Re-reading Intersectionality
as
Queer Assemblage
- as thoughts by Jabir K. Puar
Although the concept of intersectionality has been influential on feminist thinkers to tackle an insistent rasism, sexsim, gender injustices and any form of descriminations, it is important to understand how the discourse of intersectionality are analysed. A queer theorist Jasbir K Puar points out that Intersectional analysis ironically reproduces identitarian catagories and reinforces the demands of subject formation. Therefore, she argues a necessity of re-reading intersectionality in tandem with Assemblage theory. (M.N)
‘’ Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative of identification: you become an identity [...] Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident, assemblages allow us to attune to intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. [...] For while intersectionality and its underpinnings—an unrelenting epistemological will to truth—presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming/s beyond being/s.” (Puar, 2005; 128)
*Puar notes that “[t]his is not to disavow or minimize the important interventions that intersectional theorizing makes possible and continues to stage, or the feminist critical spaces that gave rise to intersectional analyses.”
readings:
Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages” ed. David L. Eng Jack Halberstam and José E Muñoz, Social Text (2005), 23, issue (3-4 (84-85):121–139. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-121
Puar, Jasbir K. "“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory." philoSOPHIA, vol. 2 no. 1, 2012, p. 49-66. Project MUSE https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486621
Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages” ed. David L. Eng Jack Halberstam and José E Muñoz, Social Text (2005), 23, issue (3-4 (84-85):121–139. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-121
Puar, Jasbir K. "“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory." philoSOPHIA, vol. 2 no. 1, 2012, p. 49-66. Project MUSE https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486621