Jennifer Nash’s introduction to Black Feminism Reimagined, “Feeling Black Feminism”, gives a detailed analysis and overview of the history and function of the term “intersectionality” in academic institutions.
When detailing the intellectual history of intersectionality, Nash posits that what has made the term “intersectionality” so important is its “…capacity to allow its reader to imagine its analytic import, to neatly and coherently represent a term that aspires to describe complexity…” (11). This, according to Nash, has given the term the ability to move across divisions within women’s studies and other disciplines– making it significant in terms of how widespread in use it has become. One point that Nash makes that caught my attention is when she mentions how “black feminist defensiveness” is rooted in how, institutionally, black women are perceived and treated as “saviors and world-ending figures” (13). In connection to this, Nash’s conversation of the ways in which academic institutions perceive the presence of black women as being essential to a narrative of progress, while simultaneously interpreting black feminism as unnecessary once the institution has successfully extracted/incorporated what is needed into its overall objectives is of interest.
This leads into the positioning of intersectionality as only being relevant when it is seen as an opposing force, or as a remedy to exclusive elements of white feminism. In other words, “intersectionality” as a term meant to describe the different levels of oppression faced by black women becomes stripped of this original meaning and dissociated from the black women academics who contributed to an understanding of it.