Olivia Hendricks
Professor Sparks
WGSS Proseminar
27 October 2014
Article Extension: “From intersectionality to interference: Feminist onto-epistemological
reflections on the politics of representation”
A broad overview of the debates on intersectionality within feminist and queer studies is in
itself an ambitious project, even more if that overview builds to a proposed alternative to
intersectionality. Ending in the idea of “interference” as its proposed resolution, the 2013 article
“From intersectionality to interference: Feminist onto-epistemological reflections on the politics
of representation” by Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin of Utrecht University takes on both of
these projects. This article was selected as an extension of Jasbir Puar’s “‘I would rather be a
cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” as it devotes a bit of
space to placing her arguments within a broader context of the intersectionality debates and
similarly seeks to more thoroughly explore alternatives to traditional notions of intersectionality,
though through different means and to a different end.
The bulk of the article consists of a genealogy of intersectionality that puts into dialogue and
political context the past ideas of thinkers on the topic. Though an academic term only thirtysomething years in the making, it is not surprising that the authors chose to devote a genealogy to
intersectionality’s history since, as Puar notes, intersectionality is often considered one of the (if
not the) primary intellectual products of women’s studies. It has been debated rather hotly in part
because of its importance to addressing historical issues of racial exclusion in feminist thought,
but also because of its engagements with other difficult questions such as categorization,
materiality, conceptions of power, and subjectivity. Most recently, scholars such as Puar in her
2012 article have been rethinking ways in which intersectionality can be approached in a
“convivial” sense to be viewed as less at odds with other notions of subject and identity
construction (p. 51). Published just one year after Puar, and citing her 2012 work, Geerts and van
der Tuin may be following suit in trying to build off of intersectionality to advocate for new
metaphors (Puar’s is “becoming-intersectionality”; Geerts and van der Tuin’s is “interference”.)
Geerts and van der Tuin begin by rooting intersectionality’s start in the context of black
feminist thought and proceed to highlight the complications of intersectionality through
subsequent tensions between feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. They emphasize the links between feminist standpoint theory and intersectionality as
reasons why the idea was able to survive changing theoretical trends in the field. Related issues
of categorization and language are raised, focusing especially on their implications for
marginalizing or universalizing experiences primarily of black women, which are then
expounded upon through a discussion of Butler’s social constructivism. The authors argue that
through all of this development and critique of intersectionality, one primary ongoing problem is
that of representationalism, in the simplest sense articulated as a privileging of thought over
being. Voicing support for an “onto-epistemological” understanding of subjects, the authors
review Foucauldian notions of power’s productiveness, the possibility for agency, and the
embodied, materiality of subjects (engaging Puar briefly here) as part of their development of an
argument for interference, which they cite primarily as inspired by Karen Barad.
Perhaps one of the places in which the authors’ elaboration on Barad’s interference is clearest
is when they demonstrate how it differs from the past conceptions of intersectionality they had
previously outlined. They explain: “By allowing for relations to be made and made differently,
we no longer assume that a social catefory or a set of social categories has a decisive and
uniform effect…nor do we continue to believe in the Butlerian queering of the norm”, instead,
they affirm that “Structures are exclusionary (i.e., they are constraining) and enabling (i.e., they
allow for surprises.) They are nothing but phenomenal interference patterns that are always on
the move”, where here we can imagine the ways in which waves of light or sound overlap into
each other, as the authors describe earlier in the article (p. 176).
While the notion of interference is interesting, a great deal of the article’s worth also lies in its
succinct contextualization of the arguments of thinkers on intersectionality, including Crenshaw,
Collins, Butler, Barad, Appiah and many others incorporated into the genealogy. This
contextualization somewhat oddly was perhaps most impactful in its discussion of Crenshaw and
her original political reasons for advocating for intersectionality—to address the flattening of
black women in discrimination cases to simply women or simply black. In their discussion on
page 173, the authors make clear the political necessity of what Crenshaw began. This being
said, there are clear parallels between the origins of women’s studies and the origins of
intersectionality. Both began with specific political intents and within specific political moments,
and both expanded to a point of possible institutionalized unwieldiness and overgeneralization.
This is one sense in which the authors’ support for interference seems like less than a
complete answer to the challenges they outline regarding intersectionality. The authors
acknowledge that intersectionality has a certain “versatility” that has allowed it to withstand a
number of transitions in feminist thinking (p. 174). Another way of understanding this versatility,
however, is that feminist theory may be over-invested in the concept, revisiting again Puar’s
citation of McCall on the importance of intersectionality as one of women’s studies primary
intellectual productions. As Wendy Brown notes in her article “The Impossibility of Women’s
Studies”, the field as it currently exists depends on the category of women in order to have a
subject of study. Part of the trouble of intersectionality, and similarly interference, is that they
both still rely on certain generalizations around notions of class, race, and of course, gender.
Thus, women’s studies has two reasons to be overly invested in intersectionality and similar
theories of subject construction—first, because these theories “prove” that the field has produced
a widely-known concept and is thus valid (a concern for a newer field that is often on the
defensive), and second, because that concept, similar to the field itself, is oriented around broad
identity constructs, even if those are being broken down and modified.
In this sense, Puar’s approach to intersectionality is somewhat more intriguing because it is
more inviting of Assemblage Theory, and of intersectionality “losing” some of itself to ideas that
come from outside institutionalized feminist thought (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari.) The more
women’s studies and intersectionality are willing to continue losing themselves in this fashion,
the more successful they may be in addressing the concerns that have been raised around
intersectionality. For example, psychology, which focuses more on individuals’ engagements
with broader social constructs may offer some rich metaphors for thinking about the ways in
which individuals are constituted at many, many different layers of socialization and subjecthood
(e.g. Bronfenbrenner’s concentric circles ecological model.) Psychology’s overlapping waves
model of learning would also explain that individuals may choose to engage different models of
understanding themselves within broader identities to suit different individual needs in different
moments (e.g. sometimes they may think intersectionally for certain purposes, other times in
terms of interference, other times something else entirely, as a matter of need and function.)
Perhaps prescribing an overarching, constant metaphor for how identities relate to individuals is
in the interest of the field as it is currently formulated. However, it may be worth thinking about
creating more space in the field for other disciplines and conceptions of the questions that are
important to us.
Works Cited
Brown, Wendy. “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies.” Women’s Studies on the Edge. Ed.
Joan Wallach Scott. Durham: Duke University Press. 2008.
Geerts, Evelien and Iris van der Tuin. “From intersectionality to interference: Feminist ontoepistemological reflections on the politics of representation.” Women’s Studies
International Forum 41 (2013): 171-178.
Puar, Jasbir K. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in
Assemblage Theory.” philoSOPHIA. 2.1 (2012): 49-66.