Rethinking with Patricia Hill Collins: A Note Toward Intersectionality as Interlocutory Interstitiality

Abstract

Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another…. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident.—Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” Stop, for a moment, at an intersection, a busy one, and you might get smashed in no time; if lucky, you could get spotted in time, which would also be a way to delay some other oncoming death. Intersections are where we get caught and where we find our bearings. Structurally tricky, fatally slippery, they can save us or sever us. An intersection can stop you short or spur you on. Such are the elusive vicissitudes of crossings—but cross we must, that ironic vitality of beings at crossroads.Cross how? Block by block, one at a time. A trick, I suppose, is to keep moving: Move in there while looking around, up and down, left and right, or move right through without looking back. Confusing? I know. It's a mixed signal. That's partly why there is that yellow sign, as I understand, a cushion for transitional chaos. It is there as a buffer zone of active inaction that strollers and drivers alike must learn to inhabit to live together, to move along. Of course, such a regulative codification of temporal boundaries solves neither the chronic traffic problems nor the Aristotelian riddle of time, once or for all; in fact, that is where we tend to expect more clashes, shifts, and accidents, literally or metaphorically. In any case, however, this material allegory of time at work does keep us reminded of and returning to this question that just won't disappear: What happens—or rather, flows, comes, or intervenes—between green and yellow, and yellow and red? Who can account for, and bear witness to, events taking place in, and surging from, that luminal space of perpetual decision and indecision? No one and everyone.So what happens there, in each case, stays there, like a blood stain at a crime scene; each, thus itemized, produces and carries effects of confluences of issues irreducible to any explanatory or justificatory epistemic apparatuses, however complex or comprehensive. Now, the situation is even trickier for what happened, including what will have happened: an accident that just happened or waiting to happen, neither can stay “there there,” as Gertrude Stein would say. Once registered, recorded, witnessed, experienced, remembered, interpreted, narrated, predicted, assumed—even distorted or forgotten or totalized—or predicted or speculated as such, what (will have) happened cannot be spatiotemporally isolated in any clear and distinct form or fashion, except in ripple effects and auto-archived traces and trajectories. Quite simply, “it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident” at an intersection, at this site that therefore functions more simply as a placeholder: “Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In these cases the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the involved parties simply get back in their cars and zoom away.”1 The courtroom, for example, another locale, is where what happened in the past and outside is “reconstructed,” that is, debated, deconstructed, and restitutively decided on, almost to the structural exclusion of what happens there there in the courtroom, that black boxy space that itself, in turn, becomes an object of inquiry as it passes through the narrative sieve of time. Something else then, almost time itself, unfurls and keeps piling on, serially, massively, obscurely. What becomes of this radical void and avoidance at the heart of trillion-plus “events,” “incidents,” “cases,” and so on?Back at that intersection: theoretical reflections start in and through a silhouette of life, after the fact, with all the countless, priceless, motionless layers of time folded, compressed “there there,” and the various corners of the world suddenly brought to light, to the center stage. This seems how a life, instantly, becomes an afterlife, serial constellations of Nachträglichkeit (belatedness or deferred effects), as one seeks to “find an order in the drama of time,” like the proverbial police officer who always arrives late, almost has to arrive late, but also has to ask immediately, “What's going on here?”2 Perhaps that's why theory, a life of logos, tends to focus on “lived” experience rather than living, even when talking about “living” beings, of bios. Whatever (will have) happened to life, a time of life?But reconstruct we must. As I see it, such is the take-home message of this allegory of life/death crosscut. Such is the political and ethical imperative lodged in the ontology of intersectional obscurity and obscure multiplicity, to which we will turn in the next section; let's try not to slip back into our own trains of thought and “zoom away” again. Occupy intersection, can we? How?Intersectionality has much to say about politics, but what are the contemporary politics of intersectionality itself?—Patricia Hill Collins, “Social Inequality, Power, and Politics: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism in Dialogue” Let's restart by zooming in on this succinct description of “intersectionality” Patricia Hill Collins offered in 2000: “Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice.”3 As noted earlier, intersection enables and disables, allows and hinders, does and undoes: it is a hinge, a point of convergence. “Seemingly” formal and neutral in its silent workings, intersection also “presses” on, forward and inward.4 “Intersectionality,” as a materially anchored and layered concept in critical social theory highlighting the interconnected mechanism of oppressions in the United States, draws for its theoretical development on the collective experiences and embodied histories of American injustices such as slavery and segregation, among others. And its key concerns as both a knowledge project and a progressive pragmatist agenda—as its “spirit unfolded in the last three decades of the twentieth century,” hot on the heels of the civil rights movement5—remain fueled and diversified by this, overridingly simple, question: how and why life becomes more definitely unlivable, unequally unbearable for some folks in some quarters, formed and pushed around various multiple pressure points within and around the U.S. borders and, now increasingly, across the globe.When Kimberlé Crenshaw advanced in 1989 her “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” with that incisive tool, “intersectionality,” her academic act, in some discursively inaugural ways, legitimized the long and rich tradition of intersectional thoughts in the U.S. black feminist intellectual genealogy populated with the early political trailblazers and activist intellectuals such as Sojourner Truth (1797–1883).6 And what she had in mind was specifically that: the cartography of the margin, not some general or universal or generic map. In the language of law coextensive with, and more technical than, the ones mobilized by some of her intellectual predecessors, Crenshaw set out to expose the tyranny of the linear and the equalizing ruse of legal-doctrinal grouping that creates, as the Combahee River Collective described in its 1974 statement, the “interlocking” systems of multiple marginalization of legal subjects.7 Her analysis sheds light on how intercutting “evasion” as both a cause and an effect of political actions becomes powerful, when first rendered possible by preemptive reductionism or doctrinal assumptions about cases under consideration;8 recall the radical void at the heart of an intersection, discussed earlier, from which people typically zoom away.Consider this ongoing question about “black women” centrality or supremacy in discourses of intersectionality. As Patricia puts it with that trenchant Pat-humor, “Given the historical derogation of women of African descent, it is tempting to grant African American women a colonial ‘discovery’ of a yet unnamed intersectionality.”9 Again, who discovered what, and where? And who is covering that story? I am partly in the business of rereading, and so that's what I will contribute here, in addition to what I had to say so far. So, let's go back and rediscover what Crenshaw, for example, has purportedly discovered, the one to whom the typical academic story attributes the pioneering insights into “intersectionality.” Crenshaw said from the start: “I will center Black women in the analysis in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women's experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences”;10 did she say, “I will contrast the multidimensionality of Black women's experiences … in order to center Black women in the analysis”? “Black women” per se are being neither (re)discovered nor (re)centralized here. Instructive to read further back, in that vein, is the interlocutory frame of reference of the aforementioned 1974 manifesto by the Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement.” Let's see what idea is being addressed to whom, for whom, and by whom. “As black feminists and lesbians who know that they [we] have a very definite revolutionary task to perform,” they said this from the start:11 The “major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”12 Again, clearly, here, “black women” per se are being neither (re)discovered nor (re)centralized but, rather, “performed” into presence as the embodied voice of a critique that addresses all—not just “all women of color” but all who listen.Then, you see, the key is elsewhere or dual. The linchpin of the idea here, vividly emerging from and self-critically returning to those particular standpoints, is the “multidimensionality” of “the manifold and simultaneous oppressions,” the discursive, driving force of which is often eclipsed or exploited in academic identity politics, full of those facial “cards” supposed to be played by those “all ‘but for’” in and from their corner offices, where they live and die. On that thorny issue, again, of (dis)identitarian political economy and hegemony, Kathryn Gines seems right back on track, when responding to Jennifer Nash's concern that in the world of “intersectionality,” academically framed and produced as such, black women are “prototyped” as if owned, self-owned or otherwise:13 Indeed, the originary “ambiguity” and structural ambivalence of intersectionality are such that the “Black Women” Central itself has already been transformed over time,14 and we will have kept returning to the shared issue as serious, simple, and structural as that of life and death, to which the black women population in the United States, among others, certainly remains most vulnerable if not the most. The guiding question, then, even at its most practical, should not be how to divide the pie or produce a bigger pie but, rather, how to share or, better still, create more and better ones out of the existing one. The key concern should not exactly be where, on the map, to put multiple black women and more gay folks and many more minorities or when to decenter African American women's exemplary political and intellectual legacy to promote, instead, non–African American “women of color” (as oddly logically juxtaposed with “African American women”).15 The straight pale male calculator can and should be used only to a certain extent, if at all. The larger and enduring question for all, regardless of who we are, should then perhaps be how to keep, while sharpening and diversifying, the momentum of the guiding spirit of this American pragmatist tradition, the soul of this sobering critique, which we might as well dub TIWD (thinking intersectional while driving).Such is how the philosophical spirit of intersectionality remains, today, a conceptual lifeline for the oppressed. A core insight of this “feminist heuristic” is in its attention to and ability to read the vicissitudes of political traffic and the accompanying logic of triage;16 the denser the traffic, the tougher the triage. As anyone ever caught or even invested in the crosshairs of identity politics would readily see, social identity is inextricably linked to its politico-economical viability, to a point where the paradigmatic distinction becomes practically impossible while analytically enabling and to that extent necessary like a ladder to climb on. In the course of navigating the often pernicious and treacherous waters of identity and belonging, we construct and mobilize a vast range of intricate apparatuses of identification as well as self-identification. So when an identity almost instantly becomes a coded value while functioning as such within any given system(s), as increasingly is the case in this age of planetary datafication and liquidization, something like “inalienable,” basic human rights, for instance, becomes a practical paradox. As Hannah Arendt famously noted: “If a human being loses his political status, … [it] seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it impossible for other people to treat him as a fellow man.”17Now, see how this point of observation chimes right with what Collins has to say in 2004, in the introduction to Black Sexual Politics: What makes a progressive Black sexual politics “critical” is its commitment to social justice, not exclusively for African American men and women, but for all human beings. In this sense, a more progressive Black sexual politics is one specific site of a broader, global struggle for human rights. It is important to stress that although this particular book is about African Americans, this specific project of developing a more progressive Black sexual politics resembles other social justice projects that grapple with similar issues…. Because Black Sexual Politics examines one local manifestation of a more general, global phenomenon, I invite non–African American readers to consider how the questions raised here might inform their own social justice projects.18 The task of intersectionality would then include that of learning to read “between the lines,” learning how to read the politics of silences.19 As Collins made it clear already in her 1990 monograph, Black Feminist Thought, and later again in the co-edited volume of 1998, Race, Class, and Gender, all, everything, every person, every event, every context, every intersection, matters greatly, singularly, “unique(ly).”20 The “unique” task of the intersectional thinker, as exemplified by the open-ended work of Collins, who keeps adding layers to her circle of thinking, would be not simply to add or reproduce what is or once was a unique property of being, such as “sexuality,” which Collins has been analyzing more vigorously since 2000, but to make herself or himself the time to mark it afresh, to spotlight such often “unprotected” or overprotected, interstitial borderlands each time anew, making room for paradigm-shifting inventions as well as discursive interventions there.Patricia Hill Collins, “an intellectual Ninja,” is getting right at such zones of interstitial contestations and constructions by constantly speaking toward and with them.21 She is a ninja of organic intellect, as she continues to allow herself to include more of herself as well as others in such interlocutory landscapes and journeys of co-thinking. Such is itself a testimony to the community-building sociality of intersectional thinking. Collins is the energy bar that a small lady philosopher such as myself would need to stock up on for interstitial camping and cross-disciplinary skiing. Pat is an inter-esting interlocutor, par excellence, of our times, someone who would occupy the center of interstitial social analyses by allowing others just to occupy her space. The battery must be kept at 99 percent, always at least 1 percent short, so that the gap, too, can keep growing, living on, otherwise.