Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements

• Published in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Vol. 38; no. 4; pp. 869 - 892
• Main Author: Lewis, Gail
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago University of Chicago Press 01-06-2013; University of Chicago, acting through its Press
• Subjects: Archives; Black people; Class Politics; Community; Constituents; Europe; Feminism; Feminist theory; Knowledge; Multiculturalism; Political debate; Political discourse; Race; Racism; Sex; Sexual Inequality; Social Structure; Society; Subjectivity; Travel; U.S.A; Europe
• ISSN: 0097-9740; 1545-6943
• DOI: 10.1086/669609

Taking as its starting point the success of the concept of intersectionality in generating feminist inquiry in Europe, this article explores the disavowal and displacement of race that have accompanied intersectionality as it has traveled across the Atlantic. In a context in which race continues to be a structuring principle in European societies, the article explores some implications for feminist practice. It argues that such disavowal and displacement has several effects: it serves to ghettoize race as meaning-making and a site of knowledge production, it silences and subordinates those identified with the genesis of intersectionality as an analytic, and it occludes whiteness as a racialized and racializing category. Working within a psychodynamics-of-organization and black feminist frame, it argues that this has profound implications for interactions among feminists racialized as white and of color as they encounter each other in spaces of feminist infrastructure.