Post-Indentitarian and Post-Intersectional Anxiety in the Neoliberal Corporate University

Abstract

This article tracks the production and circulation of post-intersectional discourse in the neoliberal university. Focusing specifically on the ways in which a public flagship university from 2008 through 2013 produces anxious subjects (graduate students, untenured professors, adjunct faculty, and staff), the article argues that neoliberal logics and everyday speech acts within corporate universities temporalize, spatialize, contain, and ultimately seek to render intersectionality to a time and space of the “post.” It is within this neoliberal context of precarity that the article identifies and scrutinizes Jasbir Puar’s critiques of intersectionality and post-intersectional discourse as “anxious speech acts.” Finally, the article proposes a new and less anxious reading practice inspired by Jennifer Nash’s “Black feminist love politics” that rethinks intersectionality’s relationship to the subject and the neoliberal ethos of disposability.