Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T11:11:35.729Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about Intersectionality?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2012

Kevin Duong
Kevin Duong
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“What does queer theory teach us about x?” ask Berlant and Warner (1995). “As difficult as it would be to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames” (p. 348). This challenge comes from an early essay published to circumvent queer theory's appropriation. Its power “to wrench frames” is what I am posing to intersectional research, not only to reflect on what intersectionality has allowed feminists to accomplish but also to identify some existing shortcomings in the scope and domain of its employment. Because there is little disputing intersectionality's theoretical contribution to feminist research in the past decades—one scholar calls it “the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies . . . has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771)—it is important for us to take stock of the sorts of political problems that intersectional scholarship has addressed and the ones to which it has often been inattentive.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 370 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, Parveen, and Cowie, Elizabeth, eds. 1990. The Woman in Question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ahmed, Sarah. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 1991. The Anatomy of National Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 2002. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics.” In Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Brown, Wendy, and Halley, Janet. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 105–33.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren, and Warner, Michael. 1995. “What Can Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110: 343–49.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren, and Warner, Michael. 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 547–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bersani, Leo. 1987. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43: 197–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1998. “Merely Cultural.” New Left Review I (227): 33–44.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chambers, Samuel. 2007. “‘An Incalculable Effect’: Subversions of Heteronormativity.” Political Studies 55 (3): 656–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chambers, Samuel. 2009. The Queer Politics of Television. New York: I. B. Tauris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chambers, Samuel, and O'Rourke, Michael. 2009. “Jacques Ranciére on the Shores of Queer Theory.” Borderlands 8 (2): 1–19.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Cathy. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Cathy. 2010. Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Copjec, Joan. 1990. “m/f, or Not Reconciled.” In The Woman in Question, ed. Adams, Parveen and Cowie, Elizabeth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 10–18.Google Scholar
Copjec, Joan. 1994. Reading My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dietz, Mary. 2002. Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, Politics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Eng, David. 2010. Feeling Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Ferree, Myra Marx. 2009. “Feminist Practice Meets Feminist Theory.” Sociological Theory 27 (1): 75–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, Richard Thompson. 2007. “What's Queer about Race?” South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (3): 477–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Frank, Jason. 2010. Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1998. “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler.” New Left Review I (228): 140–49.Google Scholar
Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Glaeser, Andreas. 2009. “The Institutional Foundations of Free Action.” Sociological Theory 27 (1): 81–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Halperin, David. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Halperin, David. 2003. “The Normalization of Queer Theory.” In Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to Queering the Discipline(s), ed. Yep, Gust A.Lovaas, E., and Elia, John P.. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park, 339–43.Google Scholar
Hanchard, Michael. 1998. “Jody.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 473–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Research Paradigm.” Politics & Gender 3 (2): 248–54.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1993. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End.Google Scholar
Kalyvas, Andreas. 2005. “Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and Constituent Power.” Constellations 12 (2): 223–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacquer, Thomas. 1992. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lucal, Betsy. 1999. “What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System.” Gender & Society 13 (6): 781–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luft, Rachel E. 2009. “Intersectionality and the Risk of Flattening Difference: Gender and Race Logics, and the Strategic Use of Antiracist Singularity.” In The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class, & Gender, ed. Berger, Michelle Tracy, and Kathleen, Guidroz.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 100–17.Google Scholar
Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31: 83–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (3): 1771–1800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McWhorter, Ladelle. 2009. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12 (3): 333–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Narayan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Patten, Alan. 2011. “Rethinking Culture: The Social Lineage Account.” American Political Science Review 105 (4): 735–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Risman, Barbara J. 2004. “Gender as a Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with Activism.” Gender & Society 18 (4): 429–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothschild, Cynthia. 2005. “Written Out: How Sexuality Is Used to Attack Women's Organizing.” New York: International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the Center forWomen's Global Leadership.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Reiter, Reyna R.New York: Monthly Review Press, 157–210.Google Scholar
Salamon, Gayle. 2006. “Boys of the Lex: Transgenderism and Rhetorics of Materiality.” GLQ 12 (4): 575–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Anna Marie. 2007. Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary, Nelson, and Lawrence, Grossberg.Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “The Burden of English.” In Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Breckenridge, Carol and van der Veer, Peter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George. 2009. “The New Aesthetic-Political Avant-Garde: Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.” Sociological Theory 27 (1): 85–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stockton, Katherine Bond. 2006. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, Michael. 1999. “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage.” GLQ 5 (2): 119–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Watney, Simon. 1987. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Wilder, Gary. 2009. “Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia.” Public Culture 21 (1):101–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zerilli, Linda. 1998. “Doing without Knowing: Feminism's Politics of the Ordinary.” Political Theory 24 (4): 435–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zerilli, Linda. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar