Black Feminism Out of Place

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine recent critiques of intersectionality produced under the heading of “assemblage theory,” especially in the work of Jasbir Puar. I argue that these critiques reductively produce intersectionality as a spatial metaphor that locates and fixes compound subjects, a fixing complicit with the work of the national security state. Intervening in these critiques of intersectionality, the article traces alternative theorizations of spatiality and subjectivity internal to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, extending them through Hortense Spillers’s theorization of the interstice as the nonsite of the Black female subject. In this rereading of Crenshaw through Spillers, I explore how intersectionality belongs not only to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on particularity and compoundedness but to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on placelessness, singularity, and absence. Rather than bolster oppressive institutions through liberal models of inclusion, Black feminism names a monstrous potential to disrupt and to disappear within institutional space.

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