"The Institutional Life of Intersectionality, or Notes on Feminist Fatigue" with Jennifer Nash, George Washington University

Thursday, March 5, 2015 4:30 PM EST
Merten Hall, 1204

In this talk, Nash will examine how intersectionality, once considered a form of outsider-knowledge developed by women of color feminists, has moved "inside" and become an institutionalized form of feminist knowledge.  Yet intersectionality's dominance and ubiquity is marked by a paradox -- it is at once imagined as, in Kathy Davis's words, a “new raison d’etre for doing feminist theory and analysis,” and, in Jasbir Puar’s words as a “tool of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism.”  This talk seeks to explicate how women's studies both produces and sustains this paradox and to interrogate the racial politics of intersectionality's institutional forms.

Dr. Jennifer Nash is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies at George Washington University. She works in the areas of black feminism, black sexual politics, visual culture, and critical race theory. Her presentation will draw from her current project, “Black Feminism Remixed, on the Institutional life of Intersectionality,” and the relationship between black feminism and women's studies. Dr. Nash's work has been published in GLQ, Social Text, Feminist Review, Feminist Studies, and Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. Her first book, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, was published by Duke University Press in 2014.

Sponsored by Cultural Studies and African and African American Studies.