My project investigates the idea of ‘intersectionality' as it develops in the period stretching from the 1960's to Kimberlé Crenshaw's coinage of the word in 1989. The aim of the project is to provide philosophical grounding for the ideas about subjectivity and subjection at stake in the concept of ‘intersectionality' while simultaneously reflecting the criticism from intersectional feminism back on that philosophical grounding.
I operate with a working definition of intersectionality as a term that seeks to encapsulate the specific mode of subjection of women of colour under capitalism. This redefinition presupposes distinguishing intersectionality as a response to a problem, i.e. the systematic erasure of black women in different conceptions of the subject, the legal subject, the revolutionary subject, the oppressed subject etc., from intersectionality as a ‘geometrical' theory of social identities. Following that, I suggest that intersectionality is not, in its most radical articulation as a response to a problem, a theory of how subjects are constituted, but rather a concept that points to the limits of the philosophical concept of the subject.
Parting from this conception of intersectionality I aim to explore firstly, how discourses on intersectionality in the years stretching from 1960 to 1980 develop as a part of Marxist feminist reconceptualizations of women's laboring practices. What role does intersectionality play in the domestic-labour debates? How do discourses on intersectionality complicate dominant ideas of the housewife as the subject of the feminist movement? Secondly, how ideas of subjectivity and subjection articulated in intersectional feminism can nuance the philosophical theories of the subject emerging from structuralism. How is the very idea of a universalized process through which individuals become subjects complicated by intersectionality? Can a philosophical engagement with the emblematically transdisciplinary field of intersectional studies contribute to a critique of philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline, a realization of it as critical theory?
I have a BA in Philosophy with a one year Erasmus exchange at Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis and a BA in French Language and Literature with a one semester Erasmus exchange at Université Paris-Diderot, both from the University of Copenhagen. In 2021, I completed a MPhil in Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, during which I studied one semester at Université Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint-Denis.
I began my PhD at the CRMEP in 2022 with a Techne AHRC Fully Funded Studentship.