UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA WGS 498/GSJ 598

Module 2 – REFLECTION

We began this module with revisiting strategies for academic and critical reading. These should be helpful for reading efficiently, improving comprehension, and tackling dense and complex texts. That said, complex theoretical texts sometimes bring us to the limit of our understanding. That is ok. Some of the best advice I received in graduate school was to read for what I understand. And with more reading, understanding will grow.

That said working regularly on improving reading skills is important for academic success, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. So I am curious: what do you do when you don’t understand the reading? Throw the book across the room? (Confession: that’s what I did when I first read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble as an international masters student in 1991. My original copy of the book still contains annotations that translate some of her words into German, my native tongue. And there are dents in the book from having been thrown around.)

Hopefully the active reading techniques suggested in this unit will help you. Try out being in conversation with the author. Take notes of what you understand and of what you don’t understand. (“I understand the author to be saying X but what I don’t understand at this point is how they connect X to Y.”) Sometimes just writing it out or talking about it with somebody helps understanding better, or, realizing more clearly what I don’t yet understand.

You can try AI technologies, and ask ChatGPT for a non-specialist summary of a technical or difficult text by cutting and pasting in the abstract and a few key paragraphs and asking for a summary of the article. However, be very careful with that. Make sure to re-read what ChatGPT gives you — it might be wrong or overly simplistic. But again, being in dialogue even with something like ChatGPT might help. Or try outlining or mapping the main moves of a text. Remember to always locate the text’s main point and the idea to which the author is responding.

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In this module, we studied three texts that survey and analyze the status of intersectionality in the face of its immense centripetal growth within  Black and BIPoC activism and research, feminist and women’s and gender studies, its centrifugal development into many other disciplines and areas of social justice movement. The goal of UofA’s Intersections of Gender Signature area described in the last module was a centrifugal effort at mainstreaming intersectional approaches beyond feminist, women’s and gender studies scholarship.

Needless to say, this effort and the exponential growth of intersectionality is both an immense opportunity but also raises concerns about what form intersectionality will take as in the process.

“[W]ithout serious self-reflection, intersectionality could easily become just another social theory that implicitly upholds the status quo,” warns Patricia Collins (2019: 2). She continues, “[i]f practitioners do not pursue intersectionality’s critical theoretical possibilities, it could become just another form … of ‘academic bullshit’ that joins an arsenal of projects whose progressive and radical potential has waned” (3). 

Dhamoon (2011) and Collins (2019) join a large chorus of intersectionality scholars who are concerned with the popularity of intersectionality leading to being “‘easily appropriated by the white-dominated mainstream of feminist thought” (Caratathis 2016, 2) while “disappear[ing] or remarginalizing black women” (Alexander Floyd 2012, 9), or being just more “academic bullshit” that upholds the status quo of inequality. Each of the authors we have read so far urges reflection, analysis, as well as offering normative commitments for keeping intersectionality alive as liberatory, critical methodology for research and social praxis.

References:

Alexander-Floyd, Nikol G. 2012. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post—Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations 24 (1): 1-25.

Andersen, Margaret L., and Patricia Hill Collins. 1992. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology. Edited by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins. N.p.: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. N.p.: Routledge.

Carastathis, Anna. 2016. Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. N.p.: University of Nebraska Press. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.2307/j.ctt1fzhfz8.

Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38 (4): 785-810. https://doi.org/10.1086/669608.

Collins, Patricia H. 1998. Fighting words : Black women and the search for justice. N.p.: University of Minnesota Press.

Collins, Patricia H. 1999. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203900055.

Collins, Patricia H. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. N.p.: Taylor & Francis.

Collins, Patricia H. 2006. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. N.p.: Temple University Press.

Collins, Patricia H. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (August): 1-20. https://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.

Collins, Patricia H. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. N.p.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpkdj.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139-167.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 2016. “Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality.” TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality/transcript?language=en.

Dhamoon, Rita K. 2011. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.” Political Research Quarterly 64 (1): 230-243. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912910379227.

Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199370368.001.0001.

Luhmann, Susanne. 2024. “Notes on Reading Closely and Critically.” YouTube. Video, 11:21. Susanne Luhmann. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dANn_RG17qI. 

Race Forward. 2023. “Home.” Race Forward: Advancing racial justice in our policies, institutions and culture. https://www.raceforward.org/.

Singh, Sonny. 2016. “#RaceAnd: Sonny Singh.” YouTube. Video, 03:09. Race Forward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD0zOrDEvAc.