NASH, Jennifer C.
black feminism reimagined after intersectionality

Of course there is a flip side - or multiple flip sides - to the ''progress'' narrative. If black feminist theory enabled the field to ''progress'', and if black feminist theory's main contribution was a demand for inclusion, then the labor of the field is complete and black feminist theory is no longer relevant or requiered in the way it once was. As Hemmings suggests, the underside of progress is also loss, a melancholic sense that the imagined demands of black feminsim, and of black women, have produced the loss of the simplistic and coherent categrory of gender as the centerpiece of our work. Black women's demands, then, have fractured feminism. This anxiety is particularly visible in debates about intersectionality's imagined goal of capturing an impossible ''etc.,'' an account of the social universe that can attend to the unending complexity of both identity and the social world.

Published by Duke University Press, 2019
Feminism / Essays