Intersectionality: old and new endeavours?

Gender, Place & Culture A Journal of Feminist Geography ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20 Intersectionality: old and new endeavours? Dina Vaiou To cite this article: Dina Vaiou (2018): Intersectionality: old and new endeavours?, Gender, Place & Culture, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2018.1460330 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1460330 Published online: 17 Apr 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cgpc20 Gender, Place & culture, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1460330 Intersectionality: old and new endeavours? Dina Vaiou department of urban and regional Planning, national technical university of athens, athens, Greece ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This short comment on intersectionality raises three points for further thought and discussion: The first has to do with the rich tradition of feminist interventions in academe and in political struggles which adopted intersectional approaches before a field of ‘intersectionality studies’ was developed. The second is a note about the difficult and complex passage from individual subject formation to the constitution of collective identities, following the logic of intersectional analysis and theorizing, Finally, the third point puts forward some thoughts on positionality as ‘perspective’ from which to interpret the complexities of intersectional analyses and seek to forge solidarities and alliances beyond individual identification. received 9 January 2018 accepted 15 January 2018 KEYWORDS epistemic communities; feminist debates; intersectionality; left traditions; positionality Introduction A number of conferences, special issues in academic journals, articles and books testify to the fact that intersectionality has gained momentum over the past three decades. The conference in Barcelona (2016) on ‘Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality. Places, Identities and Knowledges’, from which this panel discussion originates, is part of the burgeoning of the concept as a nodal point which facilitates multiple epistemologies and knowledge production and as a critique to identity politics and additive approaches; it points to the ways in which gender and other markers of power inequalities are co-constituted and inextricably linked. In this short comment I would like to raise three points for further thought and discussion, which also summarize my argument: The first has to do with the development of intersectional approaches in feminist debates before a field of ‘intersectionality studies’ (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013) was developed; the second is a note about the difficult passage from the individual to the collective subject following intersectional analysis and theorizing; finally, the third point puts forward some thoughts on positionality as ‘compass’ to interpret the complexities of intersectional analyses. CONTACT dina Vaiou [email protected] © 2018 Informa uK limited, trading as taylor & Francis Group 2 D. VAIOU Intersectionality in feminist debates In many fields and disciplines, including geography, feminist analysis and theorizing have been intersectional much more than we are prepared to accept today and certainly before the term became established and explicitly used in academic debate/s, taking Crenshaw (1991) as a starting point (e.g. Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1983; also the relevant comments by Phoenix and Pattynama 2006; Verloo 2006; and Yuval-Davis 2006). The rich tradition of feminist interventions, in academe and in political struggles, in their often controversial encounters with other social movements since the 1970s, took up by other names co-constructions of, for example, gender and class (among marxist feminists), gender and race/ethnicity often in combination with class and nationality (by Black and postcolonial feminists), gender and sexuality (in queer approaches), and many more (for a review, see Lykke 2005). Can such feminist interventions be included in intersectionality ‘avant la lettre’, i.e. before the term was coined by K. Crenshaw and without being related to her work? This question has also been raised, along with other helpful comments, by one of the reviewers of this short article. My argument in this respect is that, although they are not named as such, such interventions do in fact work with multiple forms and markers of oppression and inequality which interrelate and intersect, rather than add up, to create a whole which is different from the component parts (Collins 2015). In this sense, such interventions are intersectional in that they lie at the heart of the definition/s of the term and its further development (see also Hancock 2016). What is often forgotten, particularly in debates taking place in a hegemonic Anglophone context, is that the geographies of feminist traditions differentiate debates significantly (for a more detailed discussion see Garcia Ramon, Simonsen, and Vaiou 2006; Vaiou 2003). And this is important for the kinds of understandings produced and the specific intersections feminists work with at particular conjunctures and places. In Southern Europe, and in Greece from where I draw most of my experiences, for example, feminist interventions in geography and urban studies as well as in other disciplines have grown out of, and in constant dialogue with, the political Left after the downfall of the dictatorships in the mid-1970s. Particularly with a Left tradition drawing from the thought of Antonio Gramsci and his conception of hegemony (explicitly including male hegemony) as socially, culturally and spatially constituted at different spatial scales, from the home and everyday life to the city, the region, the nation-state and the global system. In this tradition, analyses at the intersections of gender, class, place and culture have been centrally in the agenda. In this tradition of thought and practice, Gramsci’s understanding of the production of identity not as essentialized, fixed or frozen subject positions but as fluid, shifting senses of oneself (Short 2013) is part of our feminist travels with and beyond Gramsci, as Ekers and Loftus (2013) urge us. That is to say, his work is GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 3 an inspiration for nuanced understandings of social inequality and for complex political considerations; it is in no way a set of ‘guidelines’ for present day concerns. That the particularities of gender can only be understood by considering the specificity of time, place and culture has been a perspective to work with, which has led to consider dynamic processes of positionality and location and the contested and shifting constitution of identity categories (Avdela and Psarra 1997; Bono and Kemp 1991). The experience of the Gender and Geography Research Group in the UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is a case in point. Here, as elsewhere in Southern European feminist debates, intersectionality has been an underlying thread since the mid-1980s - even if it was to explain ‘deviations’ from the established Anglophone norm, itself equally partial and situated although positing as universal. From the individual to the collective The term intersectionality (and the concept it denotes before its appearance in the vocabulary of the social sciences) points to the need for multiple epistemologies and the relational treatment of social positions. It contributes to make visible the multiple positionings that shape people’s everyday lives and to keep to the foreground of enquiry the idea that gender, race, sexuality, class etc. are identities which subjects ‘do’ or ‘perform’ and not essences or unambiguous and stable categories which subjects ‘are’ or ‘have’. The awkwardness of this ‘etc’ has been pointed out quite a long time ago by Judith Butler (1990): it signals the exhaustion and illimitable processes of signification and at the same time it leaves open a possibility that, in specific socio-spatial contexts, some social divisions may be more important than others and therefore included before the ‘etc’. Moreover, intersections of these categories are not only a synthesis of existing relations but also of the history of those relations, a resumé of their constitution and changes. Intersectionality as an analytical tool produces insights which underline the complexity, hybridity and diversity of power regimes as they co-constitute individual subject identities. The passage, however, from individual subject formation to the constitution of collective identities is more than complex and hard to conceptualize. How different voices can intersect in one narrative (Ludvig 2006) and make claims for emancipation and justice? or is this not on beyond micro-analytic readings of everyday practices? And are complex analyses, like the ones presented in the Barcelona Conference (e.g. Droogleever Fortuijn 2016; Jorba and Rodó Zárate 2016), opening the debate to such directions and problematics? Closer to geography, and as Gill Valentine (2007) underlines, particular spaces are produced and stabilized through the performing of (intersectional) identities by dominant groups as they exercise power in and through particular spaces. The ability to perform certain identities and not others relates closely to the power-laden spaces in which individual experiences are lived. Geography has much to offer when moving to an understanding of contingency and situatedness in the 4 D. VAIOU ways that power operates. In this line of argument, the difficulties arising from working in/with space at different scales are more than prominent and complex when theoretical concerns meet ‘the field’. Space, and urban space in particular, is a world of strangers where living with difference is practiced and tested on a daily and permanent basis by a multiplicity of individual and collective subjects whose identities are, in turn, shaped by space and place (Simonsen and Koefoed 2015). Space, following Doreen Massey’s (1999) propositions, is the product of interrelations and the sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity, always in the process of becoming. In this fluidity, everyday bodily encounters take place, which contribute to the formation of communities or collectivities, even temporary and fleeting ones, constituted as specific articulations of social practices, shared meanings and material conditions. What I am trying to point at here is that social power and inequality continue in many ways to be constructed along binary lines of gender, race, sexual preference, class etc. – by legal systems, local and global institutions, established and legitimized everyday practices, all of which put individual subjects ‘in their place’, having defined what this place is. Such systems, institutions and practices have different organizing logics (see also Skeggs 2006), which need some kind of collective coming together and organizing by those ‘strangers’ who inhabit (urban) space – collective organizing in order to challenge or cope with multiple forms of power. Collective organizing involves negotiations of difference among individuals who (may) prioritize some part/s of their individual intersectional identities over others in the appropriate analytical levels and in their historical and geographical conjunctures. Positionality and epistemic communities Intersectionality as it has been developed in different fields and disciplines, including geography and urban studies, has contributed to enrich the debate around the co-constitution of gender and other markers of inequality and difference in specific spatial contexts. Similar issues are raised in feminist and left scholarship, also destabilizing common sense binaries and inviting us to think in more complex ways (Simonsen 2008; Vieten and Valentine 2015). In order to navigate in a field of thought that is becoming ever more complicated, particularly in its encounters with space and place, I would argue that one needs to keep clear the particular position or perspective from which intersectionality is explicitly or implicitly sought. The ways in which analyses and discourses are located in body, time and, most importantly, in space may perhaps rescue the term intersectionality from its own success, from becoming a convenient catch all phrase. In this direction, it is important to take seriously into consideration a major feminist epistemological proposition to do with positionality in knowledge production (Haraway 1988). The idea that differently situated bodies produce different kinds of knowledge and GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 5 material practice may provide a ‘compass’ so to speak, in the search for solidarities and alliances beyond individual identification. Contributions from the European South, also in ‘gender and geography’, have always been conscious of our place as inappropriate/d others (to quote Donna Haraway 1988) in an academic debate whose centre is based in the Anglophone world. In this context, where inclusions and exclusions are constructed along crude binary categories, my own ‘compass’ is formed around a feminist perspective and a Left epistemic community. I use here the term ‘epistemic community’ to denote a process of knowledge production, as well as political action, based on values which become unifying factors shaping collective (rather than individual) practices and access to knowledge. However, beyond individual preferences to do with positionality, ‘compass’, age and conjunctures in everybody’s lives, a clear perspective is ever more urgent in these times of crisis and neoliberal attack, in which many rights thought to be ‘acquis’ are viciously curtailed while inequalities and exclusions are continuously (re)produced in and through class based austerity policies, discursive and very material fences against refugees, pushing women out of the labour market or to the margins, excluding youth from a decent future, ‘etc’ – etc. here meant to denote all the attacks that dominant forces invent and practice in real and imagined spaces. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the organisers of the conference on ‘Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality. Places, Identities and Knowledges’ (Barcelona 2016), Mireia Baylina Ferré, Maria Dolórs Garcia Ramón, Aina Gormà Garcia, Anna Ortiz Guitart and Maria Prats Ferret, for their kind invitation and for giving me the opportunity to reflect on different aspects of ‘intersectionality’; and also the editors of this special section in GPC, Mireia Baylina Ferré and Maria Rodó Zárate. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Dina Vaiou is Professor of urban analysis and gender studies in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and coordinator of the post-graduate programme on Urban and Regional Planning. Her research interests, publications in Greece and abroad and papers presented in Conferences include: the feminist critique of urban analysis, the changing features of local labour markets, with special emphasis on women’s work and informalisation processes, the impact of mass migration on Southern European cities and women’s migration in particular, the gendered effects of the crisis and local solidarity responses. She has coordinated several national and European projects (or the Greek part of such projects). She has published books and numerous articles in Greece and abroad and is member of the editorial board of several scientific journals. 6 D. VAIOU References Anthias, Floya, and Nira Yuval-Davies. 1983. “Contextualizing Feminism: Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions.” Feminist Review 15: 62–75. Avdela, Efi and Angelika Psarra, eds. 1997. Silent Stories, Women and Gender in Historical Narrative. Athens: Alexandreia [in Greek: Αβδελά, Έφη και Αγγέλικα Ψαρρά, επιμ. 1997. 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