlinson calls, following Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, a ‘mid- level theory’ well-equipped to address ‘heterogeneous objects of study across many different sites and temporalities’ and ‘particularly suited to the tasks of feminist analysis’.30 With the ‘historical turn’ in intersectionality studies in mind, is it now time for the ‘intersectional turn’ within women’s and feminist history? Or has it already happened, as argued by many at the ‘Intersections in history conference’?

What Have Historians Done with Intersectionality? Whatever reservations were aired about intersectionality, conference participants were nevertheless keen to honour trailblazing feminist historians such as Gerda Lerner in the US and Sally Alexander in the UK for pioneering intersectional analyses in feminist history. With her characteristic openness and modesty, Ann Curthoys—who along with Patricia Grimshaw, has a big a claim as any to being one of the foundational ‘intersectional’ historians in this country—paid tribute to the influence of Italian feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis on the development of her own thinking about what we now call intersectionality.31 To many in the room, Curthoys’ 1991 article ‘The Three Body Problem: Feminism and Chaos Theory’—in which she drew on de Lauretis’ critique of white American feminism as unable to properly comprehend what ‘the question of race, or ethnicity, or colonialism or postcolonialism, means for feminist theory’—was their own lightbulb moment.32 Curthoys’ astutely categorised Australian history as a series of silos, with feminist history, Aboriginal history and immigration history (for example), rarely in dialogue, and urged feminist historians to be more interdisciplinary in our approaches, and not to forget class as we examined race, ethnicity and gender. A re-reading of the article reveals its ongoing salience, and also a strong argument for intersectionality—made around the same time as Crenshaw’s major essays—even if it is not explicitly referred to. One way then that feminist historians can do intersectionality is by revisiting earlier influences and work, including their own, a task recently undertaken by US historian and self-described ‘Second-Wave Socialist Feminist’ Linda Gordon.33

27 Ibid., 231-2. 28 Sylvanna M. Falcón and Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Shifting analytics and linking theories: A conversation about the “meaning- making” of intersectionality and transnational feminism’, Women’s Studies International Forum 50 (2015): 7. 29 Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Intersectionality and its discontents’, American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2017): 117-29. 30 Barbara Tomlinson, ‘Category anxiety and the invisible white woman: Managing intersectionality at the scene of argument’, Feminist Theory (2017): 2. 31 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness’, Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 115-50. 32 Ann Curthoys, ‘The Three Body Problem: Feminism and Chaos Theory’, Hecate 17, no. 1 (1991): 3. 33 Linda Gordon, ‘“Intersectionality”, and Contemporary Activism: Musings by a Second-Wave Socialist

Simic, ‘What can Feminist Historians do with Intersectionality?’

Surveying the impact of intersectionality more broadly, it is in the US where we can see clear evidence of its influence, as well as a more obviously defined role for historians of US women’s and feminist history.34 These include producing ‘pre-histories of intersectionality’, which tend to take two main forms—recovering earlier examples of intersectional feminists or activists such as Sojourner Truth and/or re-evaluating earlier feminisms on the basis of their intersectionality or lack thereof.35 At their most rudimentary, such histories can exhibit a myopic present-ism that fails to properly recognise the specific historical context in which such feminist politics emerged. The observation by Ellen Carol DuBois, herself an intersectional history trailblazer,36 in the Journal of Women’s History that it has become impossible to write about Elizabeth Cady Stanton without describing her as a racist can be interpreted as a critique of such histories,37 as can some of the commentary surrounding the 2015 feature film . However, pre-histories of intersectionality can also militate against unnecessary or reductive feminist disavowals of previous feminisms and/or challenge dominant modes of historicism, including the waves model of feminist history, which privileges the timetable of white-dominated mainstream feminist activism and agendas. Relatedly, the writing of feminist history itself has also been the subject of intersectional feminist critique, and again, the US is the most obvious arena of engagement with intersectionality given the term’s origins in black feminist theory. That critique draws attention to feminist histories that present the history of Women’s Liberation as a largely white, middle class phenomenon and thus marginalise the contributions of women of colour and working-class women, among others. Such histories reproduce the middle-class white woman as the natural subject of feminism and consign ‘other’ feminisms to auxiliary or post script rather than foundational status.38 From this angle, feminist history can be part of the problem that intersectionality emerged as a response to. There are also signs that intersectionality has encouraged historical revisionism or new emphases within feminist history, including from big name feminists: ’s 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, for example, is full of detail about her many decades of collaboration with Native American and African American feminists, and has been read by some as a retort to charges that second wave feminism in the United States was a predominantly white movement.39 In the examples just canvassed, ‘intersectionality’ becomes a historical theme or topic, a heuristic device, rather than a methodology or radical political commitment. ‘Intersectionality’ blurs into or becomes interchangeable with ‘intersectional’ or ‘black’ feminism, which, read optimistically, has reanimated and diversified histories of feminism. More problematically, such an approach runs the risk of essentialising historical narratives about black feminism in particular—i.e., as part of the back story to the emergence of intersectionality, rather than, as Nash has argued, as exhibiting a diverse history itself and as ongoing. Nash’s own work on alternative traditions within black feminism in the US—what she calls ‘love politics’—offers both another dynamic approach to second-wave historiography and a

Feminist’, Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016): 340-57. 34 Cornelia H Dayton and Lisa Levenstein, ‘The Big Tent of US Women’s and Gender History: A State of the Field’, Journal of American History 99, no. 3 (2012): 793-817. 35 For example, Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I A woman? Revisiting intersectionality’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 5, no. 3 (2004): 75-86. 36 For example, DuBois, with Vicki L. Ruiz, was one of the editors of Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in US Women’s History (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 37 Iris Berger et al., ‘Reshaping History: The Intersection of Radical and Women’s History’, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (2013): 40. 38 Becky Thompson, ‘Multiracial feminism: Recasting the chronology of second wave feminism’, Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 337-60. 39 For a review of Steinem’s memoir via an intersectional reading see Khiara M. Bridges, ‘Feminism at the Intersections’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 3 (2017): 785-7. 23

Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 24, 2018 trenchant critique of intersectionality, or at least intersectionality as it has been hitherto historicised.40 Yet, despite the problems identified by Nash and others, the field of US history - and particularly African American history and women’s history—also offers rich examples of what historians can do with intersectionality, which arguably have wider application or at the least demonstrate that in this particular context (US history) feminist theorising and politics have influenced the kinds of histories being produced. For example, Crystal Feimster—an invited speaker at the conference and an Associate Professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies at Yale—published in 2009 her ground-breaking book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Feimster historicised together the activism of well-known black anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) and her contemporary, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835-1930), a white, wealthy women’s rights activist and defender of lynching on the basis it was necessary to protect white women from the sexual violence of black men. Historians have paid far less attention to Felton than to Wells but by bringing them together, Fiemster illuminated the centrality of rape to Progressive-era discourses from civil rights to women’s rights through to white supremacy, as well as drawing out the different and similar ways black women and white women challenged, and were implicated in, the racial and of their time and place.41 Without explicitly flagging her history as ‘intersectional’, Feimster ably demonstrated the analytic capacities that have been ascribed to intersectionality by some of its key theorists and exponents. These include that it ‘entails thinking about social reality as multidimensional, lived identities as intertwined, and systems of oppression as meshed and mutually constitutive’.42 Thus, the hitherto largely neglected history of African American women who were victims of lynching—also recovered by Feimster—reveals that the practice was integral to the maintenance of both white supremacy and white . It is a history that also challenges the arguments made by some critics of intersectionality that the experiences of black women are too ‘particular’ to draw wider theories and histories from. As Feimster has argued elsewhere, the ‘call to make black women more visible and central’ to ‘understandings of racial and sexual violence’, including (but not only) from Crenshaw, happened in the United States in the context of the shifting politics of sex and race in the late twentieth century (exemplified in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings in 1991) and as a consequence ‘mainstream narratives of American history’ have been transformed.43

Conclusion As a reflective piece, this paper is necessarily one of loose ends. Largely left untouched, for instance, is the question of intersectionality as methodology, a question that has generated different answers in different disciplines as well as reviving concerns that instrumentalist approaches to intersectionality can erase or co-opt its genealogy in black feminist thought.44 Linda Gordon suggests historians ‘de-sloganise intersectionality and use it as a guide to research questions’.45 In the last issue of Lilith, conference panellists Carolyn D’Cruz, Ruth DeSousza, Samia Khutan and Crystal Mackinnon offered more radical proposals for what intersectional history might entail, including making ‘evident that which is obscured by the idea that the state is neutral and individuals are actually on a level playing field’ (D’Cruz) and ‘deep

40 Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Practicing love: Black feminism, love-politics, and post-intersectionality’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 11, no. 2 (2013): 1-24. 41 Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 42 May, ‘“Speaking into the void”? 96. 43 Crystal N. Feimster, ‘The impact of racial and sexual politics on women’s history’, The Journal of American History 99, no. 3 (2012): 825. 44 Cooper, ‘Intersectionality’, 18-23. 45 Gordon, 354.

Simic, ‘What can Feminist Historians do with Intersectionality?’ consideration of multiple categories of identity and analysis in one’s work’ rather than ‘simply writing about people who experience multiple oppressions’ (MacKinnon).46 In doing so, they collectively reiterated its real-world, political potential, including as a basis for solidarity and coalition building across marginalised groups and as a decolonising strategy. That their conversation began as a rare panel absent of white Anglo Australians at a feminist and women’s history conference that otherwise confirms the hegemonic whiteness of Australian academia is instructive. The explicitly political nature of their discussion was also an invigorating reminder that women’s and feminist history began as an explicitly political project, closely aligned with feminism in general and with women’s studies in the academy (indeed in Australia the latter was once dominated by historians). These days, it is not uncommon for some feminist historians to lament the depoliticisation of the field, marked by its increasing separation from contemporary feminist politics. Other ‘state-of-the-field’ concerns include the (re)marginalisation of women’s history in relation to ‘general’ history and the under- representation of Indigenous, black, Asian and ethnic minority women as students and teachers of women’s and feminist history.47 Where I will end is not by proposing intersectionality as a catch-all solution to these problems, but by encouraging those of us with an ongoing investment in women’s history as feminist history to at least pay attention to intersectionality and the debates that swirl around it. One of the most important of these relates to the terms and effects of the debates themselves. Barbara Tomlinson suggests that many critics ‘assume their task is to critique intersectionality, not to foster intersectionality’s ability to critique subordination’ [her italics].48 The effect of such critiques, typically coming from white feminists, argues Tomlinson, is managerial, insofar as the ‘invisible white woman’ is reinscribed as ‘the dominant subject position of feminist politics’.49 In a related spirit, Aileen Moreton- Robinson, back in 2000, challenged white feminist academics in this country to acknowledge and interrogate their own whiteness, particularly in relation to the ongoing history of white colonisation.50 It is a sign of Moreton-Robinson’s influence, as well as that of intersectional history pioneers such as Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Curthoys, that feminist historians have been at the forefront of whiteness studies in this country, as well as settler colonial history. Engaging with intersectionality (at least before dismissing it) should only complement and enrich this work, not undermine it.

46 ‘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): 22. 47 For two recent ‘state-of-the-field’ articles that canvas these issues see: Chen Yan and Karen Offen, ‘Women's History at the Cutting Edge: a joint paper in two voices’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 1 (2018): 6-28; June Purvis, ‘“A Glass Half Full”? Women’s history in the United Kingdom’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 1 (2018): 88-108. 48 Barbara Tomlinson, ‘To tell the truth and not get trapped: Desire, distance, and intersectionality at the scene of argument’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 996. 49 Barbara Tomlinson, ‘Category anxiety and the invisible white woman: Managing intersectionality at the scene of argument’, Feminist Theory (2017): 2. 50 Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the white woman. 25