2019 Gensler Family Symposium: Articulating Intersectionality: Accounting for Racial Capitalism

Miranda Joseph, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota

“Intersectionality” has served an important role in feminist studies as a persistent call to attend to women of color and account for the relation between racial and gender formations. Meanwhile, scholars have contrasted intersectionality—which emerges from and may be bound to a US context, a US legal context—with another important analytic framework in the field: transnational feminist cultural studies. And poststructuralist feminists have challenged intersectionality for its stabilization of identity and subjectivity, offering, for example, assemblage theory as a supplement that better captures the dynamism and complexity of social processes. Less attention has been paid to exploring the scope and limits of intersectional analysis in relation to theorizations of capitalism-gender-race relations, such as “racial capitalism” or “articulation.” In this presentation, I explore what these concepts might have to offer our analyses, and, specifically, explore the role of accounting–which is to say allocating social and financial credits and debts–in articulating social formations that are, among other things, gendered and raced.