This talk aspires to historicize the present moment, one where intersectionality is celebrated as “part of the gender studies canon,” (Baca Zinn 2012) “the most cutting-edge approach to the politics of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class” (Hancock 2011), and “the most important contribution that women’s studies ... has made so far” (McCall 2005). In other words, the talk endeavors to understand a moment when intersectionality, a form of outsider-knowledge, has become institutionalized, conflated with diversity, and deployed by universities (and women’s studies departments and programs) to signal commitments to inclusion and difference. How and why did intersectionality come to institutional power in the early 2000s, and what institutional needs – in women’s studies, and in the university more broadly – did intersectionality’s emergence serve? 

Jennifer Nash is the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor at Duke University. She is the author of two books: The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014), which was awarded the Alan Bray Prize from the GLQ caucus of the Modern Language Association, and Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (2019), which was awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Her third book, Birthing Black Mothers, is forthcoming on Duke UP. She is also the editor of Gender: Love (2016), and the co-editor of Routledge Companion to Intersectionality (forthcoming). She has published articles in Signs, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, differences, GLQ, and Theory & Event. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia Society of Fellows, and the WEB Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

Veranstalterin

Cornelia Goethe Centrum für Frauenstudien und die Erforschung der Geschlechterverhältnisse (CGC)
Konzeption: Bettina Kleiner, Helma Lutz, Marianne Schmidbaur
Koordination: Lucas Schucht