Institutionalizing the Margins

“Institutionalizing the Margins” treats intersectionality as a feminist orientation in time, as an analytic that powerfully describes both what women’s studies could be and what women’s studies has already become, that speaks about the discipline’s aspirations and progress. The paper traces two ways that intersectionality is used by feminist scholars to speak about feminist time: the movement of intersectionality toward the inevitable future (what I call feminism-future) and the location of intersectionality in an already transcended past (what I call feminism-past). The paper argues that the logics of feminism-future and feminism-past share often-invisible racialized ideologies: an insistence that intersectionality’s investment in black women’s embodied experience is suspect.