2019 Gensler Family Symposium: Love Letter from a Critic, or Notes on the Intersectionality Wars

Jennifer Nash, African American Studies & Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University

This talk follows the word “critic” around the black feminist archive, endeavoring to trace its myriad meanings by asking: Who are intersectionality’s critics, and what precisely makes those scholars’ works critical? Why has the term “critic” come to circulate and proliferate around intersectionality in recent years? Why are black feminists so deeply invested in exposing the “critic”? The talk explores the affective lure of the term critic, engaging how the term “critic” has become the centerpiece of the intersectionality wars that black feminism has found itself mired in, and asking how the constant invocation of the malicious critic as a pernicious outsider becomes a crucial strategy through which black feminists reassert their territorial hold on intersectionality.