Undermining Intersectionality: The Perils of Powerblind Feminism

by Barbara Tomlinson

Overview

In this provocative book, esteemed scholar Barbara Tomlinson asserts that intersectionality—the idea that categories such as gender, race, and class create overlapping systemsof oppression—is consistently misinterpreted in feminist argument. Despite becoming a central theme in feminist scholarship and activism, Tomlinson believes dominant feminism has failed to fully understand the concept.

Undermining Intersectionality reveals that this apparent paradox is the result of the disturbing racial politics underlying more than two decades of widely-cited critiques of intersectionality produced by prominent white feminist scholars who have been insufficiently attentive to racial dynamics. As such, feminist critiques of intersectionality repeatedly reinforce racial hierarchies, undermining academic feminism’s supposed commitment to social justice. Tomlinson offers a persuasive analysis of the rhetorics and conventions of argument used in these critiques to demonstrate their systematic reliance on “powerblind” discursive practices. 

Undermining Intersectionality concludes by presenting suggestions about concrete steps feminist researchers, readers, authors, and editors can take to promote more productive and principled engagements with intersectional thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439916513
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	08/17/2020
Edition description:	1
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Barbara Tomlinson is Research Professor Emeritus of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. She is the author of Authors on Writing Metaphors and Intellectual Labor; Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist; and (with George Lipsitz) Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Interrogating Critiques of Intersectionaliry 1

2 Category Anxiety 28

3 Metaphor Anxiety 52

4 Legitimating Powerblindness 76

5 The Vise of Geometry 97

6 Intersectionality Telephone and the Canyon of Echoes 119

7 The Invisible White Woman 148

8 Colonizing Intersectionaliry 167

9 Affect and the Epistemic Machine 184

10 Turning Off the Epistemic Machine 210

Notes 229

References 243

Index 263