SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Some of Us Are Still Brave: New Intersectional Perspectives on Race

Room 223, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)

Though the marginalization of women-of-color perspectives within feminism was a foundational impulse for the development of intersectionality as an analytic frame, the need remains for the deployment of intersectionality to theorize race within twenty-first-century contexts. Addressing this need, panelists 1 and 2 will advance intersectional perspectives on black women, with panelist 1 examining the paradoxes of intimacy inherent in the social construction of the black female domestic servant and with panelist 2 discussing the distinct inflections of a feminist perspective that centers the black female Muslim subject. Panelists 3 and 4 will focus on race and class intersections: panelist 3 will engage in an intersectional analysis of Asian migration in North Georgia, and panelist 4 will interrogate not only race-class intersections but also the concept of intersectionality itself, arguing that it often gets discussed at the level of the individual rather than that of systemic operations of power, such as race-class-based policymaking. Together, the panelists will demonstrate the ongoing salience of the concept of intersectionality for understanding race, gender, class, religion, and nationality within both the humanities and social sciences. This panel will fit with the conference theme by providing illustrative examples of intersectional research.