Intersectionality in Transnational Contexts
On July 2nd, 2024, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda hosted its second virtual teach-in titled “Intersectionality in Transnational Contexts,” facilitated by Dr. Brittney Cooper.
Using June Jordan's “Report from the Bahamas” as a grounding text, this session considered whether intersectionality's core analytic frames of race, class, and gender travel well and whether they create a generative and productive basis for building transnational Black feminist solidarity.
Key lines of inquiry Dr. Brittney Cooper pursued in this teach-in included:
· Is intersectionality a useful analytic for building transnational Black feminist solidarity?
· What are some ways that American understandings of race, class, and gender work against the building of such coalitions?
· How does Black feminism help us mediate between what Jordan calls our "common identity" and the "individual identities" we may choose when our choices change?
Throughout this teach-in, Dr. Cooper urged a re-thinking of intersectionality, not as a totalizing theory of identity, but as an account of structural power and a theory for understanding violence.
“To treat intersectionality as an account of identity is to shear the framework of its radical potential and make it easily co-optable for neoliberal aims.”
In our post-session handout, we wrote that the Combahee River Collective (CRC) articulated the contours and substance of what we recognize today as "intersectionality," further developed and popularized by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
The CRC responded to the peripheralising of Black women's specific positionality across multiple categories of oppression in the civil rights movement, as well as the women's movement, which recognised “Black men” and “White women” respectively as the quintessential aggrieved subject in race-related and gender/sex-related matters.
Referencing Crenshaw, Dr. Cooper asserted that the“failure to begin with an intersectional frame would always result in insufficient attention to Black women’s experiences of subordination. She did not argue for the converse, namely, that intersectionality would fully and wholly account for the range or depth of Black female experiences.”
Read the post-session handout here for more takeaways
About Dr. Cooper
Brittney Cooper is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies. Prof. Cooper is also the Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab at Rutgers.
Her books include Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, winner of the 2018 Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians; the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood (co-authored with Susana Morris and Chanel Craft Tanner) a Kirkus top Young Adult Book of 2021 and a nominee for the Garden State Teen Book Award from the New Jersey Library Association; Stand Up!: 10 Mighty Women Who Made a Change; and The Crunk Feminist Collection (co-edited with Susana Morris and Robin Boylorn).
Cooper co-founded the Crunk Feminist Collective, a Hip Hop Generation Feminist Collective of Women of Color Activists and Scholars. They ran the highly successful Crunk Feminist Collective Blog which was named a top blog by New York Magazine in 2011. Today, they co-edit The Remix, a weekly substack newsletter.
