Intersectionality and humanity: A keynote for “remapping the feminist global”

Abstract

ABSTRACT That Modern Feminist Thought shares its lineage with the liberal Enlightenment and Humanism has continued to render certain feminist practices assimilable to the colonial-racial regime of knowledge that has long underpinned what we normatively uphold as political modernity and its foundational assumptions. This article, originally presented as a conference keynote address, revisits the familiar feminist aporia through exploring the multiple genealogies of feminisms to highlight their theorizations of difference, the human, and other ways of being and caring. It also reconsiders how “intersectionality” – a concept originally forwarded as an alternative legal doctrine yet extensively deployed for various political ends such that the term appears to have lost its original relevance for some – can be repurposed as a critical methodology with which to challenge the universalism of liberal humanism/feminism and the attendant compartmentalization of academic knowledge, but ultimately, to strengthen coalitional possibilities. The article addresses how some of the largely North America-based conversations can resonate transnationally and effectively with some of the most urgent feminist engagements that have unfolded across and beyond plural “Asias,” however imagined.