Feminist thought and practice were fundamentally alltered when radical — Intersectionality

"The emergence of the "post-" links both transnationalism and intersectionality to a kind of past tense. ... If the past tense of these terms is, in part, secured by "newer" work that challenges the hegemony of these terms, it is also secured through the fantasies of "political completion" that have swirled around the terms. ... The impossibility that any analytic can perform or produce "political completion" means that both intersectionality and transnationalism have been bemoaned and criticized for what they cannot ever accomplish. ... Because both analytics have been posited as correctives, both are imagined as exhaustible or finite. ... This conception of these analytics is at odds with the analytics themselves, both of which call for ongoing feminist engagements with questions of power, dominance, and subordination."

"Women’s studies has long constructed black feminism as a form of discipline inflicted on the field and has imagined black feminists as a set of disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape with their demands for a feminism that accounts for race generally, and for black women specifically. Of course, in an account where black women’s primary labor is to remedy—and perhaps even to save—the field from itself, ... once the field has effectively reconfigured itself, black feminism is imagined as no longer necessary or vital. Nowhere has this simplistic construction unfolded more visibly than in the context of intersectionality."

"abounds in the writings of , reinforcing and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries. Past feminist refusal to draw attention to and attack suppressed the link between race and class. Yet class structure in American society has been shaped by the of ; it is only by analyzing racism and its function in capitalist society that a thorough understanding of class relationships can emerge. Class struggle is inextricably bound to the struggle to end racism."

"[W]hile intersectionality is a good tool to orient empirical analysis, since it prevents any sort of reductionism (e.g. class or race being the factor that explains everything), there is the risk of losing something about the specificity of women’s oppression. If all forms of oppression are meant to intersect with one another, does it even make sense to speak about ‘feminism’? If lists are ever expanding, what is so specific about women’s condition? What are we saying when we say ‘women’? Is that word not in itself surreptitiously suggesting a heteronormative gender distinction between women and men that can itself be a source of oppression for those who identify themselves as neither men nor women? Can we talk about the specific condition of women, and justify a distinctively feminist position, without falling into the trap of heteronormativity or, even worse, essentialism?"