Anna Carastathis

Challenging the triumphal narrative of ‘political completion’ that surrounds intersectionality--as ‘the’ way to theorize the relationship among systems of oppression--and which helps to cement the impression of mainstream feminism’s arrival at a postracial moment, I argue we should instead approach intersectionality as a ‘provisional concept’ which disorients entrenched essentialist cognitive habits. Rather than assume that ‘intersectionality’ has a stable, positive definition, I suggest intersectionality anticipates rather than delivers the normative or theoretical goals often imputed to it.

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the review: "Fortunes of Feminism" is a collection of essays authored by Nancy Fraser between 1985 and 2010 and prefaced by a narrative about the rise, decline, and potential resurgence of “second-wave socialist feminism.” Divided into three corresponding parts (“Feminism Insurgent,” “Feminism Tamed,” and “Feminism Resurgent?”) it contains some of Fraser’s best known essays, which, although admittedly “not written with [the] aim” of tracing historical shifts in recent feminist movements, have nevertheless been “organized” into a volume which claims to do just that...

In this chapter, I explore the role of violence in colonial rule and its role in decolonization struggle by posing the question, “what is alive in Fanon’s thought?” What can Fanon tell us about white settler state power and Fourth World decolonization struggles? I explore the relevance of Fanon’s account to the ongoing colonial situation on the northern part of Anówara Kawennote (Turtle Island), occupied by Canada. In this analysis, I am informed by Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) political philosopher Taiaiake Alfred. I juxtapose Alfred’s theory of “nonviolent militancy” with Fanon’s concept of “violence in action.” I perform a reading of Fanon and Alfred to glean an understanding of the phenomenality of colonial state power.

In feminist theory, intersectionality has become the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege. The aim of this essay is to clarify the origins of intersectionality as a metaphor, and its theorization as a provisional concept in Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s work, followed by its uptake and mainstreaming as a paradigm by feminist theorists in a period marked by its widespread and rather unquestioned--if, at times, superficial and inattentive--usage. I adduce four analytic benefits of intersectionality as a research paradigm: simultaneity, complexity, irreducibility and inclusivity. Then, I gesture at, and respond to some critiques of intersectionality advanced in the last few years, during which the concept has increasingly come under scrutiny.

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the review: "For those familiar with McWhorter’s work, the publication of "Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America" was long awaited. I had en-countered an early form of the argument McWhorter rehearses in thisbook in an article she published in 2004 in "Hypatia." At that time, it was one of very few published critical engagements with the intersectional model of oppression. It had come to seem to me that, as the model became “mainstreamed”—that is, appropriated from Black feminists, who had introduced and elaborated the concept—the representational purposes to which intersectionality was now harnessed had changed. McWhorter pondered whether the increasingly vague gesture to intersectionality in feminist circles had become little more than “just a strategy to avoid charges of racism or classism.” (McWhorter, 2004, 38–39) What I found impressive about that article was its iconoclasm. McWhorter’sproject was to go beyond postulating that racial and sexual oppressions intersect—a claim rarely theorised in mainstream (that is, white-dominated) feminist theory. She argued that a genealogical investigation of the production of race and sex could illuminate their common investment with a form of power that, following Foucault, she termed “biopower”..."