Retrospectives of Intersectionality as of the Resistance from the Margins

Abstract

In this paper, we propose that the multiple experiences of oppression —as an effect of the simultaneous entanglements between instances of social differentiation and power relations— have experiences of struggle, organization and collective resistance, i.e, different forms of political participation, as their reverse. To address intersecting inequalities and forms of violence, we propose an intersectional approach, due to its multidimensional and complex nature, as well as its roots in struggle. In the first instance, we will draw political genealogies that allow us to historicize intersectionality and tie it to its foundational struggles and demands. We will analyze the experiences of the Combahee River Collective and the Third World Women's Alliance, black feminist organizations of the 1970s in the United States that sought to confront the structural inequalities produced by the articulations between different systems of domination that oriented their anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-sexist political participation. In a later instance, we propose to recover critical genealogies of intersectionality to re-politicize and recomplex it, under the diagnosis of the neutralization and simplification of the perspective. Finally, we propose to subvert dichotomous and exclusionary binarisms under which spaces of hierarchies and privileges have been structured and that reproduce violence and inequalities.