Affirming Fissures: Conceptualizing Intersectional ‘Ethnic’ Feminism in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

ABSTRACT Intersectionality, as scholarship and praxis, has traversed boundaries far beyond its roots in Black American feminism into population groups whose histories of marginalization are vastly different to those envisioned by Kimberlé Crenshaw. In translation, intersectionality can articulate with new clarity the voices of the invisibilized but also reveal fundamental fissures. This article discusses these contradictions in the context of “ethnic” populations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Comprising 17% of the total population, ethnic groups are peoples who come from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. In this article, I set out to interrogate the viability of an Antipodean ethnic feminism given the distinct backdrop of white-settler colonialism, biculturalism, and multiculturalism extant in contemporary New Zealand. I point to five “fault lines” – around positioning, culture, minoritization, place and the subject – where conceptual clarity will deepen ethnic feminism’s theoretical roots and relevance for NZ’s fastest growing population group.