Bodies at the Intersections: Refiguring Intersectionality through Queer Women’s Complex Embodiments

Abstract

In this article we examine the challenges and possibilities of mobilizing intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological construct through a collaborative, arts-based research project. This project, Through Thick and Thin, explored how persons in queer communities who identify (partially or wholly) as women and who claim multiple intersecting positions negotiate, are affected by, and resist body ideals and body management expectations. We present and analyze a selection of multimedia stories (videos) that feature assemblages of queer sexuality, gender expression and identity, and other identifications (race, class, indigeneity, ability, age, etc.) in confrontation with body-based stigma, expectations around eating and exercise, and experiences of pathologization. Reviewing relevant debates within the intersectionality literature, we reflect on how our research team enacted intersectionality as an active, integral part of the research process. We suggest that multimedia storytelling enabled video makers to revise and undermine dominant accounts of their complex, unpredictable, and irreducible bodies. Creative accounts of complex embodiment push the corpus of research on distressed eating and fatness to recognize and better account for bodies at the intersections and press the field of intersectionality studies to consider new ways of conceptualizing intersectionality to account for the complexity of embodiment.

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