At a time when hashtags such as #CiteBlackWomen and #SayHerName are regularly circling our scholarly circles, Anna Carastathis makes a necessary intervention by stressing the importance of listening closely to black women scholars and, more broadly, women of color. Carastathis, a Greek woman who identifies with neither mainstream white academia nor with scholars of color, writes this work with the intention of expressing her “identity-loneliness, [her] lack of community, but also [her] gratitude to Black feminisms” (xvi). Focusing on the crucial theoretical framework of “intersectionality” as first proposed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Carastathis asserts that Crenshaw’s work is often evoked as a “corrective to exclusion within feminist theory and politics” (4). In other words, this theory is often employed as a way to claim inclusion of those cast to the margins, but in actuality it is an empty assertion that does little to advance the inequities within the ivory tower, both in practice and in our writings. By focusing on reading and listening over speaking and writing, Carastathis aims to read Crenshaw’s work closely in relation to the critical work of other women of color rather than perpetuating the cycle of misinterpretations and misappropriations (ix).
Carastathis opens her critical reading of Crenshaw’s work by first placing intersectionality within the recent history of black feminist thought. In particular, she considers the black feminist theories of double, triple, and multiple jeopardy, as well as interlocking oppressions. From this examination, she asserts that intersectionality is not merely synonymous with these theories but rather builds on and contributes to each critical theoretical intervention. She then moves on in chapters 2 and 3 to examine two portions of Crenshaw’s writings that are most often overlooked: the basement metaphor in Crenshaw’s 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” and a footnote in the seminal 1991 text “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,” in which she names intersectionality a “provisional concept.” By focusing on these two moments in Crenshaw’s writing, Carastathis refutes both the common misinterpretation of intersectionality as synonymous with theories like interlocking oppression, and the misuse of intersectionality to claim that academic scholarship is in a post-racial moment—a task a “provisional concept” cannot accomplish. In the fourth chapter, Carastathis synthesizes the critiques against intersectionality into eight succinct categories, and addresses each claim by closely reading both Crenshaw’s work and the critiques of it. By the close of this chapter, Carastathis renders most of these critiques as overly critical and built on a misreading of Crenshaw’s theorizations.
In chapter 5, Carastathis expands on Crenshaw’s conceptualization of identity as coalitions through an archival case study of the organization Somos Hermanas (We are Sisters) and their transnational coalition building in the 1980s. Then, in her sixth and final chapter, Carastathis aims to intervene in the “disciplinary segregation of minoritized, women-of-color, Black and indigenous feminisms,” by considering how intersectionality fits within decolonial feminist frameworks (201). This final chapter serves to conclude Carastathis’ close reading of intersectionality through the assertion that intersectionality enables us as scholars to create space for solidarity within black, Indigenous, and women-of-color social and political movements that are otherwise segregated within the academy.
The strength of Carastathis’s text is her careful placing of numerous women of color in conversation with one another. Throughout her text, she heavily quotes and cites women of color, which is a political move that counteracts the citational erasure most women of color experience in academic writings. Further, her citational practices go beyond casual in-text citations and strive to directly quote each author. While her direct quotes can feel excessive at times they are necessary given Carastathis’s objective of listening over speaking. By directly quoting so many scholars of color, Carastathis creates space for those most marginalized in our scholarly conversations. Moreover, this engagement with so many voices allows Carastathis to debunk a secondary argument in her text: academic scholarship is not in a “post-racial,” moment regardless of how many women of color appear in our bibliographies.
Yet, Carastathis’s reliance on lofty theoretical frameworks over lived experience is at times frustrating given black feminisms’ emphasis on lived experience. In her preface, Carastathis considers the impact of her own lived experience on her writings about intersectionality. However, this is the only moment in her book that Carastathis integrates her lived experience into her arguments. While I understand Carastathis’s hesitancy to integrate more of herself into her arguments, given her positionality as a non-black Greek woman, I believe her work could still be enhanced by citing the lived experiences of women of color in the academy. The majority of her book focuses on placing theories and theorists in conversation, with little attention to the grounded implications of intersectionality as a theory. Her fifth chapter does attempt to integrate lived experience into her analysis, by considering the archival legacy of Somos Hermanas, but the remainder of her text has little to no engagement with intersectionality in the present moment. This lack of engagement left me as a reader unsatisfied. How has the term “intersectionality” been co-opted and misused in activist circles? How are women of color repeatedly marginalized in the ivory tower, despite mentions of “intersectionality” in mission statements and departmental philosophies? How does the burden of carrying an intersectional identity, as Crenshaw describes, become a reality when women of color go before their tenure review with harsher student evaluations, citational erasure, and the burden of supplemental “care work” for students of color? While other works on intersectionality do engage with these questions, I believe Carastathis’s text could benefit by addressing these questions as well.
Overall, Carastathis’s citational practices and the subsequent conversations she generates are a vital intervention in this current moment in academia. For both novices and experts in black feminist theories, this book is a crucial review of the literature for all academics at any stage of their career, especially those scholars naming their work as “intersectional.”
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[Review length: 997 words • Review posted on March 13, 2020]