Intersectionality and/or multiple consciousness: Re-thinking the analytical tools used to conceptualise and navigate personhood

Abstract

abstract Kimberley Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, read in the context of Black Feminist iterations, enables me to sift through the conflation of categories of analysis and praxis in three ways. Firstly, I analyse the purported tensions between Black Feminist theorists and decolonial feminist interpretations of intersectionality, and the attendant consequences of these. In so doing I navigate the fault-lines of the arguments articulated, and while acknowledging the merits of the critiques, I suggest that Black Feminist scholarship in conversation with decolonial feminist approaches may still yield possibilities for coalition which allow for subjectivity that breaks from colonial logics of essence and immutability. Secondly, I reflect on how intersectionality and the coloniality of gender have been taken up in legal discourse in South Africa, and in what ways the tensions and possibilities manifest and are navigated. I argue that fissures may be over-emphasised, replicating a divide and conquer mode of operation while simultaneously facilitating the, at times subtle, selective cooptation of these terms into liberal discourse. Finally, at the centre of this piece is the fact that personhood is the location from which meaning of the world is made and articulated – a question of ontology (Alcoff 2020). Despite the multiple meanings of personhood that suggest that it is both ambiguous and fluid, it has real implications in space/place and time interpersonally and/as structurally (Alcoff 2020). The law, authorised through the person of the state that it circularly authorises/legitimises into existence, holds a monopoly over legitimate force that is both physical and symbolic (Brubaker & Cooper 2020). What is unresolved is the question of who is a person.