The Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism, and the Breathless Sea

Young looks at the place of black feminists in today's academy in Britain, and poses some questions for contemporary self-identified black and white feminists based in that country. There is a new confidence among some black, professional Britons but infiltration into the academy remains problematic for many. Black British feminists and writers are largely absent in so-called postcolonial literary canons developed in the Anglo-American institutions, and by and large black British feminists are only offered fragile support by white feminists. Although African-American feminism offers intellectual sustenance and networks, the situation in the United States is very different, particularly as, there, black feminism has had much more impact and recognition. Discussions of the intersections of race, class and gender are rare in Britain outside black feminism, and there has been much less attention than in the States to black women's writing. Perhaps some kind of 'provisional essentialism' is still needed, for it is difficult for black feminist academics ever to feel the question of race is optional. It can be argued that 'blackness' is used to describe women of very different origins, and can obscure differential histories, but 'blackness' is always a political concept, not a register of national belonging. Black women have transformed British culture, but white feminists have largely failed to understand their problems. Attention to the social history of black women in Britain, and particularly to the creative work of black women writers, filmmakers and other cultural workers, is the place at which a new analysis should begin.

Reviewed by: The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement Karen Anderson The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. By Winifred Breines. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Winifred Breines relates a difficult and contested history in The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. She begins by asking why there was no interracial feminist movement, and in the end, illuminates key issues in American social relations and political activism. Breines focuses on key groups and issues, revisiting the politics of gender and sexuality in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Power Movement and using two Boston organizations, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, to examine white and black socialist feminisms. She illuminates the deep appeal of identity politics to white and black feminists at a pivotal moment in United States history. White women and people of color formed the social movements of the 1960s and beyond not only to rectify deep injustices in American society, but also to claim the right to speak with authority about their own lives. When activists tried to work together across differences in race, class, gender, and sexuality, they found that their differences in experiences, resources, and perceptions created almost insurmountable barriers to cooperation. Identity politics evolved in response to those dilemmas, even as the political mobilization of identities created ongoing problems. White feminists organized consciousness raising groups that profoundly shaped their personal lives and political commitments. Their belief in an ostensibly universal gender system alienated black women, whose challenges were deepened by racism and whose lives did not mirror those of white women in gender socialization or material circumstances. Breines, for example, concludes that white feminism's critique of patriarchal family relations was "cold" and did not acknowledge the importance of black families as sites of resistance in a racist society. More importantly, black women understood racial justice to be their most pressing political priority. In response, some black women formed autonomous feminist organizations. According to Breines, this separatism created a highly contentious path to a sometimes workable politics of alliance between black women and white socialist feminists in Boston. Citing the Coalition for Women's Safety, Breines concludes that when white feminists allowed black women to lead while they provided pragmatic organizational support, issues of race were defused. That arrangement did not translate well in other settings. Feminist workshops devised to address racism in the feminist movement often ended in anger, recriminations, and guilt. Though she understands that black women's rage carried with it their anger at their treatment in the society at large, Breines understates the level of dysfunction that sometimes characterized interactions between white feminists and women of color. She rightly concludes that black feminists developed significant analyses of race and gender in their organizations and publications and that white feminists lost the possibilities presented by interracial communication and organization. She fails, however, to explore the closures entailed when black feminists distanced themselves so fully from white feminists. Nonetheless, this is a courageous and insightful book. [End Page 242] Karen Anderson University of Arizona Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews . Edited by Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Edited by Sita Ranchod‐Nilsson and Mary Ann Tétreault. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Women, States, and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation? Edited by Sita Ranchod‐Nilsson and Mary Ann Tétreault. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis. By Mary N. Layoun. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2001.Jyoti PuriJyoti PuriSimmons College Search for more articles by this author Simmons CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 30, Number 2Winter 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/382639 Views: 118Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author(s).PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

As a theoretical construct, feminism presently has more raps than Queen Latifah and a plethora of additives to preserve its freshness. Yet, prior to contemporary scholars' efforts to identify variations in women's lives, feminist theory suffered from what Adrienne Rich (1978) describes as white solipsism-to think, imagine and speak as if whiteness described the world (p. 299). Considering the history of racial tensions in the United States, it is not surprising that it was African American women who engendered the initial challenge to petty-bourgeois feminism by refusing to sacrifice their community needs to the demands of racist, elite, White women. Throughout the nation's history, African American women have struggled with White women on many political fronts. For example, in 1921, at the National Women's Party Convention, Alice Paul received Black delegates' complaints over disfranchisement with indifference. On another occasion, in 1970, White feminists' reluctance to aggressively organize against the political persecution of Angela Davis continued this legacy of White women rejecting and alienating Black women. These experiences and countless others spurred Black women to shape feminist theory and praxis to include issues unique to them. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) locates four major themes in the construction of Black feminist thought, all of which are generated from a Black woman's standpoint (Collins, 1989).' First, Black women empower themselves by creating self-definitions and self-

Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns Krista Comer (bio) In the turbulent summer of 2020—amidst an uncontrolled pandemic and massive protests against police brutality on US streets—op-ed writers reported a "great white awakening on racism," an assault on white innocence without the typical hem and haw, the fragility or defenses of white guilt (Thornton). Springing up in geographies not on anyone's antiracist map of America, the first draft of a new history of race relations in this country seemed to be in process. Older white people stood with signs on unlikely suburban street corners. Throngs of multiracial young folks were getting in front of tear gas, putting their bodies on the line. Terms like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" circulated in public discourse with new legitimacy and ubiquity while the white studies scholar Robin DiAngelo made the rounds on cable TV, astounded her 2018 book White Fragility was sold out. The election of 2020 reveals the roughness of this first draft of a new history of race relations, how potent white supremacy remains as a political force, and how divided the US West is between red and blue states, urban and rural political culture. Now that the results are in, and Donald Trump defeated, the tens of millions who signed on for another term of white nationalist rule will not go away. Indeed, the affective discourse of white grievance that brought Trump to power is stronger. The famous "suburban white woman's" vote showed her to be less tired of Trumpism than predicted. Whatever racial reckoning was happening among white progressives about white women's politics has, however, been eclipsed by the January 6 insurrection of white nationalist patriarchs at the US Capitol. While horrifying, the action was also familiar to US West [End Page 101] researchers tracking extremism in the region. NPR's Kirk Siegler, in the "Roots of U.S. Capitol Insurrectionists Run Through American West," reports on extremist street activities, since 2014, of the People's Rights movement led by Ammon Bundy. Bundy has called his followers to live and die as "free men" as they stormed federal buildings and threatened officials, in effect providing a "Western ethos" playbook for Trump loyalists like the Proud Boys (Siegler). Escalated white violence makes understanding grievance politics all the more urgent. Do white progressives have anything to offer those who occupy this aggressive injured standpoint other than critique, superiority, or condemnation? Can feminists who are white (by descriptive definition, white feminists) not flinch at the term "white feminist," perhaps use it to engage the trope of "white feminism" that women of color feminisms continue to invoke as meaningful to them? Such questions about whiteness, the social geographies of the nation, and to what feminist politics are accountable are among the most pressing for feminism and for critical regional theory and action. The pervasive suspicion of feminism as "white feminism" (unless it is otherwise named, i.e., black feminism) fundamentally structures feminist alliances. This relational strain, so familiar to feminist histories and persistent, is white women's problem to fix. To do so, white feminists need to understand the problem of whiteness for white women so much better. I begin through recent political events to keep the stakes of whiteness at the top of the ticket, so to speak, at the forefront of critical concerns. Certainly, the fact of racial hierarchies in histories of conquest has been one center for the field of western American literary and cultural studies over the last thirty years and including, in the last ten years, a transformative turn to frameworks from Indigenous studies and settler theory. This essay continues that trajectory as well as builds on work over the last several years to theorize the political and aesthetic concerns an explicitly feminist critical regionalism can help critics analyze. If the advent of more "critical" regional frameworks in the field of western literary and cultural studies substantiated and gave name to a problem that too often had no name, the problem of whiteness, I will be [End Page 102] concerned here with whiteness not from the more familiar vantage point of critique or disavowal but rather from the perspective...

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 201 Ileana Nachescu Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists Black women’s activism in the 1970s has often been located in the fissures between the civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement , and Black nationalism—a form of “interstitial feminism,” in the words of Kimberly Springer.1 Providing crucial interventions to disrupt male supremacy and sexism within Black organizations as well as racism and homophobia within feminist organizations, Black feminist politics modeled a “vanguard center” whose liberation signaled the liberation of all.2 The Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” (1977), which has become a classic in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies curricula, encapsulates the power of this transformative image. The Combahee River Collective was not the only Black feminist group active in the second half of the 1970s, of course. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), founded in 1969, had a vibrant presence on both the East Coast and the West Coast throughout this decade. The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), active between 1973 and 1975, mobilized Black women around the country and gave the impetus for the formation of several local chapters. After NBFO ended, the 1. Kimberly Springer, “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations ,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 156. 2. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91. 202 Ileana Nachescu National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) became perhaps the bestknown Black women’s organization at the time due to appearances on national television, articles and essays published in multiple Black and feminist venues, and its attempt to build a national organization. In October 1977, NABF’s national conference, “A Meeting of the Minds,” attracted more than two hundred African American women to Chicago for two days in order to discuss their experiences, listen to speakers, and develop an agenda to address the most pressing issues of the day. To this day, the long list of resolutions passed at this conference constitutes the most comprehensive set of political, economic, and cultural demands collectively devised by African American women. Yet, more than four decades later, NABF has disappeared from public consciousness, remembered only by a small group of feminist historians. The erasure of NABF from women’s history and Black history is a puzzle—in part because the organization excelled at the kinds of activities that leave visible traces. In an interview with Kimberly Springer, Combahee River Collective founder Barbara Smith noted that “People who write get far more visibility than those who don’t.”3 But NABF Executive Director Brenda Eichelberger published many essays in regional and national periodicals documenting diverse initiatives by Black feminists in the 1970s. Furthermore, unlike many feminist organizations that did not record their operations or whose records have been lost, NABF intentionally gathered and preserved rich archival materials.4 Using materials from the National Alliance of Black Feminists archives, I suggest that NABF defies many received views about Black feminist activism, and this defiance makes attention to NABF all the more vital to the history of US feminism. By examining NABF’s original theorization of “Anglogynophobia,” Black women’s distrust of and animosity toward white women, I advance a much darker explanation for the 3. Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 75. 4. For this article, I have conducted research at the following archival sites: Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, 1974–1997, Chicago History Museum Research Center; and National Black Feminist Organization collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. Ileana Nachescu 203 disappearance of NABF from feminist histories—one linked to the politics of erasure. There is clear evidence that NABF’s efforts to reveal Black women’s perceptions of persistent racism and white supremacy within the feminist movement was censored, as the series of articles titled “Anglogynophobia!” was canceled prior to completion by...

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 201 Ileana Nachescu Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists Black women’s activism in the 1970s has often been located in the fissures between the civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement , and Black nationalism—a form of “interstitial feminism,” in the words of Kimberly Springer.1 Providing crucial interventions to disrupt male supremacy and sexism within Black organizations as well as racism and homophobia within feminist organizations, Black feminist politics modeled a “vanguard center” whose liberation signaled the liberation of all.2 The Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” (1977), which has become a classic in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies curricula, encapsulates the power of this transformative image. The Combahee River Collective was not the only Black feminist group active in the second half of the 1970s, of course. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), founded in 1969, had a vibrant presence on both the East Coast and the West Coast throughout this decade. The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), active between 1973 and 1975, mobilized Black women around the country and gave the impetus for the formation of several local chapters. After NBFO ended, the 1. Kimberly Springer, “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations ,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 156. 2. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91. 202 Ileana Nachescu National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) became perhaps the bestknown Black women’s organization at the time due to appearances on national television, articles and essays published in multiple Black and feminist venues, and its attempt to build a national organization. In October 1977, NABF’s national conference, “A Meeting of the Minds,” attracted more than two hundred African American women to Chicago for two days in order to discuss their experiences, listen to speakers, and develop an agenda to address the most pressing issues of the day. To this day, the long list of resolutions passed at this conference constitutes the most comprehensive set of political, economic, and cultural demands collectively devised by African American women. Yet, more than four decades later, NABF has disappeared from public consciousness, remembered only by a small group of feminist historians. The erasure of NABF from women’s history and Black history is a puzzle—in part because the organization excelled at the kinds of activities that leave visible traces. In an interview with Kimberly Springer, Combahee River Collective founder Barbara Smith noted that “People who write get far more visibility than those who don’t.”3 But NABF Executive Director Brenda Eichelberger published many essays in regional and national periodicals documenting diverse initiatives by Black feminists in the 1970s. Furthermore, unlike many feminist organizations that did not record their operations or whose records have been lost, NABF intentionally gathered and preserved rich archival materials.4 Using materials from the National Alliance of Black Feminists archives, I suggest that NABF defies many received views about Black feminist activism, and this defiance makes attention to NABF all the more vital to the history of US feminism. By examining NABF’s original theorization of “Anglogynophobia,” Black women’s distrust of and animosity toward white women, I advance a much darker explanation for the 3. Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 75. 4. For this article, I have conducted research at the following archival sites: Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, 1974–1997, Chicago History Museum Research Center; and National Black Feminist Organization collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. Ileana Nachescu 203 disappearance of NABF from feminist histories—one linked to the politics of erasure. There is clear evidence that NABF’s efforts to reveal Black women’s perceptions of persistent racism and white supremacy within the feminist movement was censored, as the series of articles titled “Anglogynophobia!” was canceled prior to completion by...

From the early days of second-wave feminism, motherhood and the quest for women's liberation have been inextricably linked. And yet motherhood has at times been viewed, by anti-feminists and select feminists alike, as somehow at odds with feminism. In reality, feminists have long treated motherhood as an organizing metaphor for women's needs and advancement. The mother has been regarded with suspicion at times, deified at others, but never ignored. The first book devoted to this complex relationship, Motherhood Reconceived examines in depth how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought. Bringing to life the work of a variety of feminist writers and theorists, among them Jane Alpert, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, and Dorothy Dinnerstein, Umansky situates feminist discourses of motherhood within the social and political contexts of the 1960s. Charting an increasingly favorable view of motherhood among feminists from the late 1960s through the 1980s, Umansky reveals how African American feminists sought to redefine black nationalist discourses of motherhood, a reworking subsequently adopted by white radical and socialist feminists seeking to broaden the racial base of their movement. Noting the cultural left's conflicted relationship to feminism, that is, the concurrent demand for individual sexual liberation and the desire for community, Umansky traces that legacy through various stages of feminist concern about motherhood: early critiques of the nuclear family, tempered by strong support for day care; an endorsement of natural childbirth by the women's health movement of the early 1970s; white feminists' attempt to forge a multiracial movement by declaring motherhood a universal bond; and the emergence of psychoanalytic feminism, ecofeminism, spiritual feminism, and the feminist anti- pornography movement.

About the Contributors

Native Americans and the Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. By Andrea Smith. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. xxxix, 356. $24.95. Native Americans and the Right is a bold fusion of activism and scholarship that aims to reshape the ways in which Natives and Christians think about one another, targeting as its end political coalitions that recognize commonalities while rejecting insistence on complete ideological conformity among allies. Smith intervenes in a range of issues, including the institutional racism of the prisonindustrial complex, the pitfalls and possibilities of race reconciliation rhetoric, the respective roles of Native and white scholars in indigenous studies, relationships between Native scholars and the broader Native population, the place of western philosophical thought in Native studies, the possibilities for re-centering feminist debates around the concerns and perspectives of indigenous women, and the meanings of sovereignty in Native politics. On each of these issues, she strikes a complex, collaborative pose that renders the book a concrete performance of precisely the sort of bridge-building it advocates: a reimagining of the religious and political configurations of Right and American Indian activism as a way of talking about the larger project of rethinking the nature of political strategy and alliance building for progressive purposes (xi-xii). The title of this book is in fact somewhat of a misnomer, as Smith demonstrates that evangelical politics are far from a monolithic construction and that the term Christian right is in fact reductive in its use as a descriptor of evangelical social thought. This tactic is indicative of the book's approach, which dismantles uncritically held assumptions about what constitutes progressive politics and who is able to participate in them (xii) - in fact, as she demonstrates, those whom both Natives and evangelicals have assumed to be natural allies or adversaries often prove quite the opposite. She presents Native coalitions with ranchers, sport fishermen, and a small office within Con Edison, as well as alliances forged by homeschoolers, pro-gun advocates, and pro-life groups with feminists, Satanists, and the ACLU, while simultaneously outlining the pitfalls of Natives' alliances with white feminists and progressive nonprofits who have aims that are often incompatible with indigenous interests. To be sure, Smith does not cast the alliances she describes as historically paradigmatic - rather, she posits that these coalitions demonstrate the possibilities for configuring similar alliances with other such unlikely groups, including evangelical Christians. …

Reviewed by: Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer Cait McKinney (bio) Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer. Duke University Press, a Camera Obscura Book. 2022. 304 pages. $107.95 hardcover; $28.95 paperback; also available in e-book. Feminist theory and queer cultures often locate lesbian feminism a bit out of time, a formation that is over(ish) but drags on, affecting present movements. In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer enters this fray with a metaphor about being tongue-tied. Lesbian is a hard word to say, they suggest, both technically—as the transition from the slow, smooth les- to the hard, quick -bian requires a sudden shift in embouchure—and also conceptually, in that some associate the term lesbian with transphobia and white feminism. For Samer, speaking the word lesbian "always feels like molasses," because there is urgency in uttering the word but its lineages are a mouthful. This image is bound up with the author's emphasis on the gendered body, located in time, as what we always think and theorize from.1 The slow, careful being with 1970s lesbian media that unfolds in this book is geared toward a different kind of historiographic opening, which Samer names lesbian potentiality. With this concept, Samer puts forward a new theory of lesbian media history as offering alternative visions of sexual and gendered life, visions that emerge from concrete experiences of lesbian conviviality, including the film screening, video workshop, and fan newsletter. Lesbian documentary and science fiction, they assert, enact worlds without patriarchy, prisons, or binaries that wound. These visions are "potentialities" because they present former [End Page 209] futures that were never realized, that are indeed unrealizable, but that generate ideas scholars and activists committed to liberation "may want to imagine within the ongoing project of forging freer futures."2 Samer emphasizes that potentiality has implications for historiographies of media and of social movements, which are freed from the burden of making something progressive and linear out of the past to revel in historical contingencies as they either resonate onward or don't. "What happened and what did not happen" is as important in Samer's method as "what could have not been but was and what could have been but was not."3 As Samer puts it, sounding a bit weary of trends in media history, "there are historiographical alternatives to simply converting past potentialities into a resource in the service of our imagined future."4 Freed from the burden of being a precedent for feminists and queer people "today," lesbian media in this book are allowed to be expansive, messy. In this process, Samer paints lesbian as a structure of feeling more than an identity category and a capacious concept for which people who might call themselves trans today have always had affinity. Samer builds on the work of Giorgio Agamben to carefully contextualize lesbian potentialities as existing and concrete rather than generic. Unlike related theories such as José Esteban Muñoz's aesthetic focus on queer futurity, potentialities are not abstract or utopian.5 Rather, they emerge from grounded conditions of lesbian feminist collaboration across media, politics, and affective life. Samer finds these lesbian potentialities in counterpublics formed around documentary film and video and science fiction fandoms, each of which take up one-half of the book. In the first two chapters on documentary, Samer begins with a study of film distribution, an under-theorized aspect of 1970s lesbian feminism's cultural infrastructure. Investigating the origins of Women Make Movies and some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Samer frames the traveling film screening as an eventful space where audiences labored to generate, negotiate, and revise meanings between their local contexts and the feminist politics of the films they watched together. Feminist distribution is a culmination of activist-artist labor, technologies and systems, and routines through which audiences are invited to encounter media. Returning to the concreteness of lesbian potentiality, Samer shows how film distribution as a system combines with dialogic consciousness-raising as a practice. This conjuncture happens in and through a political vision of what an end to compulsory heterosexuality...

‘Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface’: the question of Black-women-only services and spaces

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

About the Contributors

Intersectional thinking emerged as a provocation in contemporary feminist studies as a political and analytic concept, a sensibility or disposition, a heuristic for thinking in supple and strategic ways about social categories and relations of power in terms of “both/and” rather than “either/or” (see Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Collins 1991). But in contemporary feminist critiques of intersectionality, it is frequently misrepresented, portrayed as fixed when it is fluid and flexible, and accused of creating the very categories and social relations it exposes and challenges. Few theories are as consistently misrepresented. The compelling conception of intersectionality proposed by Black feminists and other feminist scholars of color has a long—often ignored—history in scholarship and activism. In the 1970s and 1980s it represented a dramatic challenge to a white feminism that framed gender as the primary axis of oppression and white women as the primary representatives of feminism. Rather than welcoming this critique as a necessary tool for crafting a more capacious feminist practice, many white feminists perceived the emergence of intersectionality as a loss of power and prestige for themselves. This shock—seeming to lose control of a previously undifferentiated yet implicitly white feminism—continued to echo in the 1990s as white feminist scholars engaged in a series of interventions to counter and appropriate intersectionality. These interventions have become part of a chain of misrepresentations that continue to reverberate today through their citation, reiteration, and imitation (see Tomlinson 2013a, 2018). In practice, intersectionality informs, guides, and shapes advanced research in substantive and generative ways. But the relentless citational attack on intersectionality has made the term itself seem like damaged goods, often disavowed. These practices attempt to both diminish the luster of intersectionality and co-opt its prestige in the service of a revanchist white feminism. Such efforts are not the product of individual choices and errors but rather a shared social discourse pervading feminist scholarship, a discourse that is caught in continual reinscriptions of these arguments rather than reflecting on, reformulating, and moving beyond them. As a result, the valuable feminist tool of intersectional inquiry experiences a kind of stasis that needs to be overcome by transforming feminist tools of reading and writing. Critical feminist studies cannot allow arguments about multidimensionality and race to congeal around strategies that reinforce white women's symbolic domination of the field. In this article I examine two attempts to distort intersectionality through the trope of the vise of geometry.