For nearly a year now I’ve been laboring in Critical Theory, trying to get a handle on it and I think I hit one of the most depressing plateaus. Not so much with the Theory, but with how the praxis (that is supposed to be based on the theory) is justified by activist types. “Intersectional” is one of those buzz words that gets a lot of use in some communities and I harbored a deep suspicion that it was only being used by people as a signaling device; letting their fellows know that they are with the band, so to speak. Well I’ve finally gotten to a point where I came across how this term and idea was introduced and implemented by Kim Crenshaw. Using it as a device to track legal actors in the specific context of domestic violence against women is pretty clever and it certainly has its merits. But then the limitations becoming glaringly obvious when you take that same set of tools and go to a larger context. You cannot critique culture with these limited tools, you can give no insights into the human condition if you fall into crass human essentialism. The boxes in the forms at the Equal Opportunity office only reflect a contingent and structural problem; they do not define individuals on any meaningful level. Crenshaw herself says similar things in regards to her contributions to South African policy concerning race and how and why she could not simply import her previous work across the ocean. Another hard lesson about skipping discourse for education and going straight to the texts that originally motivated that discourse; the fruits reveal nothing about the tree that bore them. The fruit can only tell you about the fruit and nothing else. Newman reflects my mood.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:20:50 +0000
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