Conference Plenary: When Liberation Movements Become One-Dimensional: On Critical Theory and Intersectionality

Abstract

One of the great obstacles to liberation and social change is the one-dimensional focus of many liberation movements. By “one-dimensional,” we mean the narrow reductionist approach to social change by many oppressed groups. In this article, we examine Marcuse’s notion of catalyst groups and connect that to the concept of intersectionality. We argue that critical theory must become a theory of intersectionality. While various forms of oppression have their own distinct logic of operation and specific target group, the continuation of each form of oppression is supported by other forms of oppression. One of the goals of this plenary was to help participants focus on the theme of the conference, critique and praxis, by envisioning new possibilities for theory, critique, praxis, and pedagogy in our time. To this end, we attempted to rethink Marcuse’s notion of one-dimensional thinking by linking it with Rene Girard’s concept of mimetic rivalry and the black feminist concept of intersectionality.

Notes

¹ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 1.

² Herbert Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,” in Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (eds), The Essential Marcuse (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007), p. 64.

³ Ibid., 64–5.

⁴ Herbert Marcuse, “The Reification of the Proletariat,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds), Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 392.

⁵ Monique M. Morris, Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2014), p. 110.

⁶ Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in James M. Washington (ed), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986), p. 290.

⁷ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 10.

⁸ Karl Marx, “The German I deology,” in David McLellan (ed), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 192.

⁹ Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, Joan Riviere (trans), James Strachey (ed) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), p. 26.

¹⁰ Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, James Strachey (trans) (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), pp. 46–7.

¹¹ Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (trans) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 295.

¹² Ibid., 286.

¹³ Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 291–2.

¹⁴ Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women & the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 205.