Critical Reflections on "Intersectionality"

SCA Speaker Series Presents:

Two Decades & Counting: Critical Reflections on "Intersectionality"
A Roundtable Discussion

With:
Kimberle Crenshaw, Columbia University and UCLA
Lisa Duggan, NYU
Karen Shimakawa, NYU
Chandan Reddy, University of Washington

DECEMBER 1, 2009
4:00 - 6:00 pm
20 Cooper Square, 4th Fl

This forum commemorates the 20th anniversary of the enunciation and analysis of “intersectionality” by legal theorist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw in her path-breaking essays, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991). Panelists explore the ongoing analytic purchase of “intersectionality” for anti-racist social critique and legal activism and also ask how the term has been transformed as it travels across different historical and disciplinary contexts.

Kimberlé Crenshaw teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. Her primary scholarly interests center around race and the law, and she was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory. She now splits her time each year between UCLA and the Columbia School of Law. Professor Crenshaw's publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993). In 2007, she was nominated the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil. In 2008, she was a fellow at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. Professor Crenshaw is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, a think tank that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research, public discourse and public policy related to inequality, discrimination and injustice.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.

Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage and co-editor (with Kandice Chuh) of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Her current project, titled Somatic Citizenship, focuses on the construction and maintenance of bodily regimes of cultural identification and her research and teaching interests include critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American Jurisprudence.

Chandan Reddy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of a number of articles on the topic of race, sexuality and late capitalism. He is currently at work on a forthcoming book entitled: A Freedom with Violence: Trajectories of US Modernity as a Politics of Race.

Thanks to our co-sponsors:
American Studies Program
Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and
the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality