Collisions in the Dark: Invisible Intersectionality and the Black Female Psychoanalyst

Abstract

At the end of the 1980s, Black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw offered intersectionality as a way to shift our attention to Black female subjectivity as a complex, multi-dimensional unfolding of identity. This essay focuses on how she situated that identity within, as she termed it, whiteness as “a single-axis framework of analysis.” In this respect, her discussion converged with that of her peer, the writer Toni Morrison, in the work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993). Interpreting the psychoanalytic implications of Crenshaw’s and Morrison’s stances toward Whiteness, this essay asks, where does the Black female analyst position herself in this discussion? Drawing from the writings of Black feminist thinkers, Black female psychoanalysts, and relational and interpersonal theorists, invisible intersectionality is explored as a set of unseen forces colliding in the dark, animating the dyad in the clinical space of the Black female analyst’s consulting room.