Intersectionality and/or multiple consciousness: Re-thinking the analytical tools used to conceptualise and navigate personhood

abstract

Kimberley Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, read in the context of Black Feminist iterations, enables me to sift through the conflation of categories of analysis and praxis in three ways. Firstly, I analyse the purported tensions between Black Feminist theorists and decolonial feminist interpretations of intersectionality, and the attendant consequences of these. In so doing I navigate the fault-lines of the arguments articulated, and while acknowledging the merits of the critiques, I suggest that Black Feminist scholarship in conversation with decolonial feminist approaches may still yield possibilities for coalition which allow for subjectivity that breaks from colonial logics of essence and immutability. Secondly, I reflect on how intersectionality and the coloniality of gender have been taken up in legal discourse in South Africa, and in what ways the tensions and possibilities manifest and are navigated. I argue that fissures may be over-emphasised, replicating a divide and conquer mode of operation while simultaneously facilitating the, at times subtle, selective cooptation of these terms into liberal discourse. Finally, at the centre of this piece is the fact that personhood is the location from which meaning of the world is made and articulated – a question of ontology (Alcoff 2020). Despite the multiple meanings of personhood that suggest that it is both ambiguous and fluid, it has real implications in space/place and time interpersonally and/as structurally (Alcoff 2020). The law, authorised through the person of the state that it circularly authorises/legitimises into existence, holds a monopoly over legitimate force that is both physical and symbolic (Brubaker & Cooper 2020). What is unresolved is the question of who is a person.

keywords:

• personhood
• intersectionality
• decolonial
• feminism
• identity
• law

Introducing the person: Assimilating the logics?

A person writes this piece. A person reads it. While this may be obvious, it is loaded. Being a person, or personhood, signifies subjectivity, identity and has several possible meanings that could be synonymous or interrelated. How personhood is represented and interpreted by the person themselves or the next person determines its meaning. At the centre of this piece is the fact that personhood is the location from which meaning of the world is made and articulated – a question of ontology (Alcoff 2000). Despite the multiple meanings contained in personhood in a way that suggests that it is both ambiguous and fluid, it has real implications in space/place and time interpersonally and structurally (Alcoff 2000).

The question of who gets to decide who is a person and what this means is intimately tied to power (and/as authority) and agency (and/as freedom). The law has the power to determine who a person is and what the consequences of being a person are. It is authorised through the person of the state that it circularly authorises/legitimises into existence. In this way, the state has a monopoly over legitimate force, both physical and symbolic (Brubaker & Cooper 2020).

To begin to unpack this, I turn to the law of South Africa from where I write and from where you encounter me as a person. A legal person is “a legal subject [that] can be defined as a bearer of judicial capacities, subjective rights (including the appropriate entitlements) and legal duties” (Jordaan & Davel 1995, p. 3). The significance of being a person is “in the eyes of the law, both public and private … only a person can have rights and duties. This is the essential characteristic that distinguishes a person from a thing” and facilitates ‘legal intercourse’ with other persons (Boberg 1999, pp. 4-5). Personhood is differentiated into natural (ostensibly human) and juristic/artificial (the state and incorporated entities such as companies) persons (Boberg 1999). Technically, a human being is granted personhood once born alive and carries this till death (Boberg 1999, p. 12). As such, theoretically every human is a legal person (Boberg 1999).

While seminal South African textbooks recognise that not every human was recognised as a person, citing the example of Roman slaves and Roman Law, the argument is that this was never the case in this state, as slavery had been abolished by the time the Union of South Africa came into existence (Jordaan & Davel 1995). The implication is that the South African legal system, founded on Roman-Dutch law, recognised all humans as persons since its inception. What this argument elides is that the colonial-apartheid conventions, policies and legislation in operation in the territory of South Africa did not recognise every human as human and thus ‘excluded’ them from access to (legal) personhood. Human and person, while fashioned as neutral, was designed in the image of the coloniser (essentially white and male).

Access to personhood seemed to depend on concessionary recognition – for example, when white women challenged their inability to be admitted as attorneys and were denied on the basis that ‘person’ was interpreted to exclude ‘woman’ (Incorporated Law Society v Wookey 1912 AD 623). Later through legislative intervention white women were permitted to join the legal profession in 1923 and granted the vote in 1930, through assimilation of ‘woman’ into the category of person. Through non-recognition and/as erasure through the universal category of woman and black, women were excluded from the category of person. Sustained and varied forms of resistance won concessions. The justiciable right to equality that explicitly recognises discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, class and sexual orientation as automatically unfair, may be seen as one such (Hassim 2018, p. 343). Nonetheless, there has been no fundamental alteration of the concept of personhood itself. Instead, personhood appears to have been instrumentalised within the ‘politics of recognition’ that is characteristic of political and economic liberalisation and liberal constitutionalism characteristic of continental transition into independence from direct colonial administration (Ossome 2020, p. 163).

This latest constitutional intervention, which ostensibly ushered in a post-apartheid constitutional democracy, has been described as serving only to allow black elites to putatively assimilate into white status as human, continuing to exclude the majority of the black population (Madlingozi 2016). This split society into a democratic constitutional society that enjoys personhood and the attendant human rights and freedoms that define South Africa’s constitutional democracy, and those that remained within the colonial-apartheid created ontology of personhood. This continued bifurcation of human and non-human in society accounts for the paradox of continued violence, poverty and inequality, despite a seemingly progressive legislative and policy framework in this constitutional democracy (Lewis 2021).

The framing of both this reading and the categorical delineation of race and gender in the legal interventions that it speaks to, highlights the assumption that experiences of black women are accounted for in the category of black (and woman). This may be read as an example of the inadvertent replication of the logics that excluded black people from the category of human, revealing the erased subject position of the black woman that Pumla Gqola (2001) describes as “contradictory locations” given the tendency for binary to emerge between categorical black and woman.

Therefore, the uptake of the concept of ‘intersectionality’, as coined by Kimberle Crenshaw (1991), when navigating these legislative interventions that tend to privilege the already privileged within these subject positions is not surprising. Intersectionality has been deployed to render visible in law and politics “the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (Crenshaw 1991, p. 1241). Despite Crenshaw’s intervention emanating from the United States of America (USA), which is significantly politically and demographically different from South Africa, the uptake has been apparent.

While intersectionality has become popular in contexts extending to the legal and policy realms, it is not always clear to what end it is being deployed, nor even precisely what its parameters as a theoretical framework are. I will turn to reflect on some prominent critiques of intersectionality emerging inter and intra black and decolonial feminist thought, before considering the relationship of these to the evocation of intersectionality in African feminist theory through Sylvia Tamale’s Afro-Feminism. I hope to be able to draw out the tensions emergent from the critiques, before returning to the question of personhood, considering whether the conflicts emerging may actually be accounted for if the categories of analysis deployed in each are revisited with more particularity. I argue that this opens us up to consider more deliberately whether interventions are aimed at recognition or a radical reconfiguration of personhood and relations between humans. I conclude by suggesting that Angela Harris’ articulation of multiple consciousness may better serve the latter purpose.

Critiques of intersectionality: Conflicts of principle or purpose?

As a starting point we may consider Nash’s (2016) question of whether intersectionality as an analytical framework is concerned with structures or identities, and specifically whether it is intrinsically linked with the embodied experience of black women or attempts a general theorisation. Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) make the point that intersectionality has always been concerned with structural inequality and the implications of multiple overlapping identities rather than identity as a sole or even main concern. This distinction is significant, especially given the varied application and critiques of intersectionality that have emerged over time (Nash 2016). According to Nash, these interpretations and their application reveal a politics of reading that has implications on why intersectionality arose as a concept in the first place: the erasure of black women’s experiences by legal and political interventions in labour and anti-violence contexts.

Criticisms of intersectionality range from it being identity-based at the site of multiple sources of oppression faced by black women and thus necessarily committed to victimhood (Nash 2016), to the critique that disembodiment and tokenism have diluted its potential as a meaningful instrument for social justice (Bilge 2013). A further critique is that in its tendency towards being a theory accounting for multifarious identities, it has produced the additive approach to multiplicity that it was designed to critique, in this way merely reproducing a shopping-list of essentialised categories (Nash 2016).

Maria Lugones (2014) articulates a sustained decolonial feminist critique of intersectionality. Velez (2019) crisply articulates that at its core, Lugones’ critique of Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality is twofold. The first is that the language of intersectional and interlocking takes for granted, even conceptually, the categories of gender and race as separable (Lugones 2014; Velez 2019). The risk, according to Lugones, is colonised women losing themselves in internalising the idea that they are merely fragments of essential wholes: ‘white women’ and ‘non-white men’ (Lugones 2014). Velez agrees that this critique is misplaced, especially since Crenshaw herself elaborated intersectional positions as an intervention against seeing the categories of gender and race as mutually exclusive or divisible (Crenshaw 1991; Velez 2019).

The second critique is that colonised women cannot be either ‘woman’ or ‘black’ as these terms are deliberately coded to convey attachment to ‘white’ and ‘man’ respectively (Lugones 2011; Velez 2019). Lugones makes reference to Soujorner Truth’s provocation ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ to suggest that the colonial logics that actively erase woman of colour mean that the answer to the question is no (Lugones 2011; Velez 2019). Lugones argues that colonised peoples were excluded from contemplations of the category of woman as much as they were from that of human (Lugones 2011; Velez 2019). In making this critique, Lugones acknowledges the opportunity that Black Feminist thought facilitates in showing the disjuncture between women of colour and gender contending, “Even though understandings of the relation between colonization and racialized gender oppression have been part of the formulations of Women of Color feminisms, it has not been clear how colonization has affected the meaning of ‘woman’” (Lugones 2011, p. 72; Velez 2019).

Velez argues that the concept of the ‘coloniality of gender’ formulated by Lugones is an important contribution to how mutually constituting categories of race and gender are produced by coloniality as an intrinsically white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist enterprise (Lugones 2011; Velez 2019).

While this encapsulation of Lugones’ critiques and contributions are insightful, Velez stops short of reading the encapsulation together to potentially reveal a deeper tension between Lugones’ reading of intersectionality and the coloniality of gender, this being the politics of recognition through reform versus dismantling the system towards a world where other worlds are possible. In other words, while applying intersectionality may be seen as an attempt to get a foot in the door of a building called home, Lugones is arguing that the building should not be there. The reformist vision perhaps sees the building as capable of housing everyone – thus the goal is inclusion. The tension, while not representative of all strands of Black Feminist thought, is one that is significant in thinking through the purpose of deploying intersectionality as a theoretical instrument. I submit that this also reveals the conceptual conflation between dimensions of identity or subjectivity being navigated through intersectionality and the coloniality of gender. Each may have its place, but the context and aim for which it deployed matters to the consequences of its circulation.

The conflation may be accounted for by the fact that they are arguably using the same pivot – identity’s relationship to personhood – to describe different things, which have in travels and reiterations been conflated with categorical identification on the one hand and self-understanding on the other (Brubaker & Cooper 2000).

Nash’s (2016) concern with placing the value of intersectionality in its ability to account for all subject positions is that its purpose at securing redress through making visible the positionality of black women is lost. This neutral framing of intersectionality must be read within a racial politics that shifts attention away from the embodied experience of the black woman (Nash 2016).

The criticism of disappearing black woman made against intersectionality resonates with the charge against Lugones’ articulation of decolonial feminism as “pornotroping” and ventriloquising black women (Terrefe 2020). This erasure and ventriloquising is done through reduction of the contributions of Black Feminist theorists to a reductive interpretation of intersectionality on the one hand, and the selective use of Black Feminist literature to make that critique, as well as to develop the coloniality of gender on the other hand. Terrefe exposes how Lugones’ articulation of decolonial feminism’s aspirations of overcoming the coloniality of gender is premature, reading Lugones’ critiques of intersectionality, reductive of complex context and history, as attempting to provide an overriding theory of identity that erases black women (Terrefe 2020). While this critique is convincing and resonates with aspects of Velez’s concerns with the framing of Lugones’ misplaced critique of intersectionality, it also highlights the fact that we may be having parallel conversations due to the absence of specificity of the particular outcomes sought in relation to the categories of analysis deployed, and perhaps the categories themselves.

For example, if we read Lugones’ attempts to disavow what she theorises as the fiction of the category of woman, and its exclusion of colonised bodies on a global scale, part of both the possibilities and limitations in decolonial feminism as articulated is coalition building across colonised peoples. Arguably, where identity conflates the interaction between categories of practice and analysis, these categories needn’t be mutually exclusive, but without the necessarily contextual delineation of how they interact, conflating the terms ‘women of colour’ or ‘colonised peoples’ could bear the same critique that Lugones poses to fragmenting the terms ‘black’ and ‘woman’. However, the converse is also true: that ‘black woman’ could sustain the same critique that Terrefe (2020) levels against Lugones’ use of ‘women of colour feminisms’, ‘African’ and ‘Native’. Employed without context, either set of terms could have the same erasing effect that ‘woman’ or ‘person’ does. The question, without attempting to derive a solution here so much as highlight the effect of the absence of conceptual clarity, is perhaps whether the decolonised subject position that Lugones attempts to articulate and navigate is a reductive metonym or is it trying to do different work (Terrefe 2020, p. 145)? Prior to becoming categorically black, native and woman, is there merit in providing vocabulary that invites us to interrogate the logics of these categories (Oyěwùmí 1997; Mudimbe 1988). The idea that these categories themselves, real in one sense, need to be anticipated as fictions in order to be transcended appears to be a perennial tension in theorising oppression (Brown 1995).

Due to the plasticity of the category of identity and categories synonymously or interactively deployed alongside it, the critiques could conceivably apply to analytical category in several contexts, depending on what they are deployed to achieve (i.e. coalition building in political community versus engagement with a public, authoritatively imposed category). I am not suggesting that there is absolute categorical separation or absence of connection; however, the absence of clarity makes it difficult to assess whether we are actually part of the same conversation or if it is doing the work it sets out to do.

The weight of Nash’s (2016) intervention can be captured in her troubling of the distinction between identity and structure. She states that the operation of power on representation and the structural implications thereof are not as clearly distinguishable as has been suggested (Nash 2016). She draws on MacKinnon (2013, p. 1019), who makes the point that intersectionality has long been concerned with redress and representation in respect of the people and experiences that power erases through restoring the “the embodied knowledges of the multiply-marginalised” (Nash 2016). It appears that there is no neutral or absolute reading of intersectionality, and we should be cognizant that “we are all making the analytic as we deploy, critique, or safeguard it’ (MacKinnon 2013, p. 1019; Nash 2016).

With this in mind, when Sylvia Tamale argues for adopting an intersectional approach that appreciates the manner in which systems of oppression interact to co-constitute race and gender rather than viewing them along singe-axis, and she breaks from the argument for assimilation into the category of person, what is happening with intersectionality (Tamale 2020)? She invokes it in this context as a means to move beyond binaries in pursuing social justice that opens up different ways of being in the world and relating to each other (Tamale 2020). Departing from an African Feminist theoretical orientation (what Tamale calls Afro-Feminism), which explicitly draws on revolutionary Black Feminist theory and decolonial feminist theory, this invocation of intersectionality suggests that it can be instrumenalised towards an end beyond mere assimilation into a predefined category of personhood and attendant system. This suggests that intersectionality has utility in serving to interrogate the parameters of subjectivity. In this way, she expresses an explicitly different aim of the category of person.

I contend that an important part of Tamale’s manoeuvre in bringing intersectionality and the coloniality of gender together cohesively is the call to go beyond seeking equality as an end. She argues that liberal constructions of equality tend to play into the logics of incorporation into personhood (an individual in fatal competition with other individuals who is modelled against the white male comparator) (Tamale 2020). hooks (1984, p. 13) problematises this logic as follows:

Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to? Do women share a common vision of what equality means? Implicit in this simplistic definition of women's liberation is a dismissal of race and class as factors that, in conjunction with sexism, determine the extent to which an individual will be discriminated against, exploited, or oppressed.

This definition suggests that the aim ought not to be mobility into the privilege enjoyed by white men but rather the goal of “eradication of elitism in all human relationships” which would collapse categorical hierarchy in society (hooks 1984).

Identity matters: Purposive analytical tools

On the methodologies of resistance, Nash (2008, p. 10) reflects on how “a nuanced conception of identity recognizes the ways in which positions of dominance and subordination work in complex and intersecting ways to constitute a subject’s experiences of personhood.” Identity can be described as a hermeneutic that allows navigation of a social (and political) location from which we attempt to understand and know the world, and situates the harm of identity-based oppression as the tendency to “disallow the individual negotiation and interpretation of identity’s social meanings” (Alcoff 2000, pp. 22-23), and furthermore

To self-identify even by a racial or sexed designation is again not merely to accept the sad fact of oppression but to understand one’s relationship to a historical community, to recognize one’s objective social location, and to assert one’s own power to negotiate the meaning and implications of one’s identity (Alcoff 2000, p. 25).

To this end, Alcoff (2000, p. 25) suggests that a realistic identity politics must be “dynamic, variable, and negotiated”.

How is this achieved without replicating essentialist logics on the one hand, or creating vacuously ambiguous constructions on the other? Alcoff (2000, pp. 20-21) distinguishes between interrelated but metaphysically discernable dimensions of public identity “by which one is hailed, interpellated, and categorized” and private identity, “my own sense of myself, my lived experience of my self, or my interior life”. This distinction is helpful in negotiating the source from which the position being navigated emanates and deliberately engaging in the relationship between the two, but still offers flexibility that while useful at times may generate the kind of analytical ambiguity that causes parallel conversations on identity through assumptions of shared meaning and purpose.

Brubaker and Cooper (2000) suggest that this plasticity of the term identity (which literally denotes sameness even if employed as fluid) results in limitations of ambiguity and contradiction that curtail its utility as an analytical tool without suggesting that it is not an effective political tool. In so doing they cause us to reflect on the work it is meant to do and its efficacy at achieving that. They question, given the range of analytical functions it seeks to serve, whether it would make more sense to disaggregate the term into those that more effectively convey the analytical purposes for which they are deployed (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). This is not to dismiss the necessity for specific claims, but to consider how to frame them in a way that allows greater conceptual clarity (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). They argue that this opens up analytical and political imagination and understanding (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). One analytical maneuver is to prefer ‘identification’ to ‘identity’ in that the verb conveys the processual nature of the category and avoids reifying it as constant sameness. Importantly, “it invites us to specify who is doing the identifying” (Brubaker & Cooper 2000, p. 14).

Such identification may be ‘relational’ (“to position oneself (or another) in a relational web”) or ‘categorical’ (“to identify oneself (or another) by membership in a class of persons sharing some categorical attribute”) (Brubaker & Cooper 2000, p. 15). Self-identification and categorical identification are interactive, but do not necessarily correlate; categorical identification is external identification that is “formalized, codified, objectified systems of categorization developed by powerful, authoritative institutions” (Brubaker & Cooper 2000, p. 15).

This structurally determined and purportedly universal categorical identification can be read against the more varied conception of situated subjectivity that is concerned with self-understanding or social location, that does not necessarily imply the Eurocentric unitary self (Brubaker & Cooper 2000, p. 18):

Self-understandings may be variable across time and across persons, but they may be stable. Semantically, ‘identity’ implies sameness across time or persons; hence the awkwardness of continuing to speak of ‘identity’ while repudiating the implication of sameness. ‘Self-understanding’,’ by contrast, has no privileged semantic connection with sameness or difference.

In disaggregating the term collective identity, the authors propose “‘Commonality’ connoting sharing common a, ‘connectedness’ the relational ties that link people. Neither commonality nor connectedness alone engenders ‘groupness’ the sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded, solidary group” (Brubaker & Cooper 2000, p. 19). This suggests that commonality and connectedness may confer groupness, but not necessarily the other way around.

This clarity of analytical intention and purpose seeks to provide analytical leverage over identity as something that is simultaneously real, concrete, constructed, contextual, not essential, categorical and fluid. It allows articulation and analysis in a manner that does not empty the categories of meaning or increase tacitly reifying or essentialising concepts, thus replicating the tendencies we attempt to critique. It also makes it easier to navigate commonalities and divergence in discourse that allows us to appreciate whether, while deploying ostensibly similar or the same analytical terms, we are actually utilising them to understand and convey different content and aspirations.

It also potentially allows for clearer delineation between material and structural conditions of oppression, and their relationship to identifications employed. This allows us to frame interventions and discussions strategically, while keeping that strategy attentive to what normative and ethical commitments of navigating what being in the world entails.

Concluding thoughts: Proffering multiple consciousness rather than intersectionality in reconceptualising personhood

The analytical leverage that the disaggregated vocabulary around identification provides allows us to reconsider the utility of intersectionality in pursuing self-understanding. It makes way for more just ways of relating in a world where categorical identification has real purchase on our lives individually and collectively. I submit Black Feminist theorist Angela Harris’s (1990, p. 584) argument that we should not assume a unitary self, but rather move from the position that we are made up of selves that are “partial, sometimes contradictory, or even antithetical ‘selves’”. If we are to attain a self, it is through intention (Harris 1990, p. 584). As such, multiple consciousness is “a process in which propositions are constantly put forth, challenged and subverted” (Matsuda 1989; Harris 1990, p. 584).

Distinguishing the fluidity of multiple consciousness from an essential conception of self emphasises that difference is always relational and contingent, and requires navigation that is alive to this. It recognises that we are not fragmented, nor coherent in a binary sense. This motion allows us to confront the complexities of our own implication in categorical logics, including anti-blackness and sexism, in ways that recognise that there is no version of ourselves that is more or less real unless we make it so (Harris 1990, p. 611). To this end, “‘essential self’ is always an invention; the evil is denying its artificiality” (Harris 1990, p. 611).

The ethical commitment therein is to deliberately construct and navigate the self in a manner that is true to the commitment to destabilise oppressive hierarchies and articulate them as the time, place and context demand, departing from the premise: What person am I?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara

CHARMIKA SAMARADIWAKERA-WIJESUNDARA is a senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) School of Law, researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Hague, and attorney of the High Court of the Republic of South Africa. She was previously a Research and Teaching Associate, and associate researcher of the Business and Human Rights Programme of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Wits. She completed her LLB (with distinction) and LLM (by dissertation) at Wits and is currently pursuing her PhD through the Wits and ISS joint PhD programme. Email: [email protected]