Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Jennifer C. Nash

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Race, Theory, Gender, Feminist Theory

184 pages, Hardcover

First published December 6, 2018

About the author

Jennifer C. Nash is Associate Professor of African American and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, also published by Duke University Press, and editor of Gender: Love.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“. . . it is the ongoing conception that Black feminism is the exclusive territory of black women that traps and limits Black feminists and Black women academics who continue to be conscripted into performing and embodying their intellectual investments.”

A dissertation on intersectional* Black feminism, its history, its structure, and its struggles, from Duke University Professor Jennifer Nash.

Straight Outta’ Academia

Although she most often refers to intersectionalism as an analytic Dr. Nash also references it as an act, an argument, an analysis, a theory, a category, a concept, a constraint, a descriptor, a discipline, a foundation, a framework, an identity, an instrument, an intervention, a point of entry, a practice, a system, a tool, a tradition, and a “territory under siege” (just to name a few). To call this an intense study in Black feminism would be an understatement. Sit down, saddle up, and be prepared to take notes.
______________________________

*”Intersectionality is a term first coined in 1989 by American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It is the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.” -Research Guide, First Year Studies, Syracuse University

[Shannon Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first full review because... well... I think this title is deserving of it. Nash is a fantastic writer, that keeps you well informed while chomping at the bit for more information. The book is a bit text heavy, and you are expected to have a strong analytic foundation of black, and intersectional feminism. However, I really enjoyed this book. Nash does a brilliant job of putting together an academic quilt of fabulous writers' main arguments that seek to flesh out, challenge, and remedy the wounds found in black feminism in the face of intersectionality. I also liked the amalgamation of history lessons within the text that push your understandings or beliefs.

On the down side, Nash proposes some great concepts to give intersectionality its vibrancy back -- however there's not much after that, hence the 4 stars. As i moved toward the end i was expecting a lot more from Nash that really gave proposition as to how her claims would be carried out with agency. My second disappointment with this text is that Nash alludes to activist work, but very RARELY does she elaborate on HOW activist work was pivotal in intersectional and black feminist history. I get it, Dr. Nash is an academic but to not devote at least a subsection to how non-academic non-theoretic work played major roles in this movement then and now i think is a disservice to readers. Overall, a well spoken and strong piece with so much love for the topic at hand. Looking forward to reading more of Nash in the future.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Nash's ability to question the phrases we repeat without interrogating. Why does intersectionality need to be protected? Why can't we critique intersectionality? Who can critique intersectionality? How does not critiquing intersectionality hurt us? Nash asks the whys we are too afraid to ask, the whys we haven't considered, the whys we need to be asking. For that alone, I think this is a good book for feminists.

I gave it 4 stars because the reimagining piece, (the piece where Nash tries to remedy the issues around where intersectionality is located in current discourse) seems to be less developed and left me wanting more.

A good book with a beautiful cover.

[Katrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

READ IT

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful work of academic criticism, but I felt like I was eavesdropping on a family dispute. The book is about the various internal fights over intersectionality and specifically, ownership and control of the term. Nash brings up a few of the top thinkers in this field and makes some crucial points about the limits of intersectionality. I agree with what she is saying her and I really enjoyed her perspective, but I have only a passing familiarity with the original works so I am not sure whether the characterization of the critics or defenders are right.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this for a feminist reading group in my masters and i must say this is the first time in a long time i have felt incredibly receptive to a book of theory. nash articulates the underlying reasons behind the apathy and frustration i had with so many methodological teachings and application of intersectionality in my undergrad with precision.

in particular nash’s investigation of the mobilization of intersectionality by academic institutions as a way of ”program building”: their way of fleshing out and making whole the complex relationship of feminism to black studies. intersectionality has thus become a catch-all term for scholars and institutions to practice their due diligence, or what nash at time calls their ”racial alibi.”

intersectionality within the university thus becomes a practice of misreading black feminist scholars who employ the term, and a superficial gestural site of analysis that enables us to forget the complex relations and history of feminism and black scholars.

in my undergrad, this idea of intersectionality was rampant. it instructed a whole generation of budding art history grads that intersectionality was a means unto itself, and that no real critical scholarship had to be done beyond it. not to mention nash also details how intersectional methodology is often done by white feminist scholars to cover their bases. often my art history classes taught by one white scholar who’s was ”in conversation” with intersectional black scholars, teaching a cult following of upper class white women that an intersectional reading was the holy grail - often ending with a reading of black bodies subjugated, fragmented, and removed from agency.

in my opinion, this is academic work done in bad faith. now at the graduate level, i am only at the beginning of unravelling a pillar of my training. i by no means seek to vilify my previous instructors, but seek to highlight what nash calls for, and now what i call for — is a continual interrogation of our methods and practices. also a loyalty to the criticism itself. in the realm of Intersectionality - the scholars who coined this term are notably silenced. it’s high time we started listening to them.

[Ife · Rating 5 out of 5]

A major turning point in my understanding of Black feminist politics was the Will Smith-Chris Rock slap. Seeing online Black feminist content creators cannibalise the production of meaning in the aftermath and insist that it must be understood primarily as a political narrative of a Black man protecting a Black woman from misogynoir and ableism, more so than an interpersonal dispute involving three people, was one of the first times that I felt so at odds with other Black feminists. Underneath the claim that Rock’s joke was a shining example of how Black women are casually dehumanized, underneath the censorship of any voice that dared to interrogate Smith’s slap as paternalistic and patriarchal were serious affective charges. I felt the sense that for a lot of Black women the sight of a Black man ‘defending his Black wife’s honour’ was simply a refreshing image that felt both cathartic and karmic, and that Black feminist language had become a mere rhetorical tool to defend the glory of that image. I realised that as Black feminists sometimes the way we feel and the “stories we tell” can shroud all else.

Nash has established herself as a thinker that is particularly keen to Black feminist feelings and the way they can sometimes shroud Black feminist ethos of open debate, truth-seeking etc. In Black Feminism Reimagined she takes a critical lens to feelings around intersectionality (often seen as Black feminism’s greatest contribution) and its movement outside of Black feminism, theorising that feelings of defensiveness and ownership structure logics that seek to absolve intersectionality of any critique, claim its universality, and simultaneously claim that its movement is a form of expropriation. She further argues that this movement outside Black feminism has been mobilised by views of intersectionality as a corrective to ‘white feminism’ which aids a culture in which the bodies of Black female academics are constantly called upon to symbolically bear witness to departments of women’s studies 'inclusivity', which she argues fuels these feelings of defensiveness. In doing so, she theorizes Black feminism as an emotional site, something that we feel as well as practice:

“What does it feel like when analytics that one imagines as one’s own—such as intersectionality—become popularized, institutionalized, ossified? How does one come to imagine an analytic, method, or tool as one’s own? What does it feel like when one’s scholarly work becomes termed a “buzzword” or is mobilized by universities in ways that feel at odds with one’s own work? And what does it mean to feel that the symbols of one’s body and intellectual production have become the cornerstone of women’s studies programmatic ambitions and wills to institutionalism?”

She instead calls for feelings of ‘love’ as opposed to ownership to come into Black feminism’s engagement with intersectionality, which would facilitate an affective openness to vulnerability and sharing with other fields.

I cannot overstate how much I love Nash’s writing style and the way she structures her arguments. It doesn’t feel like she is belittling Black feminist feelings, it never feels like a malignant slam dunk. I rarely cite other reviewers, but I feel this is so apt that I can’t help but repeat it – the tone feels like “eavesdropping on a family dispute”. She strikes a marvellous middle ground between writing formally/academically and being approachable to readers outside the academy. Her arguments are well substantiated, and I will definitely be sitting with the thought of the affects and defensiveness of Black feminism for a while. I also found the idea of originalism as it pertains to Black feminist texts so fascinating.

I feel like I need to chew on the idea put forth in the fourth chapter on somewhat embracing and reorienting the law to feel differently about Black women. I tend to agree with more anti-state critiques that locate the state as a site of racist and misogynoiristic violence and I am not sure it is fully argued here why those presumptions are unfounded. However, I am still giving it an imperfect 5 stars. This one of those theory books that feel like a lifted veil, or a sigh of relief and I hope that it invigorates the intended effect of creating more dynamic debate around intersectionality, its possible limitations and the future of Black feminism.

[Ash Ponders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a while to read all the source and references material so I could follow along with the arguments. This one is for folks who are already up to date. I admittedly checked out of the leading feminist and black stuff in probably 2007, I had a *ton* of catching up to do. I’m glad Nash gave me the kick in the pants.

As for the text itself, I’m gonna need to sit with it a while and digest. I’m glad I pre-ordered this. Good shit.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's what I think happened. Nash wrote an article that critiqued intersectionally but did so poorly in a way that failed to understand that intersectionally is about power, not identity. People called Nash out. In response, Nash wrote this book in which she does some bizzare mental contortions all to the end of wanting not to be thought of as the critic she is. She accuses black feminists of being overly defensive and says that its impossible to know what Crenshaw actually meant in her intersectionality articles (huh?) and so rather than try to fact check critics, we should validate them through debate and accept them as people merely building upon the concept of intersectionality.

Basically the book form of a lowly conspiracy theorist calling the famous scholar a coward for refusing to engage in public debate with them.

[J. Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strong intervention in what Nash dubs the "intersectionality wars" which seek to "protect" intersectionality against perceived attacks instead of opening the term up to the kind of capacious reading practices which might allow a great analytical freedom. Nash examines how intersectionality has gotten linked with Black feminism and Black women's embodiment in ways which create the perception that an attack on one is an attack on actual people. Her claim is not that we abandon intersectionality but that we reinvigorate it through a reexamination of its juridical roots and consider how it can provide new pathways for figuring intimacy, vulnerability, and witnessing. The chapter on the overlapping narratives about intersectionality and transnational feminism was not as clearly knitted into the overall claims, but the thrust of this book was lovely and generous.

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

i feel relatively ambivalent about this book--i'm not convinced that its failure to attend to the very category of woman is warranted (particularly in light of Spillers and Patrice Douglass) and i'm wary of any attempt to reinvigorate the law as if it is not itself rooted in the first law, which is to say, the preservation of an anti-Black property relation. but i did think it gave a good sense of the academic debates around intersectionality and some of the impasses that such debates can generate.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This couldn't be any more thought-provoking and intelligent unless Nash just kept writing more chapters. I LOVED this book. I will say it starts well past simple introductions to Black Feminism, Intersectionality, and social/political/racial theorizing, so you better have your smarty-hat on because she is all-in from the first page. This is not a book for the faint of heart or the casual reader. Nor can it be casually read,even by those with the proper background. It requires full attention and insists that you actively think while reading. It took me much longer than I would have expected to complete because it is dense and scholarly to a fault. That is a big reason I enjoyed it so much, Nash forces you to analyze things, to reject commonly accepted doctrine, to go deeper into concepts and -isms. She is obviously super-intelligent and quite well-versed in feminist studies, at the very least. Amazingly smart.
Some examples of how thorough she considers her topics:
: The politics of reading - the idea that reading with "care" leads into two meanings of "care": to read with a deep fidelity to intersectional texts, AND to read with deep concern and nurturing for intersectionality as a concept. Yep, it is like that all the way through. Smart as hell.
: Diversity - does it just mean multiple differences in the agents - as in Black, White, Queer, Muslim, Other-Abled? Or does it mean a system or process leading to a different result than what we have now? Meaning this: if diversity just allows Non-White agents to participate, but still with the aim of producing "White Systems", than is diversity valuable? Is it working? Is it needed? Is something else needed?
: Origin Stories - Whence Intersectionality? The endless/needless search for "who came up with it first??" Which scholar, thinker, activist? Nash asserts Intersectionality has always been a part of Black Feminism, not via theory but practice. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, The Combahee Collective, Audre Lorde. All of these women were operating "intersectionally", before or after the term was penned. The idea that there is a "Columbus" for the concept is pointless and defeating, as it leaves out too many people, too many actions (as in political actions), too many tangents.
There is so much more of this between these pages. Nash almost casually makes you think and rethink and unthink commonly held ideas and phrases and words. She has this rather sideways analysis that I thoroughly am on board with, as I think when you are willing to question everything - and Nash even questions herself and her ideas throughout the book - then you are truly thinking. Foucault is hardly a friend to feminism in general, but his edict to read without the author has always made me work hard to be authentic with my thought-pursuits. Nash does this too, and then some. Yes, "who said it" can matter, but "what is said" is where meaning and value should be attributed, in my mind. It is easy to parrot others' ideas or agree without serious deconstruction and re-analysis, but that isn't thinking, if you ask me.
Nash makes you think, and be concerned, about Intersectionality, Black Feminism, Feminism, sexual politics, racial politics, class, gender, and the current operations of our academic enterprises. This book is amazing, and will definitely push me to further reading. Her plentiful Notes and massive Bibliography will be extremely helpful in that task.
Essential.

[Kevin Ouyang · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good, carefully written and argued. nash details how "intersectionality" has traveled (and, in many contexts, emptied of meaning) across discourses and goes on to argue that women's studies has cast "intersectionality" as its primary intellectual export, its salvation, and also its undoing, in turn locking black feminists and black women scholars into "positions of defensiveness." the last chapter deals with the potentials of law and the juridicial, which i'll need more time to think about. overall would recommend.

[Enya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't realise that this book would focus more on the academic field of intersectionality and its position in the university than the actual content of intersectional thought, and thus was a little less interested in this book than I thought I would be.

[no · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very dense but thoughtful & skillful piece of academic critique. unfortunately she completely lost me at the end with an underdeveloped and willfully naive assertion that intersectionality ought to reorient to the juridical, approaching the state with ~love~. no thanks!

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like psychoanalysis because it is a theory, as Mari Ruti suggests, about feelings, in particular, bad feelings. I like feminism, specifically Black feminism, and its notion of "intersectionality" for similar reasons. Intersectionality is also a theory about feelings, too often bad feelings. To be clear, this is not to suggest that Black feminism, like feminism broadly, is, as many of its detractors might suggest, a "kill-joy" theory. Instead, I agree with Jennifer C. Nash that Black feminism is "an affective project" and a "felt experience" (3). But the question to consider is what Black feminism, and by extension, Black feminists, feel. What is Black feminism's guiding affect? For Jennifer C. Nash in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality that affect, especially regarding intersectionality, is "defensiveness" (3).

The defensiveness Nash associates with Black feminism should come as no surprise. For example, Black women, both inside and outside the academy, labor in invisible, ignored, underrepresented, and uncompensated or poorly compensated ways. Plus, many conservative commentators use intersectionality as a scary buzzword. For example, in 2019, Ben Shapiro described "intersectional politics" as "really dangerous." That same year, Omayma Mohamed described intersectionality as "a conspiracy theory of victimization" and "a tangled web of obsessive white guilt and fetishized victimhood." Therefore, according to Nash, defensiveness is "a practice of a certain kind of agency" for Black feminists, and I have no trouble understanding why (26).

But what Nash attempts to accomplish in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality is not a wholesale abandoning of intersectionality, but an abandoning of the defensiveness and pain she associates with intersectionality. She writes, "The book, then, theorizes defensiveness as the feeling that emerges when intersectionality is thought to be a lost object or, worse, a stolen object" (32). In Chapter 3, for example, she argues for a politics and ethics of "letting go" as a necessary step for intersectionality. She successfully argues that intersectionality's defensiveness and "territoriality" around interpretive practices of original intersectional texts simply reproduces certain exclusionary capitalist drives. Even a theory of stewardship, which suggests that "one never possesses intersectionality, one simply cares for the precious intellectual tradition to enable its ongoing vitality" (77), produces and reinscribes, according to Nash, "logics of ownership, property, and territoriality" (78). Nash's larger critique exposes the reflexive yet understandable protectiveness and territoriality too often visible in critiques of critiques of intersectionality. She argues, "To care for intersectionality, then, is to care for black women's intellectual production and to care for black women as knowledge producers, as subjects...this book again and again emphatically interrogates moments where care, love, and affection mask a pernicious possessiveness, a refusal to let intersectionality move and transform in unexpected and perhaps challenging ways" (80). But I suspect critics of Nash might ask: how can we care for Black women as knowledge producers, as subjects" without intersectionality? Intersectionality's legal, social, and symbolic gains are precarious, right? Perhaps, but for Nash, the risk is worth it because the "deep pull of the proprietary" does far more to limit intersectionality because it has the effect of mapping the exploitative contours of capitalism onto intersectionality. Therefore, if we let go "of what we think intersectionality must do," then we can begin "to tell a different story about what black feminist theory can do" (110).

Nash's final chapter locates love or "radical intimacies" as one of two sites for intersectionality's emancipation. In a move that sounds like psychoanalysis's notion of lack, Nash writes, "To act in love, with love, is to recognize this mutual vulnerability as something that must be not eschewed but rather embraced" (116). Love and the recognition of a "mutual vulnerability" represent something genuinely emancipatory because we cannot think of what we share as something positive, it must, instead, be a shared, collective negativity (i.e., lack).

However, Nash situates these conceptual notions in the relatively concrete territory of the law. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, Nash wants to reanimate the law as a space for Black women's survival. She writes, "I treat intersectionality as an analytic that radically occupies law, takes hold of legal doctrine and refuses its conceptions of neutrality and uniformity as performance of justice" (129). This line of argumentation is where a Nash-skeptic might characterize her argument as naive and utopian. One might, for example, read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and wonder how the legal system could ever work if the affirmative ways Nash describes for Black people. But again, this schism is the foundation for Nash's argument; she wants to push intersectionality into a new and potentially perilous territory while her detractors, by contrast, are more skeptical and, therefore, conservative as Nash suggests.

Too often, the sort of debate and theorizing that happens in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality feels insular and impenetrable, save for a select few wonky academics. However, Nash makes a compelling claim for why Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality matters beyond the academy. She writes, "black women are the beginning and end of politics, the figures that will salvage feminism, even as that salvation might rupture the project of feminism, altogether" (135). Furthermore, "academics debates about intersectionality acted as a laboratory for the debates that now circulate outside of academic feminism, in popular feminism practiced on Twitter and Facebook, at protests and rallies" (136). Timely and prescient, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality effectively characterizes intersectionality's past, present, and (if Nash's utopianism comes true) its future.

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nash asks brilliant, engaging, robust questions about the rhetoric of intersectionality and how it positions black feminists within women’s studies (typically as offering correctives or disciplining the field to make it better rather than articulating a theoretical tradition that is rich and worldmaking in its own right). This inquiry into questions of labor, service, and historiography is really tremendous. I’m still a bit unclear on what she thinks intersectionality actually does or looks like in contemporary scholarship though, and I’m also interested in but not totally convinced by her concluding chapter on recuperating law—I’m not really a full-on anti-state person either, but I am an abolitionist and I don’t think she engages that tradition fully enough to rebut its concerns about punitive approaches to structuring life/the state.

This pairs really well with Clare Hemmings’ “Why Stories Matter” and shares many of its generic conventions and rhetorical strategies. Would love to teach/discuss both together.

[Chloë Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like 4.75 stars. This academic text does a new thing around intersectionality as a field that i really appreciated. Nash’s critiques of academia are saliently, her arguments around the usefulness (or lack thereof) of intersectionality to different sectors lands, and her manipulation of grammar and rhetoric is masterful. I am, having said all that, not sure if I’m sold on the premise of intersectionality’s being more useful when positioned categorically outside black feminist theoretical frames. I understand though, and agree, that the work of defensiveness around a linguistic manipulation (intersectionality) is a pseudo pointless one, one that demands breaking up and playing with, one that asks more questions than it answers. Unrelated to content, this book is written near perfectly, is the IDEAL length of an academic text. It doesn’t espouse or soliloquize but it does narratively ask and answer all it needs to do its work. It has proven that y’all w the 300 page plus academic texts just love to hear yourself gab. It was great. Actually five stars fr.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elegantly written and impressively theorized dissection of intersectionality and the debates, discourses and dogmas surrounding it. A large part of the book is strongly focused on discussions and feuds that are internal to the academic fields of women’s studies and black feminism — which were illuminating but also quite inward-looking. Still, Nash is such a brilliant theorist and generous author that I remained thoroughly engaged throughout.

[Hazar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good read for anyone who calls themselves a feminist, however I think the language used was sometimes unnecessarily complicated.

[Fran Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ughhhhhh I thought it was good but like why is the solution to intersectional feminism carceral the ending is so unserious wtf

[Hy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this was a pretty interesting look at the field, but wasnt the biggest fan of her swing towards the judicial. Not bad though and quite generative

[William Alves · Rating 4 out of 5]

is she a fan or hater?

[Ife · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5 (Solely because of the performance)

I will attach my review from the other edition of the book which I gave a 5/5

A major turning point in my understanding of Black feminist politics was the Will Smith-Chris Rock slap. Seeing online Black feminist content creators cannibalise the production of meaning in the aftermath and insist that it must be understood primarily as a political narrative of a Black man protecting a Black woman from misogynoir and ableism, more so than an interpersonal dispute involving three people, was one of the first times that I felt so at odds with other Black feminists. Underneath the claim that Rock’s joke was a shining example of how Black women are casually dehumanized, underneath the censorship of any voice that dared to interrogate Smith’s slap as paternalistic and patriarchal were serious affective charges. I felt the sense that for a lot of Black women the sight of a Black man ‘defending his Black wife’s honour’ was simply a refreshing image that felt both cathartic and karmic, and that Black feminist language had become a mere rhetorical tool to defend the glory of that image. I realised that as Black feminists sometimes the way we feel and the “stories we tell” can shroud all else.

Nash has established herself as a thinker that is particularly keen to Black feminist feelings and the way they can sometimes shroud Black feminist ethos of open debate, truth-seeking etc. In Black Feminism Reimagined she takes a critical lens to feelings around intersectionality (often seen as Black feminism’s greatest contribution) and its movement outside of Black feminism, theorising that feelings of defensiveness and ownership structure logics that seek to absolve intersectionality of any critique, claim its universality, and simultaneously claim that its movement is a form of expropriation. She further argues that this movement outside Black feminism has been mobilised by views of intersectionality as a corrective to ‘white feminism’ which aids a culture in which the bodies of Black female academics are constantly called upon to symbolically bear witness to departments of women’s studies 'inclusivity', which she argues fuels these feelings of defensiveness. In doing so, she theorizes Black feminism as an emotional site, something that we feel as well as practice:

“What does it feel like when analytics that one imagines as one’s own—such as intersectionality—become popularized, institutionalized, ossified? How does one come to imagine an analytic, method, or tool as one’s own? What does it feel like when one’s scholarly work becomes termed a “buzzword” or is mobilized by universities in ways that feel at odds with one’s own work? And what does it mean to feel that the symbols of one’s body and intellectual production have become the cornerstone of women’s studies programmatic ambitions and wills to institutionalism?”

She instead calls for feelings of ‘love’ as opposed to ownership to come into Black feminism’s engagement with intersectionality, which would facilitate an affective openness to vulnerability and sharing with other fields.

I cannot overstate how much I love Nash’s writing style and the way she structures her arguments. It doesn’t feel like she is belittling Black feminist feelings, it never feels like a malignant slam dunk. I rarely cite other reviewers, but I feel this is so apt that I can’t help but repeat it – the tone feels like “eavesdropping on a family dispute”. She strikes a marvellous middle ground between writing formally/academically and being approachable to readers outside the academy. Her arguments are well substantiated, and I will definitely be sitting with the thought of the affects and defensiveness of Black feminism for a while.

I feel like I need to chew on the idea put forth in the fourth chapter on somewhat embracing and reorienting the law to feel differently about Black women. I tend to agree with more anti-state critiques that locate the state as a site of racist and misogynoiristic violence and I am not sure it is fully argued here why those presumptions are unfounded. However, I am still giving it an imperfect 5 stars. This one of those theory books that feel like a lifted veil, or a sigh of relief and I hope that it invigorates the intended effect of creating more dynamic debate around intersectionality, its possible limitations and the future of Black feminism.

However as for this performance a few of the words were mispronounced, lots of odd pauses, weird pronunciation of names. There was a sense that the performer wasn't familiar with the content of the material and I don't think they always have to be but it shouldn't come across. I couldn't even imagine having only have listened to this I think its important to follow the citations and I highly recommend reading it.

[Eavan Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike what many critics of the book contend, this is NOT an effort to discipline and correct black feminists, but a skeptic explicating the critical attachment produced by the contemporary reified academic institution. The problem is not black feminist defensiveness (which is the result of institutional configuration of it as the ONLY form of agency black feminists exert in academia), not even the conceptual efficacy of "intersectionality", but the institution itself. If anything, this is one among the emerging auto-critique genre/affective turn in feminist studies, questioning black feminist theorists' own attachment to the university, "optimistically, self-destructively, or both" (27). It is a symptomatic reading pointing to the felt experience of black feminists as not only cathartic (psychic), but obstructed (social).

Nash highlights the multi-faceted symptoms of the discipline of "women's studies" in the citational ubiquity of intersectionality: the compulsive symbolization of black women's bodies (4), the distribution of labor and value extraction of black women's "feminist service work" to "remedy the field from itself" (13), the self-legitimating progress narrative based on self-congratulatory inclusive tokenism (14, 17, 23 and 24 on diversity as organizational rebranding rather than systemic remedy), the fixed figuration of black women as aggrieved subjects (15), the continuous treatment of black feminists as a footnote of white feminist institution ("merely a critique") rather than having "an autonomous intellectual and political tradition" (16), the fetishization (19) and currency-like circulation of "intersectionality" as symbolic capital in the academic job market (18), the critical desire for "pitching one against another" between black suffering and the capacity for pleasure (20), the desire to treat identity categories (race, gender) as "ontologically equivalent" (21), etc. As such, to call out her project as one that pathologizes and regulates black feminist feelings is to miss the whole point of critique of affect, institution, and ideology. As she emphasized, "the felt life of black feminism is shaped by black feminist's institutional location in women's studies." (28)

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book argues that defensiveness has come to mark contemporary academic Black feminist practice, which manifests itself most explicitly through Black feminism's proprietary attachments to intersectionality. Defensiveness is then articulated by rendering intersectionality Black feminist property, as terrain that has been gentrified, colonised, and appropriated, and as territory that must be guarded and protected through the requisite Black feminist vigilance, care, and stewardship.
Defensiveness should not be misconstrued as diagnosing Black feminists as defensive or to pathologise their feelings, rather this history is noted and critiqued so as to reveal how the defensive affect traps Black feminism, hindering its visionary world-making capacities.

Particularly illuminating is how academia has used intersectionality in a manner in which it becomes both overdetermined and emptied of any specific meaning. By seeking to confer value and aligning priorities around diversity and inclusion, intersectionality strays far from its intellectual roots in Black feminism, and instead acts as a "value added" plus, which signals an ethical orientation that animates the analytic's institutional life

Feelings of defensiveness and the act of intersectionality into property to be defended and guarded are contradicted by Black feminism's long standing anticaptivity orientation, and the tradition's deep critiques of how logics of property enshrine boundarie, which ensure that value is communicated exclusively through ownership
The author instead offers two ways of letting go: 1) reanimating the notion of "women of colour", reinvigorating connections between transnationalism and intersectionality, and 2) unleashing radical intimacies among women of clour and a deep embrace and return to intersectionality's juridical orientations

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jennifer Nash provides a detailed exploration of the ways approaches to intersectionality have failed to account for intellectual growth while also probing the term's usefulness. For individuals with a strong foundation with intersectionality as a concept relating to compounding dimensions of identity, some of Nash's arguments may seem unnecessary, but the book seemingly has greater relevancy given that so many scholars, per Nash, both inside and outside of Black feminism reduce the term to a singular identity rather than a compounded identity that results in distinct unique interactions with the systems we engage with. Familiarity with Black feminist theory seems necessary to fully engage with this book.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jennifer Nash argues that black feminists should let go of the idea of having to defend the concept of intersectionality from appropriation by the neoliberal academy. She proposes that by saving your energy on defending this theoretical framework from traveling, black feminist theorist could develop new concepts and focus on scholarship beyond intersectionality.

This book is a very interesting contribution to black feminist theory. Not only is Nash proposing interesting new concepts to further develop, but she is also providing useful surveys both the American Women's Studies Association and black feminist thought throughout the years.

[jose buendia · Rating 5 out of 5]

My sisters frequently asked me what Feminism can offer in the way of theory or analytics for a modern woman. Many foundational texts having been produced before the turn of the century, their insights may be limited in some ways.

This text delivered a cautious indictment of intersectionality & establishes fundamental tools with which to foment much needed evolution. The political right has rendered intersectionality facile, necessitating a grander project and movement. Wholly innovative and erudite, this text perfectly situates the reader for the revelations that will be constructed by the next generation of Feminists.

[Chrissy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I encountered this book through a Women’s Studies class. It was a lot of new material for me. I had a strong understanding of many of the black feminist authors Nash mentioned, but this was my first time encountering critiques about intersectionality, or thinking critically about how the analytic has been co-opted by the university. I found this book insightful and well-written, but I wish her later chapters had been more fleshed out. I wanted to hear more about her vision for love-politics and finding new ways to use intersectionality within the realm of the juridical.