The fungibility of intersectionality: an Afropessimist reading

ABSTRACT What makes intersectionality an empty shell onto which scholars of all stripes can conveniently project their own concerns and feel completely legitimate to do so? What authorizes the easy removal of Black feminists from their theoretical innovation, intersectionality? Asking these polemical questions, the article engages a constellation of concepts (Black fungibility, natal alienation, slavery’s afterlife) typically attached to Afropessimism to propose exploratory answers. Despite a lack of strong affinities between these two strands of Black theorizing, intersectionality and Afropessimism, the latter provides a useful interpretive lens to illuminate the former’s post-Black feminist makeover in contemporary academe. Bringing evidence of the fungibility of Black women’s bodies and knowledges within current academic dealings with intersectionality, this inquiry also invites all scholars engaging intersectionality to build a defensive front against violent academic extractivism that unfolds through the removal of Black women and Black feminism from intersectionality.

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