A review by colin_cox
Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer C. Nash
5.0
I like psychoanalysis because it is a theory, as Mari Ruti suggests, about feelings, in particular, bad feelings. I like feminism, specifically Black feminism, and its notion of "intersectionality" for similar reasons. Intersectionality is also a theory about feelings, too often bad feelings. To be clear, this is not to suggest that Black feminism, like feminism broadly, is, as many of its detractors might suggest, a "kill-joy" theory. Instead, I agree with Jennifer C. Nash that Black feminism is "an affective project" and a "felt experience" (3). But the question to consider is what Black feminism, and by extension, Black feminists, feel. What is Black feminism's guiding affect? For Jennifer C. Nash in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality that affect, especially regarding intersectionality, is "defensiveness" (3).
The defensiveness Nash associates with Black feminism should come as no surprise. For example, Black women, both inside and outside the academy, labor in invisible, ignored, underrepresented, and uncompensated or poorly compensated ways. Plus, many conservative commentators use intersectionality as a scary buzzword. For example, in 2019, Ben Shapiro described "intersectional politics" as "really dangerous." That same year, Omayma Mohamed described intersectionality as "a conspiracy theory of victimization" and "a tangled web of obsessive white guilt and fetishized victimhood." Therefore, according to Nash, defensiveness is "a practice of a certain kind of agency" for Black feminists, and I have no trouble understanding why (26).
But what Nash attempts to accomplish in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality is not a wholesale abandoning of intersectionality, but an abandoning of the defensiveness and pain she associates with intersectionality. She writes, "The book, then, theorizes defensiveness as the feeling that emerges when intersectionality is thought to be a lost object or, worse, a stolen object" (32). In Chapter 3, for example, she argues for a politics and ethics of "letting go" as a necessary step for intersectionality. She successfully argues that intersectionality's defensiveness and "territoriality" around interpretive practices of original intersectional texts simply reproduces certain exclusionary capitalist drives. Even a theory of stewardship, which suggests that "one never possesses intersectionality, one simply cares for the precious intellectual tradition to enable its ongoing vitality" (77), produces and reinscribes, according to Nash, "logics of ownership, property, and territoriality" (78). Nash's larger critique exposes the reflexive yet understandable protectiveness and territoriality too often visible in critiques of critiques of intersectionality. She argues, "To care for intersectionality, then, is to care for black women's intellectual production and to care for black women as knowledge producers, as subjects...this book again and again emphatically interrogates moments where care, love, and affection mask a pernicious possessiveness, a refusal to let intersectionality move and transform in unexpected and perhaps challenging ways" (80). But I suspect critics of Nash might ask: how can we care for Black women as knowledge producers, as subjects" without intersectionality? Intersectionality's legal, social, and symbolic gains are precarious, right? Perhaps, but for Nash, the risk is worth it because the "deep pull of the proprietary" does far more to limit intersectionality because it has the effect of mapping the exploitative contours of capitalism onto intersectionality. Therefore, if we let go "of what we think intersectionality must do," then we can begin "to tell a different story about what black feminist theory can do" (110).
Nash's final chapter locates love or "radical intimacies" as one of two sites for intersectionality's emancipation. In a move that sounds like psychoanalysis's notion of lack, Nash writes, "To act in love, with love, is to recognize this mutual vulnerability as something that must be not eschewed but rather embraced" (116). Love and the recognition of a "mutual vulnerability" represent something genuinely emancipatory because we cannot think of what we share as something positive, it must, instead, be a shared, collective negativity (i.e., lack).
However, Nash situates these conceptual notions in the relatively concrete territory of the law. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, Nash wants to reanimate the law as a space for Black women's survival. She writes, "I treat intersectionality as an analytic that radically occupies law, takes hold of legal doctrine and refuses its conceptions of neutrality and uniformity as performance of justice" (129). This line of argumentation is where a Nash-skeptic might characterize her argument as naive and utopian. One might, for example, read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and wonder how the legal system could ever work if the affirmative ways Nash describes for Black people. But again, this schism is the foundation for Nash's argument; she wants to push intersectionality into a new and potentially perilous territory while her detractors, by contrast, are more skeptical and, therefore, conservative as Nash suggests.
Too often, the sort of debate and theorizing that happens in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality feels insular and impenetrable, save for a select few wonky academics. However, Nash makes a compelling claim for why Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality matters beyond the academy. She writes, "black women are the beginning and end of politics, the figures that will salvage feminism, even as that salvation might rupture the project of feminism, altogether" (135). Furthermore, "academics debates about intersectionality acted as a laboratory for the debates that now circulate outside of academic feminism, in popular feminism practiced on Twitter and Facebook, at protests and rallies" (136). Timely and prescient, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality effectively characterizes intersectionality's past, present, and (if Nash's utopianism comes true) its future.
The defensiveness Nash associates with Black feminism should come as no surprise. For example, Black women, both inside and outside the academy, labor in invisible, ignored, underrepresented, and uncompensated or poorly compensated ways. Plus, many conservative commentators use intersectionality as a scary buzzword. For example, in 2019, Ben Shapiro described "intersectional politics" as "really dangerous." That same year, Omayma Mohamed described intersectionality as "a conspiracy theory of victimization" and "a tangled web of obsessive white guilt and fetishized victimhood." Therefore, according to Nash, defensiveness is "a practice of a certain kind of agency" for Black feminists, and I have no trouble understanding why (26).
But what Nash attempts to accomplish in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality is not a wholesale abandoning of intersectionality, but an abandoning of the defensiveness and pain she associates with intersectionality. She writes, "The book, then, theorizes defensiveness as the feeling that emerges when intersectionality is thought to be a lost object or, worse, a stolen object" (32). In Chapter 3, for example, she argues for a politics and ethics of "letting go" as a necessary step for intersectionality. She successfully argues that intersectionality's defensiveness and "territoriality" around interpretive practices of original intersectional texts simply reproduces certain exclusionary capitalist drives. Even a theory of stewardship, which suggests that "one never possesses intersectionality, one simply cares for the precious intellectual tradition to enable its ongoing vitality" (77), produces and reinscribes, according to Nash, "logics of ownership, property, and territoriality" (78). Nash's larger critique exposes the reflexive yet understandable protectiveness and territoriality too often visible in critiques of critiques of intersectionality. She argues, "To care for intersectionality, then, is to care for black women's intellectual production and to care for black women as knowledge producers, as subjects...this book again and again emphatically interrogates moments where care, love, and affection mask a pernicious possessiveness, a refusal to let intersectionality move and transform in unexpected and perhaps challenging ways" (80). But I suspect critics of Nash might ask: how can we care for Black women as knowledge producers, as subjects" without intersectionality? Intersectionality's legal, social, and symbolic gains are precarious, right? Perhaps, but for Nash, the risk is worth it because the "deep pull of the proprietary" does far more to limit intersectionality because it has the effect of mapping the exploitative contours of capitalism onto intersectionality. Therefore, if we let go "of what we think intersectionality must do," then we can begin "to tell a different story about what black feminist theory can do" (110).
Nash's final chapter locates love or "radical intimacies" as one of two sites for intersectionality's emancipation. In a move that sounds like psychoanalysis's notion of lack, Nash writes, "To act in love, with love, is to recognize this mutual vulnerability as something that must be not eschewed but rather embraced" (116). Love and the recognition of a "mutual vulnerability" represent something genuinely emancipatory because we cannot think of what we share as something positive, it must, instead, be a shared, collective negativity (i.e., lack).
However, Nash situates these conceptual notions in the relatively concrete territory of the law. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, Nash wants to reanimate the law as a space for Black women's survival. She writes, "I treat intersectionality as an analytic that radically occupies law, takes hold of legal doctrine and refuses its conceptions of neutrality and uniformity as performance of justice" (129). This line of argumentation is where a Nash-skeptic might characterize her argument as naive and utopian. One might, for example, read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and wonder how the legal system could ever work if the affirmative ways Nash describes for Black people. But again, this schism is the foundation for Nash's argument; she wants to push intersectionality into a new and potentially perilous territory while her detractors, by contrast, are more skeptical and, therefore, conservative as Nash suggests.
Too often, the sort of debate and theorizing that happens in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality feels insular and impenetrable, save for a select few wonky academics. However, Nash makes a compelling claim for why Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality matters beyond the academy. She writes, "black women are the beginning and end of politics, the figures that will salvage feminism, even as that salvation might rupture the project of feminism, altogether" (135). Furthermore, "academics debates about intersectionality acted as a laboratory for the debates that now circulate outside of academic feminism, in popular feminism practiced on Twitter and Facebook, at protests and rallies" (136). Timely and prescient, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality effectively characterizes intersectionality's past, present, and (if Nash's utopianism comes true) its future.