Shifting analytics and linking theories: A conversation about the “meaning-making” of intersectionality and transnational feminism

Women's Studies International Forum 50 (2015) 1–10

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Shifting analytics and linking theories: A conversation about the “meaning-making” of intersectionality and transnational feminism Sylvanna M. Falcón a,⁎, Jennifer C. Nash b a b

Department of Latin American & Latino/a Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA American Studies Department, George Washington University, 2108 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online xxxx

s y n o p s i s Transnational feminism and intersectionality have been widely celebrated in women's studies and feminist scholarship as a theory, framework, and politics. As antiracist feminist scholars who research and teach in these areas, this conversational essay grapples with the shifting meanings of these analytics within our research and how we have experienced their institutionalization in women's studies and related fields. This essay explores the “desires” – to borrow Robyn Wiegman's language – that underpin feminist engagement with transnationalism and intersectionality and considers the potential spaces of intellectual coexistence between intersectionality and transnational feminism, especially given how they have traveled and circulated across the humanities and social sciences. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Our conversation about intersectionality and transnationalism is situated in a moment we might call the unfolding present. It is a moment marked by the institutionalization of women's studies in the U.S. academy (Kennedy Lapovsky & Beins, 2005), the interdisciplinary circulation of the field's leading analytics (intersectionality and transnational feminism), and the fetishization of the rhetoric of diversity (Ahmed, 2012). As antiracist feminist scholars of color who share a curiosity about how intersectionality and transnational feminism animate our scholarship and politics, and shape the disciplines that we call home, this conversation is, then, always already about the field of women's studies, its critical practices, investments, divestments, and narrative strategies. These are important moments in the history of women's studies in the U.S. academy, moments where the field is increasingly theorizing itself, its dominant narratives, and its

⁎ Corresponding author.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.010 0277-5395/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

intellectual and political attachments (see Hemmings, 2011; Wiegman, 2012). The university itself has increasingly become a subject of analysis, with new attention to the formation of disciplines and interdisciplines, and with renewed interest in studying the relationship between the university and the state (See Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Ferguson, 2012; Newfield, 2003, 2011). Though our essay focuses on intersectionality and transnational feminism, and the variety of ways that women's studies constructs and circulates these analytics, it is impossible to engage in that conversation without also considering this moment in the U.S. “corporate university's” history, one where intersectionality and transnationalism continue to be conflated with diversity and difference (Luft & Ward, 2009). In this moment, faculty of color often have to vociferously defend the intellectual value of scholarship on gender, nation, and race; at the same time, we are celebrated for the diversity “value” we confer upon our universities, and our attachments to intersectionality and transnationalism are lauded for their attention to so-called differences (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Gutiérrez y Muhs, Flores Niemann, González & Harris, 2012; Mohanty, 2006).

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Our exchange contributes to the robust and exciting interdisciplinary body of work considering the place of intersectionality and transnationalism in feminist theory and institutionalized women's studies. This body of scholarship has proliferated in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of Kimberlé Crenshaw's canonical articles that coined the term intersectionality, yielding special issues of two scholarly journals (Signs in 2013 and Du Bois Review in 2014) alongside a host of edited volumes devoted to intersectionality, its relationship to transnationalism, and its place in women's studies. These special issues and volumes celebrated the “burgeoning field of intersectional studies,” carefully traced the “remarkable degree of theoretical and methodological engagement that the concept of intersectionality has invited among feminist and antiracist scholars around the globe,” and asked how intersectionality and transnationalism have “traveled” — across disciplinary borders, across national borders, and apart from the bodies of women of color (Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013: 785, 787; see also Crooms, 2003). Further, widely-cited and taught introductory textbooks to women's studies courses have institutionalized these analytics for the foreseeable future (Baca Zinn, Hondagneu-Sotelo & Messner, 2010; Grewal & Kaplan, 2005). At the same time, there is a growing body of feminist scholarship critically examining the institutionalization of these analytics (Nash, 2014; Wiegman, 2012). Chandra Mohanty, for example, writes, “Radical theory can in fact become a commodity to be consumed; no longer seen as a product of activist scholarship or connected to emancipatory knowledge, it can circulate as a sign of prestige in an elitist, neoliberal landscape” (Mohanty, 2013: 971). Mohanty's concern about the de-radicalization of analytics like intersectionality and transnationalism is echoed by other scholars, including Nikol Alexander-Floyd, who criticizes “a new wave of raced-gendered occultic commodification” where “the voices, intellectual contributions, and political projects of black feminists magically disappear or are supplanted by post-black feminist readings of intersectionality” (Alexander-Floyd, 2012: 19). Our contribution to this scholarly moment takes the form of a conversation, a form that is important to us for numerous intellectual and political reasons. We have been inspired by the collaborations of other scholars, including Chandra Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, the Combahee River Collective, and the Kitchen Table Press. These meaningful models encouraged us to produce a form that breaks with the conventional journal article, and that instead makes readily visible two scholars actively working through a set of intellectual and political questions. More importantly, we decided on this form to honor the histories of intersectionality and transnationalism, analytics that were developed and crafted through political and intellectual collaborations. Ultimately, our article enacts a scholarly conversation, and not a debate that foregrounds opposing scholarly approaches. It is, instead, a testament to two antiracist feminist scholars of color writing and thinking together, and making that collaborative process transparent to readers who also aspire to consider this moment in the history of transnational feminism and intersectionality. We are deeply aware that we are writing in a context where so much scholarly exchange is set up — and is even believed to thrive — around disagreement

and contentious dissent. Our approach here, one rooted in intellectual friendship, is meant to be a rupture with the kinds of competition that the “corporate university” increasingly demands from scholars. In other words, we embrace collaboration as a rigorous methodology of collective knowledge production and as a radical political act seeking to resist the structure of a “corporate university” that continues to privilege individual intellectual labor. Our conversation began in 2013 when we were both postdoctoral fellows. Over the course of the year, we discussed our disciplines, our research, the analytics we were deploying, and our experiences of institutional life more generally. Indeed, we started to write for each other in part, because we were drawn to each other's research and wanted to continue the discussion we started as fellows: we engaged in free writes, asked each other questions related to our work, and responded to what the other had written. The purpose of these exchanges was to think together and to remain in conversation; the purpose was also to let the conversation unfold, to let it be structured by our curiosities and our interests, inspired by what we were reading, teaching, and exploring in our research. Ultimately, we decided to write an essay that recorded the questions that we circled back to again and again, and the provisional answers we were crafting. As a result, we view ourselves as interlocutors, and we view this working document as one that invites readers to grapple with questions about intersectionality and transnationalism along with us. As we formalized our thoughts in this form, we focus on a set of questions that we believe animate the field today and that continue to shape and inform our respective scholarship and teaching as tenure-track faculty.

Q: What are your attachments to “intersectionality” and “transnationalism” as theories, methods, politics, frameworks, and analytics? What do you find useful or productive about these terms?

Falcón: I have been drawn and remain attached to intersectionality because it was the first theoretical, political, and epistemological concept developed by women of color to have profound resonance in the academy (Anzaldúa, 1987; Beale, 1970; Combahee River Collective, 1983; Davis, 1983; King, 1988; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983). You can see the impact of this concept across the social sciences and humanities and it has circulated in certain ways outside of the U.S. as well. Intersectionality gave us a language and framework out of the quandary: “All the women are white and all the blacks are men” (Hull, Scott & Smith, 1993). I remain attached to intersectionality because it is a logic that removes us from thinking in silos and asks for us to delve deeper into complex inter-relationships. Intersectionality has captured the feminist imagination and as such, how to define it, apply it, and use as a methodology have all fostered vibrant scholarly work and debate. I find myself drawn to thinking about the typology of intersectionality because it recognizes that its use varies, and richly so. Sociologists Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree offer a productive typology of intersectionality that recognizes this variance. They describe intersectionality as group-centered,

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process-centered, and system-centered. Group-centered intersectionality ensures that the voice of marginally subordinated people or groups is prioritized. Process-centered intersectionality refers to how the “main effects” of labor markets or immigration, for example, are less about “giving voice” to marginalized groups than about understanding interconnected relationships (Choo & Marx Ferree, 2010: 134). The system-centered approach stresses that, because intersectionality shapes the entire social system, it “pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institutions, instead looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex” (Choo & Marx Ferree, 2010: 129). Choo and Ferree favor this third approach, in which intersectionality is a “complex system” that can disrupt problematic assumptions—such as, that the economy is primarily about social class or that family is primarily about gender (Choo & Marx Ferree, 2010: 136; see also McCall, 2005). If we nurture our “feminist curiosity” as Cynthia Enloe (2004) would say, then intersectionality is instructive for both recognizing the social realities and dynamics that exist for women of color as well as making apparent the kinds of social transformation that needs to occur. Now transnationalism has always been very appealing to me because of what I've referred to as my bi-national and bicultural upbringing between the U.S. and Peru. My life, my thinking, and my experiences have never been solely U.S.based and therefore, the concept of transnationalism signaled an important permeability of borders that eventually meant my intellectual-activist pursuits with regards to racial and gender justice did not have to just be about lived experiences in the United States or a single national context. I could grapple with the critical question of how the injustices I witnessed and experienced in the United States may have some relationship or parallel to the injustices I witnessed and learned about in Peru. With the theoretical concept of transnationalism, I could ponder what resonance the struggles of Afro-Peruvians have with African American women in the U.S. Transnationalism offered me a lens in which to explore parallels and intersections that felt very evident to me. I wanted to interrogate these links without minimizing the intense differences between contexts in terms of, for example, militarism, poverty, marginalization, and violence. By applying a feminist lens to the concept of transnationalism, I readily embraced transnational feminism as feminism across borders, but not borderless (Mohanty, 2003a). Transnational feminism is not a “sisterhood is global” model of which I would ascribe “global feminism” to; rather, transnational feminist scholarship sought to unsettle the binary of the “West versus the rest” (Alexander, 2006; Chowdhury, 2009) much like intersectionality aimed to disrupt the deracialization of gender as well as the gender-neutrality of racism. Moreover, the “scattered hegemonies” of systems and structures of white supremacy, of imperialism, of capitalism exist and dominate the world in a dispersed manner that can be overlooked if we ignore the transnational dimension (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). For all of these reasons, intersectionality and transnational feminism are instrumental to my research and teaching. Nash: I should start by way of confession. Though intersectionality has long been central to my work, transnationalism is not an analytic that has been central to my feminist practice or politics until very recently, when I began a project

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about the institutionalization of women of color feminisms in women's studies. My feminist coming-of-age was as an undergraduate majoring in women's studies in the late 1990s, and though the so-called “transnational turn” was well underway, our women's studies program was still steeped in a pretransnational, pre post-colonial feminism. I graduated without reading Mohanty, Grewal, Kaplan, Spivak, and so on, but well trained in U.S. black feminisms. When I returned to feminist theory as a graduate student, I was surprised to see how transnationalism was deployed within the discipline: often, it seemed to me, to exculpate women's studies from talking about U.S. processes of race-making, and to shift scholarly conversation away from the fleshy materiality of black women's bodies (Soto, 2005). In other words, it seemed that black women had somehow become passé, that to name black women as subjects worthy of study had become problematic in an intellectual epoch that was invested in both the global and the non (or perhaps post) identitarian. The emergence of the logic of transnationalism alongside critiques of identity politics seemed to make black women the subject of women's studies' past. Years later, as a newly-minted Ph.D. on the job market, it became clear to me that “transnational” was a code for certain kinds of jobs — and for jobs that schools wanted to be filled by certain bodies, by particular women of color. In other words, “transnational” became code for “global,” and “intersectional” became code for “black Americans.” My experience on the job market revealed to me that a rigid boundary had been erected between these two analytics, and that this boundary had an intellectual and a racial politic. Despite the rigorous labor of transnational feminists to consider the American university (and the field of U.S. women's studies) as transnational subjects, it remains the case, I think, that U.S. black feminisms are seen as outside of the transnational, as domestic, as a nonglobal subject. It also remains the case that intersectionality is tethered to the U.S. even as the U.S.-focus of intersectionality often remains unnamed. Vrushali Patil persuasively argues that intersectionality's ability to circulate broadly, or to “travel” across disciplinary and national borders, reflects “the transnational power structures that shape academic knowledge production and distribution” (Patil, 2013: 853). Indeed, Patil develops the term “domestic intersectionality” to describe the analytic's ongoing preoccupation with “domestic dynamics as opposed to cross-border dynamics,” and to capture intersectionality's unmarked preoccupation with U.S. locations (Patil, 2013: 853). So why have I been drawn to intersectionality? To me, intersectionality's promise — and its peril — comes through its capacity to move across the disciplines in an effort to describe the shifting, contextual, contingent positions of multiplymarginalized subjects and to envision certain forms of redress. Intersectionality's promise, then, is diagnostic: it sees how certain structures collaborate and collude to produce positions of marginalization. But it is also utopian and visionary, invested in crafting a worldview that begins with the experiences of the multiply-marginalized, and that validates those experiences by treating them as both knowledge and critical theory. What I love about intersectionality is that it is also always slippery – analytic, method, theory, politic, framework – a way of describing experiences, structures, identities, resistance,

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legal doctrine, and a mode of capturing the multiplymarginalized or the social location of all subjects. It is this elasticity, that allows many of us to put intersectionality to use in a variety of ways, and to debate the ways that it gets put to use (Davis, 2008). Here, my conception of intersectionality builds on Kathy Davis' work on intersectionality's generative “vagueness” (Davis, 2008). What I appreciate about Davis' claim is her recognition of intersectionality's capacity to be put to use in myriad ways. My own investment, though, is less in reading this elasticity as “vagueness” (or as a sign that intersectionality is “chimerical”) which presumes an at-times frustrating imprecision; rather, I am interested in intersectionality's purposeful multiplicity, and in the host of ways that this multiplicity is generative and rich (Davis, 2008: 70). In other words, I am interested in how intersectionality resists fixity and stasis through its capacity to be mobilized to describe structure, subjectivity, identity, marginalization, multiple-marginalization, oppression, and agency at once. I think this is a particularly important contention in a moment where intersectionality itself is often accused of fixity, rigidity, and stasis by scholars invested in assemblage and other post-intersectional theoretical innovations (Puar, 2012). Now that I am researching the relationship between black feminisms and women's studies, I have become interested in how the discipline itself has produced intersectionality and transnationalism as mutually exclusive (and perhaps even as competing) so that U.S. women of color and non-US women of color are constructed as competing for limited “diversity” resources. I am also interested in how both of these analytics have been constructed as remedies for certain kinds of feminist violence – either practices of white dominance within feminism or imperialist narratives of “global sisterhood” – and how both have become objects of critique when they “fail” to remedy this violence. As Jigna Desai notes, “Clearly, ‘race, class, and gender’ has become a theoretical and methodological cliché in U.S.-based feminist studies. The mantra associated with a ‘been there, done that’ exasperation by many feminists does not address the ways in which contemporary feminist scholarship has barely begun to understand how an analytic based on multiple and simultaneous contextual differences might affect feminist theories” (Desai, 2004: 25). I am interested both in the “been there, done that exasperation” that both of these terms produce, and in how “exasperation” indexes a kind of feminist fatigue with both of these analytics. Falcón: You make so many excellent points here. I especially want to re-visit your remarks about the academic job market because the power of code words starts from the moment a job ad is made public. The job ads are interpreted and subsequently scrutinized by department faculty and administrators, respectively, but for different ends. Administrators are the ones who have final approval of a faculty hire. Yet, faculty have to translate and justify to the administrators, who are often outside of our fields, why a particular position is needed. So for me, the dislodging of intersectionality and transnational feminism began, in part, during that moment in which they had to be made distinct rather than mutually inclusive. It ultimately is a disservice to both theoretical traditions in the service of being intelligible to people who have no stake in women's studies. Academic job ads offer a window in which to understand the implicit and explicit neoliberal logics that pervade the

academy. These logics include an over-emphasis on external fundraising. This priority focus on having a record of securing external funds as a desired job qualification puts feminist scholars at risk, particularly in the humanities, because funders desire tangible results that appeal to their constituency, their board of directors, and so forth. The discourse of fundraising requires its own critical assessment, as interdisciplinary scholars have to either use the language of the natural sciences to garner funding, or else entirely frame their work in terms of “outcomes” and “findings.” This is an extremely unsatisfying and unproductive — arguably counter-productive — way in which to engage in feminist inquiry. In addition, new faculty are encouraged to develop and participate in activities that support the university's strategic plan, which includes infrastructure. As such, neoliberalization of the university involves the rapid restructuring of our own responsibilities as faculty. Our responsibilities have increased to an unsustainable level (including for staff); we are expected to do more but with less staff and research support. As the standards for tenure reviews continue to increase (just consider and compare the content of tenure files for faculty from twenty years ago to today), we are expected to be machines in terms of output (more journal articles, books, research grants, mentoring graduate students than ever before). Lastly, universities are part of an economic market in which antiracist and feminist work is devalued and threatening. These days disgruntled donors and alumni can influence hires where apparently now “civility” has become a job requirement. I'm of course referring to the case of Dr. Steven Salaita who has been fired from his new tenured position at the University of Illinois in August 2014 before even setting foot on the UrbanaChampaign campus. The reason given for his firing by Phyllis Wise, the university's chancellor, is that Dr. Salaita violated “the tradition of scholarship and civility” (emphasis added) in his online posts condemning the Israeli bombings of Gaza in 2014. Of course the language of “civility” was really a cover for wealthy donors who were extremely displeased about his hiring in the American Indian Studies Department. There are of course additional layers to his case, but the main point I want to make here is that his situation makes no apologies about appeasing donors at the expense of academic freedom and therefore, his ouster unmasks how truly “corporate” the university has become. Where does this leave critical scholarship that is anti-racist, feminist, anti-imperialist and so forth? Nash: It is revealing that the job market, with its insistence on clear and legible categories, becomes a location that makes explicit how intersectionality and transnationalism are pitted against each other. Perhaps this is also the problem of the demise of the term “women of color feminism” or even “third world feminism.” Ranjoo Seodu Herr's work argues for the importance of the term “third world feminism” because of its emphasis on the local and the national as transnational locations; I think that term, even as it produced certain kinds of elisions, necessarily underscored continuities between projects that we might now call “intersectional” and “transnational” (Herr, 2014). The term “third world feminism” (or even “woman of color feminisms”) insisted on linking intersectionality and transnationalism in ways that might still productively challenge a tendency to drive a wedge between these terms. It seems to me we might look to

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that kind of work as one model for how to counter the separation of intersectionality and transnationalism, a division which pits US black women against other women of color.

Q: How do you respond to the notion that intersectionality: race as transnationalism: nation? To ask it another way, what are the racial politics of transnationalism and intersectionality? Nash: A number of scholars have considered how these analytics get put to use in competing ways: Karla Holloway argues that the push toward the transnational is often, in fact, a way of eliding or obscuring American projects of race-making, and reveals that the transnational “manifests a profound and troubling discomfort with the local” (Holloway, 2006: 2). Sandra Soto's work echoes these concerns as well, grappling with how transnational feminist work is often positioned as antithetical to “feminist scholarship on women of color in the United States” (Soto, 2005: 112). I think it is crucial to remember that these analytics are pitted against each other in the way they have been taken up and practiced in the U.S. university, which is to say, there is nothing inherent in these analytics that put them in conflict or tension. In other words, we can't think about these analytics' positions within the field without examining how they have been mobilized in and by the corporate university. And I think it's critical when we describe the “corporate university,” that we recognize that women's studies is embedded in, not somehow outside of, these neoliberal logics. What interests me about how intersectionality and transnationalism are imagined, though, is that despite their similar institutional histories – despite the fact that these analytics emerged from specific intellectual contexts and theoretical debates only to be deployed by the discipline of women's studies as a strategy that would complicate the field and undo its violence – they continue to be constructed as mutually exclusive. It seems to me, then, that it is crucial to tell institutional histories of these terms which underscore how despite the fact that they emerged as very specific critiques, they have come to circulate within women's studies as calls for diversity and inclusion, for more “complex” analyses, and as strategies for undoing feminist hegemony. Let me linger a bit on diversity because I think that term is critical for understanding how intersectionality and transnationalism have similar lives in an intellectual and institutional moment where diversity – whatever it means – is both celebrated and reviled. Sara Ahmed reminds readers that, “it is important to note that the language of intersectionality is now associated with diversity.” Similarly, Jasbir Puar warns that intersectionality has simply become a tool of “diversity management” (Puar, 2012: 53). In other words, Ahmed and Puar reveal that intersectionality has been taken up as a call for inclusion, or as a celebration of what Chandra Mohanty terms “benign variation,” rather than as an epistemological and political shift that requires contending with race and gender (along with other axes) as mutually constituted (Mohanty, 2003a: 193). The conflation of intersectionality with diversity, in my mind, serves to de-radicalize intersectionality's theoretical and political contributions by presuming that intersectionality is a

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call to “include” women of color into pre-existing categories — doctrinal, theoretical, and political. Rather, the call of intersectionality is to re-think the categories themselves, and to consider how our categories, our modes of analysis, might look and feel different if our starting point was the experiences and material realities of women of color. Moreover, the tethering of intersectionality to discourses of diversity rather than to a radical reconception of structures of domination, has produced a particularly pernicious institutionalized form of diversity labor in the U.S. academy. As Banu Subramaniam notes, “… contemporary work on diversity, rather than questioning differences, often ‘mirror’ and reinforce them. … Diversity in its recent institutional incarnation has been utterly domesticated and depoliticized and largely seen as ‘good’ because it has lost its political roots of structural issues of sexism and racism” (Subramaniam, 2014: 15). In an era where universities increasingly have diversity offices and diversity officers, celebrate diversity as a criterion in undergraduate and graduate admissions, market diversity to be eligible to apply for federal education funds, offer courses that satisfy diversity requirements, pepper their websites with images of a racially diverse student body, and require programs and departments to justify new hires through crafting diversity statements, both diversity and intersectionality are positioned as correctives, as way of undoing past violence through an insistence on inclusion. This is not unlike universities' celebrations of study abroad programs, their investment in global institutes, and their commitments to transforming students into “global citizens,” all of which have made the language of “transnational” and “global” – and these two terms are often conflated – into celebrated ethics in the U.S. neoliberal university (Roshanravan, 2012). How did intersectionality — an analytic that is deeply critical of the “benign variation” logic of diversity, and at odds with simply adding women of color to an existing violent structure, come to be rendered synonymous with diversity in this moment in the university's history? And in this moment in women's studies history? It seems to me that this move — treating both theories as diversity logics that have to compete for the university's limited diversity resources (remember: diversity is always both desirable and troubling) — reentrenches the idea of intersectionality and transnationalism as competing logics. Falcón: I also think about how the logics of white supremacy have fostered tensions and produced dynamics and divisions that situate intersectionality and transnationalism as dissimilar, as in contest with one another, when we should be understanding them as mutually constructive or overlapping. Here's where bell hooks's explanation of the term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (as if a single term rather than as partitioned) and Andrea Smith's work on heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy are particularly illuminating for navigating the racial politics of not only intersectionality and transnationalism, but of women's studies more broadly inside the academy. bell hooks thoughtfully reflects on why she's chosen to use “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” in her work because this is the lens upon which she understands her life as a black woman and because we cannot lose site of “the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality” (Media Education Foundation, 2006). I think the divisions, both

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real and imagined, between intersectionality and transnational feminism may in fact speak to the fact that we have forgotten about the entrenched nature of “the interlocking systems of domination” that actually stimulated the development of these two theoretical concepts in the first place. Now Andrea Smith calls for a re-thinking of women of color organizing by recognizing heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy: Slavery/Capitalism, Genocide/ Capitalism, and Orientalism/War (Smith, 2006). Smith does not suggest a delinking of heteropatriarchy and the pillars of white supremacy but rather to view all of them together as informing each other and as inter-related. Smith reminds us that heteropatriarchy, capitalism, slavery, genocide, and Orientalism are all simultaneously constructed and overlapping; this insight informs the three pillars of white supremacy. These issues also happen to be the foundations of universities and colleges across the country (Wilder, 2013). Consider the stealing of indigenous lands upon which universities sit, the slave labor that built the university campuses, the creation of curriculum based on Orientalist rationalities, the systematic exclusion of women and/or people of color, the links university investments have to the military apparatus today, the yearly student tuition fee hikes, and so on. I discuss hooks and Smith here to offer a linguistic framing in which to contextualize the university. Hence, feminist scholars should be wary of any claims — explicit or implied — that feminist theories and concepts, such as intersectionality and transnationalism, develop outside of these fraught academic legacies. So my point then is that the institutionalization of intersectionality and transnationalism occurs in an academic environment that relies on competition of resources, on exclusions, on divisions shaped by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. We work in a setting that wants us to avoid working collaboratively or in solidarity.1 We must be mindful of how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is deeply invested in our separation and our antagonisms.

Q. How do you think these two analytics have shifted or changed as they have become institutionalized? (Do you think they are institutionalized? What does it mean for them to be institutionalized?) Falcón: I think we must understand institutionalization as a process that is laden and complicated. The construction of the academic institution was never meant to include the bodies (much less the intellect) of people of color. Therefore, a sanitization and de-politicalization occurs when analytics become institutionalized — radical concepts and theories can shed some of their political resonance in the service of an institution meant to educate a particular group of middle to upper-class white or elite men. Institutionalization creates new norms as well that can both be promising and disheartening. For instance, the new institutional norm of intersectionality in women's studies curriculum specifically has meant that the frustration many women of color had with the 1960s and 1970s version of women's studies could be challenged. So then the white faces of feminism were no longer central (or the singular narrative) and it no longer meant that gender was somehow deracialized.

If “feminism is for everybody,” then the face of it could no longer be a white woman (hooks, 2000). Institutionalization has also led to a shorthand version of intersectionality to the metaphor of a “crossroads” or “intersections,” which culminates in a great disservice and misreading of the scholarship on intersectionality. Much like bureaucracies, the institution cannot tolerate nuance and once a concept is institutionalized then it must be legible to those for whom the academic institution was created for in the first place. Shireen Roshanravan writes about the importance of foregrounding heterogeneity when discussing the work of leading feminist scholars of color. By focusing on a “plurilogue” as a method in which to emphasize “reading interdependent differences within Women of Color theorizing,” Roshanravan offers a “more acute” and simultaneous reading of the work of Chandra Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Maria Lugones. Through an engagement of their work involving epistemic frameworks, methodologies, political orientations, and by offering a general mapping of their work on an the landscape of Women of Color politics, Roshanravan illustrates what goes unseen when scholars are grouped together and their different contributions minimized. This kind of scholarship is critical because it resists a “superficial engagement” that erroneously presents “Women of Color scholarship as a unified genre of thought defined solely in terms of its critique of feminism's racism” (Roshanravan, 2014: 41, 57). Nash: I think it's worth stepping back and considering what it even means to talk about these analytics – or any analytics – as “institutionalized.” In my own work, I use the term “the institutional life of intersectionality” to describe a moment where intersectionality is not outsider-knowledge, but instead deeply embedded in the university. I also use the term to describe a moment where the analytic lends value both to women's studies and to the university in an era where diversity, difference, and inclusion are celebrated terms often conflated with intersectionality. In so doing, I heed Leela Fernandes' reminder that “interdisciplinary scholarship is located within institutional networks that are indirectly or directly (in the case, for instance, of state-funded institutions) connected to the state” (Fernandes, 2013: 138). My understanding of “institutions” is indebted to Sara Ahmed's work, which treats institutions as “processes” rather than as fixed (Ahmed, 2012: 20). Drawing on Ahmed, I am invested in considering how intersectionality became part of the very structure of the university. Ultimately, I endeavor to reveal the set of forces and shifts that produced the moment we inhabit now, one where the analytic is not outside of institutional life but part of that life, and productive of that life, one where intersectionality is both part a feminist lexicon and part of an administrative lexicon, deployed to signal certain investments in difference and diversity. I think the price of institutionalization is that both of these terms — intersectionality and transnationalism — come to be conflated with diversity and difference, rather than with specific modes of inquiry emerging from particular feminist critiques and concerns. Intersectionality is not, in my mind, a technology of inclusion, nor is it a plea to “include” the voices of women of color. It is one theoretical, methodological, and political innovation emerging from black feminism and women of color feminism — and I emphasize one because it is not the

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only contribution of these feminist traditions — that studies the working of structures of domination. Yet too often it is treated as a remedy, a way of undoing feminist histories of racial violence. I think the other price of institutionalization is that these terms are often treated as synonymous with women of color feminisms rather than as one of the myriad frameworks and approaches deployed by women of color feminisms.

Q. Even though “transnationalism” and “intersectionality” are celebrated as key analytics in women's studies, they are also critiqued, and, at times, described as analytics that are passé. How does your work engage with or respond to those critiques?

Falcón: I have used theories of transnational feminism and intersectionality to situate my research on political organizing in the Americas region that is antiracist and feminist in character. These frameworks remain enormously useful for understanding activist coalitional and solidarity politics outside of academia. If anything, I have tried to discern ways in which to offer more appropriate readings of these frameworks in the spaces of which my research engages. For instance, I propose “contextualized intersectionality” as a way to recognize the multi-variance usage of intersectionality in transnational organizing spaces (Falcón, 2012). My intent is to offer an approach to intersectionality that remains mindful and cautious of advancing decontextualized essentialisms and universalisms as it relates to women's struggles specifically. We have to continually build what Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers to as a “theory of contexts.” As he contends, in evaluating and assessing contexts, we can then “distinguish progressive politics from regressive politics, empowerment from disempowerment, (and) emancipation from regulation.”2 Therefore, by considering intersectionality vis-à-vis its context then it becomes possible to navigate the tension between particularism and universalism as it relates to transnational feminist organizing (see also Falcón, 2015 and May, 2014: 96–7). At the same time, I do not want to suggest at all that intersectionality and transnationalism are somehow exempt from critique. My point is that even though these theories may have their limitations, as arguably all theories do, there should not be a rush to dismiss. I think the project becomes what can be discerned from the critiques to either strengthen or clarify our use of intersectionality and transnationalism as a theory, framework, politics, and even as methodology. Perhaps the project also becomes about creating a “plurilogue” with feminist theorists of intersectionality as Roshanravan has done with women of color theorists mentioned earlier to discern the ways in which this concept is used. More importantly, as Vivian May argues, we have to examine how intersectionality is being interpreted and the “epistemic negotiation” taking place in the “meaning-making” of intersectionality that forms the basis of the critiques as well (May, 2014). The “epistemic negotiation” also applies to transnationalism. As Leela Fernandes argues, “discarding the nationstate as a unit of analysis does not automatically dislodge a U.S.-centric epistemic project” (Fernandes, 2013: 6). As she explores transnational feminism within the context of the

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U.S. nation-state as well as the U.S. academy, Fernandes engages “the national imaginary” as a paradigm that “grasp [s] historical processes that have in fact unsettled the nationstate” (Fernandes, 2013: 11). Challenging the view that transnational feminism somehow “marks a break from older regressive approaches,” Fernandes maintains that the contradictions in transnational feminism are vitally important because “[s]uch contradictions necessitate that we ask, what does it mean to locate feminist research and theory within a transnational frame in the specific location and historical location that we live in” (Fernandes, 2013: 24)? This provocative question not only deems it necessary to remain perpetually cognizant of multiple levels of contexts — geographic, social, cultural, political, and so on — but that we should embrace contradictions rather than bury them. Nash: I imagine my work on intersectionality as a kind of loving critique that is invested less in critiquing the analytic itself, then in critiquing the ways the analytic has come to circulate in the university generally and in women's studies specifically. I am interested in how intersectionality came to be feminism's common sense. It is treated as “the most important contribution that women's studies … has made so far” (McCall, 2005: 1771), yet I am increasingly interested in historicizing this claim, with understanding what institutional imperatives allow us to narrate intersectionality as central to the discipline. How has intersectionality been re-made as it moved to the discipline's center? How does it become theory, method, politic, framework, analytic, and approach all at once? And what does intersectionality's centrality mean for women of color? I also think we should attend to intersectionality's institutionalized form where the idea of “more” (which is a really capitalist logic!) come to predominate — that is, the best analyses are “more” intersectional and attend to “more” intersections. My objections to this are two-fold. First, I am curious as to the ways in which intersectionality becomes something that can be measured (as in, “make your analysis more intersectional”). What actually makes an analysis more intersectional than another analysis? Is it simply an “attention” to more intersections? Is it the number of intersections accounted for? Is it the methodology advanced for studying intersections? Is studying race, gender, sexuality, and class simultaneously necessarily “more” intersectional than studying race and gender? This conception of intersectionality as something that can simply be added to an analysis, and that can be added in greater strength, seems to neglect that intersectionality is a theoretical and methodological innovation that permeates every aspect of a research project, not a cosmetic additive that can be layered on top of an alreadyfinished product. Second, it is also now commonplace for the intersectionality trump card to be played, particularly in contexts where scholars work “only” on race/gender, as in “but does your analysis attend to age and sexuality also?” According to this logic, “attending” to “more” intersections produces a more sophisticated analysis, and the goal of intersectionality is producing an analytic that can attend to everything, to all subjects' positions. This idea of “more” is, I think, a facile idea of intersectionality that resonates with – rather than resisting – the corporate university (Nash, 2010). Of course, I think calls to attend to undertheorized structures of domination can be

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appeals to complexity, but I also think they can be what Sara Ahmed terms “method[s] of deflection,” where work on black women or on U.S. practices of race-making is downplayed as non-intersectional, not sufficiently intersectional, or simply passe (Ahmed, 2012: 195). Ahmed notes, “When I give talks on race and racism a common question is ‘but what about intersectionality?’ or ‘what about gender/sexuality, class?’ I am not suggesting these are not legitimate questions. But given how hard it is to attend to race and racism, these questions can be used as a way of redirecting attention. In other words, when hearing about race and racism is too difficult, intersectionality can be deployed as a defense against hearing” (Ahmed, 2012: 195). Ultimately, I am interested in how the call for “more” becomes a strategy sanctioned by feminism that denigrates certain intellectual and political projects. Finally, I also imagine my work as responding to what has become a commonly circulating critique — that intersectionality is simply identity politics. My new work asks how and why black women's epistemology becomes treated as necessarily identitarian, and how and why naming race and gender as meaningful categories of analysis becomes synonymous with identity politics. In other words, I am interested in what space remains in this post- or anti-identitarian age for engagement with race and gender and their particular effects on black women's bodies that will not simply be defeated by critiques of identity politics. More than that, why are black women always treated as the paradigmatic identitarian subjects? I argue that this is a moment in women's studies history where women of color's bodies are both celebrated and denigrated, fetishized and dismissed. At once, intersectionality is the field's “key analytic,” and identity politics are critiqued; at once, intersectionality is celebrated and dismissed, treated as central and criticized for its investment in wounded subjects and fixed identities. I think this is the paradoxical position of women of color in the corporate university — to be at once valuable for our imagined diversity and to be devalued for our imagined insistence on identity politics. And, again, I don't think women's studies exist outside of this logic; indeed, I think it also produces this logic. At once, it treats women of color's bodies as a kind of utopia – one day we might have a theory sufficiently complex enough to grapple with the specific locations of particular marginalized women – and as a kind of tired insistence on injury and woundedness. Falcón: There has been this critical turn in women's studies that has shifted from the centrality of “white women” (post-1970s) to now a space in which women of color become an important narrative, knowledge base, epistemology, and arc in which to engage in the study of women (see Hemmings, 2011). Nash: Absolutely. And I think it's key that women of color take on symbolic value in the field. I still don't think there is sufficient scholarly interest in the fleshy and embodied materiality of women of color while there is plenty of interest in what intersectionality and transnationalism can do for women's studies. Falcón: It also seems now as if there is a women's studies pre-intersectionality and women's studies as intersectionality. I think you could say the same now for the transnationalism. So there's a women's studies before the transnational turn and now women's studies curriculum reflecting this transnational approach.

Nash: Or if it's something else — it seems to me the challenge with transnationalism is moving beyond its imagined synonymousness with “over there.” I still think that students expect a transnational feminism class to deal with feminisms practiced outside of the United States, so that the U.S. is not conceptualized as a transnational actor or location, our feminisms are not seen as transnationally produced, and so on. Mohanty critiques this “feminist-as-explorer” pedagogical model where “… the ‘foreign’ woman is the object and subject of knowledge and the larger intellectual project is entirely about countries other than the United States. Thus, here the local and the global are both defined as non-Euro-American” (Mohanty, 2003b: 519). In its place, she advocates a “feminist solidarity” model which emphasizes “the links, the relationships, between the local and the global” and underscores that “these links are conceptual, material, temporal, contextual, and so on” (Mohanty, 2003b: 521). Yet, I think we need to continue to consider how to make this “feminist solidarity” model the basis of feminist pedagogies in concrete and material ways; it seems to me that transnational feminisms are still often taught as precisely the “explorer” model Mohanty critiques, as a “case study” approach, or as a week (or, perhaps, a few weeks) in a women's studies course, rather than as a theoretical framework and methodology that informs the entire practice of feminist inquiry. In other words, transnational feminisms are treated as a singular topic to be covered in a course, rather than as an overarching feminist framework or feminist approach. This is despite the fact that Mohanty's work — including the very article where she critiques the “feminist-as-explorer” model — is regularly assigned in these courses.

Q: Finally, what are the possibilities for co-existence between transnationalism and intersectionality? Nash: I see both intersectionality and transnationalism as anti-subordination analytics, frameworks, and politics that inform theory, politics, and feminist worldviews. They both prompt me to think of June Jordan's brilliant question posed in her now canonical-essay “Where is the Love?”: “How is my own lifework serving to end these tyrannies, these corrosions of sacred possibility?” This is the pivotal question. What in your feminist practice, theory, and politics is working to “end tyranny,” violence, and inequity; to forge intimacies and affiliations where they weren't before? Importantly, intersectionality and transnationalism are not the only antisubordination frameworks, nor are they the only ways women of color have conceptualized anti-subordination work (Nash, 2013). One of the myriad other ways that women of color have theorized justice is through what is now called the “affective turn” (though black feminists have been affective practitioners long before the arrival of the “affective turn” in critical theory). Patricia J. Williams' work on racism as “spirit-murder” (Williams, 1991), Saidiya Hartman's work on memory and history (Hartman, 2008), Sharon Holland's work on the proximity of blackness to death (Holland, 2000), and Rebecca Wanzo's work on suffering and black pain (Wanzo, 2009) reveal a robust black feminist tradition of theorizing race as affect. (It is worth asking, then, how and why it is that black feminism is reduced exclusively to intersectionality given the richness and variety of black feminist intellectual production).

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I think, then, we should deploy intersectionality and transnationalism along with other analytics – including affect – to theorize race and gender in robust ways, and to labor to end “corrosions of sacred possibility.” Finally, my own intellectual and political allegiance is always going to be to women of color, not just as theoretical objects or rhetorical strategies, but as material and fleshy bodies whose actual beings need to be accounted for seriously by academia. My own investment is in these bodies as locations of wisdom, experience, and knowledge — that's where my own anti-subordination commitments are located. Falcón: I absolutely believe in the mutually constructed and transformative co-existence of intersectionality and transnationalism, which is the space in which I try to locate my scholarship. My department talks about bridging fields — specifically Latino/a Studies and Latin American Studies — as a method in which to practice inter-disciplinarity. I like the metaphor of the bridge because it symbolizes a joining or linking together. So then how can we bridge intersectionality and transnational feminism without rendering invisible its distinct genealogies, histories, and epistemologies? How can they come together in an intellectually vibrant way because they similarly embody, as we've discussed here, antisubordination logics. By identifying the links, or thinking about the bridge, then it leads us to a space in which we steer away from conceptualizing intersectionality and transnationalism as competing and binary logics but rather as politically complementary. And just a personal level too, I want us to be talking with one another and building genuine intellectual feminist friendships based on our unwavering political commitments to social justice and women of color. Perhaps then our mental and physical health and survival as women of color in the academy will be less of an anomaly. Perhaps then we can sincerely answer June Jordan's question of “where is the love?” by looking to each other. Conclusion This article presents collaboration as a generative and necessary feminist project, one that interrupts and destabilizes the corporate university's logic of competition. Indeed, we treat the practice of collaboration – and the feminist friendship it both produces and sustains – as one of the kinds of “sacred possibilities” Jordan alludes to in her call for a feminism oriented around love. We emphasize the importance of feminist work that is process-oriented rather than outcomeoriented; in other words, this article is a “working document,” one that is a testament to two scholars grappling with ideas and challenging questions. It makes visible the sometimes-messy process of thinking together. Perhaps there are moments when the article eludes certainty, or embraces multiple perspectives rather than advocating for one particular approach. But we welcome these moments of transparency, complexity, and multiplicity as feminist ethics that respond to the conditions of the present – conditions marked by corporatization, neoliberalism, and precarity – with a politics of generosity and multitude rather than singularity and certitude. We also recognize the limitations of both of these analytics when it comes to centering the anti-subordination practices of indigenous feminisms, and the lived experiences of indigenous communities. Transnationalism often seeks to understand how

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multiple communities in different contexts are similarly situated. But for indigenous communities along the U.S.– Mexico border, such as the Pascua Yaqui people, they are of the same community being forcibly divided by the geographical colonial imposition of national borders. Their anti-subordination practices reflect a struggle to contest or undermine border enforcement policies that aim to divide them and their connection to ancestral land (Herreras, 2012). Intersectionality has long attended to patriarchy and white dominance as interlocking structures of oppression, and has recently turned sustained attention toward sexuality as a site of domination (and pleasure), but has not often rigorously turned its attention to questions of colonialism and imperialism (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2006: 4). While we acknowledge the ways in which indigenous feminists have been influential to our thinking — specifically in reference to Andrea Smith's work on heteropatriarchy and white supremacy as discussed earlier in this essay — we believe other critical feminist insights can be garnered by intentionally centering indigenous women (Jacob, 2013). We underscore the conceptual limitations of transnationalism and intersectionality here to acknowledge that indigenous feminisms inspire the construction of theories that attend to power's myriad violent forms and expose ways in which domination and subordination should be both imagined anew. If the article challenges the logics of the university which insist on competition and polished finished products, and which presume that valuable scholarly conversations are debates rather than conversations, it also seeks to rupture a tradition in women's studies — one which places intersectionality and transnationalism in tension, and one which produces women of color as competitors rather than as allies. Without conflating intersectionality and transnationalism, or ignoring their particular and distinctive genealogies, we aspire to put their political productivities into dialogue. We are drawn to intersectionality and transnationalism as antisubordination projects that seek to expose and redress inequality and violence. In treating them as anti-subordination endeavors, we recognize that they perform their justice-seeking work in multiple ways, and that they prescribe not a singular approach (or a singular theory or method) but a broad commitment to feminisms that expose and eradicate inequalities and violence. They are analytics that prompt us to powerfully rearticulate Jordan's question, to consider the historically, geographically, and temporally specific forms that “tyrannies” take, and the variety of feminist responses that might emphatically speak on behalf of “sacred possibility.” Acknowledgments We are thankful to Dr. Caryl McFarlane and Ms. Ina Noble for supporting us as postdoctoral fellows of The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty. Endnotes 1 This rationale is in part why we have to explain the division of labor in co-authored pieces for personnel reviews. 2 Quoted in Speed and Collier, “Limiting Indigenous Autonomy,” 879. This quote is from an earlier version of “Toward a Multicultural Conception of

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Human Rights” by Boaventura de Sousa Santos that was published in a working paper series on political economy and legal change for the University of Wisconsin in 1996.

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