On “Re-Thinking Intersectionality” by Jennifer C. Nash (2008)

The article discusses intersectionality as a whole by surveying various scholars who have critiqued it, analyzing its impact, and considering who it takes into account. Nash says we must “engage with its [intersectionality’s] contradictions, absences, and murkiness” as if to say that acknowledging intersectionality in and of itself creates more “murkiness” than the issue at hand (195). The overarching point that Nash seems to be attempting to make is to “expose the assumptions that underpin intersectionality... to [help in continuing] to dismantle essentialism... [and] to grapple with the messiness of subjectivity” (195). McCall’s opinions on the subject are that categories are ‘simplistic’ in nature and that drawing boundaries creates more exclusion; this is to say that the point of intersectionality, in McCall’s eyes, is “to use those categories strategically in the service of displaying the linkages between the categories and [the] inequity” that said categories create (197). This idea is called inter-categorical complexity. We then go on to read about black feminism and its effects and interactions with intersectionality. Nash critiques Crenshaw’s using black women as an example of intersectionality in the way that she does because “her analysis precludes an examination of forms of ‘multiple burdens’ ... beyond race and gender” and also goes on to say that this “mark[s] all black women in similar ways” (198). This is a valid criticism. By lopping all black women into one category, it fails to recognize how all people’s identities are multifaceted and layered. Apart from this, to say that race and gender are the only two things that we need to take into account when considering how people are affected by society and oppressed by the people in that society would be a clumsy consideration of identity. Nash continues in this line of thought by disagreeing with Crenshaw’s perspective that intersectionality “positions itself as a theoretical advance from black feminism” and discerns that it instead rather adds onto it and was born out of it (199). Intersectionality as a theory seems to have a clear throughline connecting itself to black feminist thought. A particularly interesting point that this article considers is who in fact has the ‘right’ to claim an intersectional identity.