“Descriptive Representation” and “Critical” Intersectionality

To capture the stakes in distinguishing between these varying paradigms of intersectionality, I want to describe each briefly in terms of the political problem to which it is a response, rather than account for the philosophical grounds upon which each paradigm rests.Footnote ³ This is crucial because the difference between “queer theory” and “intersectionality” is a difference not only in theoretical and bibliographic grounding but also in the way they construe the nature of the problems to which they are answers.

Intersectionality research conducted within the descriptive-representation paradigm arises as a response to the political problem of exclusion. Such exclusions appear in many feminists' past and present tendency to reduce to a singular, privileged rubric the multiplicity of an individual's identity, such as privileging gender at the expense of racial identity. Or it appears as the broader exclusion of individual persons from a group, such as the absence of women in public spaces, or the absence of women of color in otherwise women-dominated spaces. In response to this political problem of exclusion, intersectional research of the descriptive representation variety tries to include the excluded. Thus, feminists have shown that women of color are excluded from white feminist spaces (Higginbotham Reference Higginbotham1993; hooks Reference hooks1981), that lesbian sexuality and baiting is used to exclude non-Western women's participation in international organizing (Rothschild Reference Rothschild2005), that Third World feminists are excluded both from their own local manifestations of cultural critique and from their European and American counterparts (Mohanty Reference Mohanty1984; Narayan Reference Narayan1997), among countless other instances. The units of analysis for intersectional research in this paradigm are typified in the triptych race-class-gender.

Research in the critical paradigm also attends to the multiple dimensions of identity, but it is a response to a different though related political problem: that despite the critique of essentialism mounted by feminists like Beauvoir, on one hand, and the critiques of unitary categories like “Woman” largely by women of color, on the other, essentialist identity categories continue to resist critique and transformation both ideologically and materially. And so while detailing the fictitious, essentialist nature of “Woman” through descriptive intersectionality has afforded us critical distance from the category, it has done little to affect the socially objective (“reified”) character of the category that continues to pattern out material resources in deeply gendered ways.

Such descriptive criticisms have yet to dislodge decisively the structures that secure something like sexual dimorphism as a fundamental feature of our experience of the world.Footnote ⁴ And so “critical” intersectionality researchers have risen to the challenge by showing how social structures—from poverty and biopolitics (Smith Reference Smith2007), kinship (Rubin Reference Rubin and Reiter1975), racism (Cohen Reference Cohen1997, Reference Cohen2010; Stockton Reference Stockton2006), colonialism and its afterlife (McClintock Reference McClintock1995; McWhorter Reference McWhorter2009; Narayan Reference Narayan1997), militarized nationalism (Enloe Reference Enloe2004), and past and present institutions of life sciences (Fausto-Sterling Reference Fausto-Sterling2000; Lacquer Reference Lacquer1992) to the broader world-historical contexts of capitalism, global division of labor, and modern historicism (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000; Spivak Reference Spivak, Cary and Lawrence1988)—entrench as intransigent fixtures of our world the “fiction” of essentialized identity. Thus, the critical response to the political problem of women confronting the socially objective character of what is technically artificial entails supplementing a description of identity's multiplicity with, in Salamon's words, “[asking] after the ways in which bodies inhabit different sexes and genders and what social structurings make those inhabitations possible” (2006, 578). The units of analysis in critical approaches are thus theorized as historical structures and processes, rather than abiding characteristics of individuals (so, “patriarchy” versus “womanhood”).Footnote ⁵ Rather than responding with inclusion via attention to exclusion, the response from the critical approach is to attend to structures and processes that render the world resistant to fundamental emancipation.

There are conceptual shortcomings with each paradigm that pose significant challenges to our research practice. For example, and without denying the political purchase of this tactic for feminists in the past, the trope of making invisible people visible that is typical of work in the descriptive paradigm is underwritten by the notion—the political commitment, even—that the inclusion of marginalized or invisible perspectives will serve as an important corrective to our social scientific vision. Descriptive representation demands from us that we form a more complete and objective field of vision by including in our work a previously excluded perspective. Or, alternately, it tasks us with reconciling the parallax perspectives of the researcher and the subject – that is, identity as an object of research (“objective”) and identity as lived experience (“subjective”).Footnote ⁶ In either case, descriptive work construes the problem of exclusion to be one of myopic vision, a partiality we need to rectify by representing and making visible those forms of living and being disavowed and erased.

There are dangers for this approach. For his part, Foucault indicates in The History of Sexuality that the figuration of medical categories of sexuality, far from being beneficent acts of extending visibility to the previously marginalized, worked to naturalize a constellation of deviant social practices and peoples as pathological, thus justifying them as targets for the state's moral, scientific, and legal administration. It is sadly the case that, historically, efforts to make public or “visible” deviant practices and peoples often functioned as a pretense for sustaining the operative system of discipline that classified such deviance as deviance in the first place.Footnote ⁷ We see this elsewhere: in the American apocalyptic depiction of the AIDS public-health crisis as representing a queer sexual threat (Bersani Reference Bersani1987; Watney Reference Watney1987); in today's efforts to “include” queer Americans in U.S. nationalist imaginations by making visible—even dramatizing as a spectacle—the perverse racialized and eroticized “queer terrorist of elsewhere” as someone whose existence secures our nationalist schema of good and bad queers (Puar Reference Puar2007);Footnote ⁸ and in the feud between queer politics and “mainstream” lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics regarding the latter's fixation on marriage and what many queer activists see as their reactionary and conservative fantasy of “really” being normal, effectively dropping the critique of normalcy altogether (Halperin Reference Halperin, Yep, Lovaas and Elia2003; Warner Reference Warner1999).

So descriptive representation, responding to the political problem of exclusion, is often insufficient for dislodging the governing system of representation that makes available these very categories that are subsequently included or excluded. When a group's emergent visibility is staged in relation to the representational status quo uncritically, visibility colludes with the policing of identity. For sexual politics more generally, “representing” deviance has consolidated modern disciplinary regimes (Butler Reference Butler2004); served as a pretense to invest in and relive our wounded identities in a reactionary politics possessed by the past (Brown Reference Brown1995); or narcissistically hypostatized trauma into an inner moral truth that ends up naturalizing those very moral regimes against which queer activism has historically struggled (Berlant Reference Berlant, Brown and Halley2002).Footnote ⁹ These are all serious pitfalls given that sexual politics in the United States have struggled tirelessly to revolutionize our prevailing schemas for representing normal/deviant sex and sex practice, and to avoid settling for enfranchising us onto the side of “normal” folk. Polemically stated, we must be wary of rendering visible marginality and deviance for inadvertent therapeutic purposes.

Many of these shortcomings are allayed in the critical approach. Because the units of analysis for critical intersectionality are dynamic structures, researchers working in this paradigm are better equipped to attend to the normative ordering of material and ideological systems. At its best, critical intersectionality maps out the complexity of identity as a way of diagnosing these larger world-historical structural contexts. But if the political problem, to which critical intersectionality arose as an answer, is the socially objective character of identity (that is, its reification), then we need to specify how the identifications of these structural conditions of possibility can lead to an adequate political response. Obviously, critical intersectionality research continues to provide us a map of our difficult terrain. But much of it is unable to specify of what the relationship between critical, intersectional, empirical research and feminist politics consists.

We feminists often leave the relation between knowledge and politics unspecified, implicitly operating on the assumption that empirical knowledge of socially objective structures and causal complexity will diminish their seeming immutability. Or, dangerously, we venerate knowledge of complexity (“intelligibility”) for its own sake. McCall (Reference McCall2005) writes tellingly in an essay that is otherwise exemplary of the “critical” genre of scholarship: “All three [ways of dealing with categorical complexity that McCall outlines in her essay] attempt to satisfy the demand for complexity and, as a result, face the need to manage complexity, if for no other reason than to attain intelligibility” (2005, 1773; emphasis added).

This passage is symptomatic of the ambiguous relationship that feminist researchers repeatedly confront between the knowledge of intersectional complexity we obtain and what constitutes emancipatory political practice.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite what I take to be her intentions, the ambiguous relation between knowledge and politics is resolved here by McCall's veneration of knowledge for its own sake, as if it inherently carried emancipatory potential or its relation to practice was self-evident.

This goes to the heart of a common shortcoming for both descriptive-representation and critical intersectionality, which is that, as Zerilli writes, “feminists have not adequately articulated the difference between speaking about women as a demographic or social group and speaking about women as a political collectivity” (2005, 171). If this is true, then it is because we have often failed to articulate within the scope of intersectional research the specifically political quality of collective identities, to stress what distinguishes them from identities that are accomplished historical or descriptive facts of the status quo, in short, to acknowledge that what is “common” and what is sensed as “shared” within a political group like queers is not a purely descriptive element nor a common underlying historical process.Footnote ¹¹ My worry is that between the two paradigms of intersectional research, we have been working with a narrow repertoire of what can count as “in common” for political groups whose shared solidarity is a fragile political achievement, rather than historically or descriptively given.

Between examining the exclusions of people or elucidating concealed structural processes and historical conditions of unfreedom, our intersectional research often adopts a conception of identity that misses the politicization of collective identity, for instance, the gap between being gay and claiming queerness.Footnote ¹² Descriptive intersectionality conceptualizes collective identity, such as queer, as constituted on the basis of a demographic characteristic (“deviant” sexual orientation), whereas critical approaches view it as a determined product of persistent structures of which we can obtain emancipatory empirical knowledge (heteronormativity), rather than the successful effect of a political claim that has no necessary or intrinsic relation to the existing demographic character or shared history of the subjects who make this claim to queerness. This process of politicization and claims making, a practice of calling forth something new that can even be in common and shared, is what I specify, with queer theorists, as queer “world-making.”

Queer Politics and World-Making

I argue that world-making is the decisive aspect that characterizes a collectivity as a political one. The concept appears throughout queer theory scholarship, particularly in its proximate post-foundational democratic theory configurations.Footnote ¹³ Berlant and Warner, for example, write:

It entails an ongoing practice “dispersed through incommensurate registers, by definition unrealizable as community or identity.” Because “queer worlds do not have the power to represent a taken-for-granted social existence,” they envision queer world-making as an ongoing collective practice of enacting “the radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the reference or the privileged example of sexual culture” (pp. 548, 559).

Other queer theorists explore aspects of world-making when they study affect, race, and colonialism (Eng Reference Eng2010; Gandhi Reference Gandhi2006; Hanchard Reference Hanchard1998), the history of countercultural sexual practices (Chauncey Reference Chauncey1994; Halberstam Reference Halberstam1998; Halperin Reference Halperin1990), queer phenomenology and existentialism (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006; Salamon Reference Salamon2010), or media studies (Chambers Reference Chambers2009). Brown has world-making in mind when she advocates for an alternative to a definition of critical politics as reliving a wounded past:

Chauncey (Reference Chauncey1994) speaks of “forging queer identities” by making “gay worlds in the streets”; Frank (Reference Frank2010, 183), in the context of democracy's aesthetic dimension, speaks of “the people envisioned as a poetic, world-making power”; and Zerilli (Reference Zerilli2005)elaborates “world-building” as the name of feminists' collective efforts to found new forms of political association and authority.

While they are world-making, queer movements do not limit themselves to redistributing material resources, affecting legal change, or creating queer institutions, though each of these are crucial. Queer world-making is the making of a commons, itself realizable only through claims for a common world that does not yet exist, which is technically unimaginable but nevertheless retained as a possibility by enacting the “aspiration to live another way now, here” (Berlant and Warner Reference Berlant and Warner1995, 348).Footnote ¹⁴ It is an expression of a vision of justice by a collective that claims this vision without any grounds to guarantee or underwrite such a thing. World-making is thus, as Frank notes in the context of American revolutionary politics, “self-justifying” because for world-making collectivities, “the act of declamation [is] often taken to be as important as the particular political issue being declaimed against” (2010, 151). What constitutes a group as a queer one is not necessarily that it rests on a demographic commonality, nor that it is the necessary effect of heteronormativity, but that it claims a vision of a queer world order at all, and by collectively claiming for it seek to call “queers” as a collective political subject into being.Footnote ¹⁵

Because this utopian political form that queer identities assume often renders them fleeting (because this form of collective identification exists only insofar as political claims are made in its name), this specifically political quality of queer identity is often overlooked in orthodox intersectional research. Wilder describes the utopian political form this way:

Since the world that is the object of queer world-making is not something to be substantiated in light of what grounds it, intersectional researchers make an enormous mistake attempting to study and identify queers and their claimed worlds as things that can be identified akin to a social scientific object that I can ground, that I can show as valid on the basis of something else. Practices of world-making that constitute politicized groups exist as claims that posit a shared normative vision of the world. And so queer world-making, and the queers who are the provisional and contested achievement of this project, possess a fundamentally creative or inventive dimension that cannot be strictly ascribed to, or judged as valid on the basis of, the descriptive or structural character of the political subjects who participate in it.

This, however, is precisely what both descriptive representation and critical intersectionality demand of queer subjects and politics when it unpacks the category “queer” strictly in terms of sexual orientation, social structures, shared histories, and abiding characteristics grounded in the present constitution of the status quo, subsequently depoliticizing the category of “queer.” It misses the ungrounded world and so commons-making, justice-positing character of queer collectivities by either reducing this world-making character to an apolitical (i.e., given) demographic feature of a collective subject to be grounded descriptively, or it elides it altogether as if there is a natural adequation between our shared history of sexual oppression and our political sympathies and attachments to a world claimed as queer.

One of queer theory's lessons for intersectional research is that the gap between an empirical/historical category and political collectivity exists because the latter is brought into existence through world-making, that is, the struggle to create a commonality, which is not self-evidently given in demographic or historical premises, despite the indispensability of these latter aspects as a condition for understanding what is at stake in the former.Footnote ¹⁷

Intersectionality as Attentive to World-Making

When the social scientist tries to respond to the political problems of exclusion or a structurally intransigent world by accounting (either descriptively or critically) for intersectional complexity, often subtending this accounting process is the idea that such accounting is the prerequisite to emancipatory politics, insofar as we need to know who we are and from whence we came before we can begin to make claims of justice on behalf of that knowledge. But it is the case that accounting for who we are, our queerness, is already a political claim about how the world is and how it ought to be. When queer activists and theorists identify as such, they are not just grounding it on their identity's abiding features or structural and causal conditions. They are also claiming, positing, enacting a queer commons and public (in a way that does not readily yield to being judged as valid or grounded) in the leap from individual subjectivity to shared collective identity. This leap is no mere accounting of who we are—objectively, truly, once and for all—as foreplay to the serious business of world-making. Instead, the leap from individual subjectivity to politicized collectivity is a world-making leap. It consists of the articulation of an emergent normative vision of justice among allies and companions with whom I hope to be in common cause, an articulation that springs from the demographic categories that we embody, but which is not immediately captured by such categories if they are understood as containers of visibility and intelligibility—that is, if they are understood as capturing being gay rather than the claim to queerness.

Empirically, the stakes for our attending to world-making become acute when we reflect, for instance, on Proposition 8 campaigns in California in 2008, where many pro-marriage gay-rights organizations working to articulate themselves as a movement excluded assistance outright from sympathetic black churches and vice versa. If we read this conflict with descriptive representation, then the contours of this dispute will be attributed to “queers” and “blacks.” If we read it with a critical approach, then the relevant structural or historical explanation might be, for instance, that blacks are prone to authoritarianism because of high church attendance or shared domination under white supremacy,Footnote ¹⁸ that therefore they reproduce simplistic conceptions of traditional authority, and, finally, that they therefore are somehow “the problem.” It will in any case appear preordained as a function of the structural and demographic specificity of the subjects in question.

This analysis is politically counterproductive. It identifies the relevant actors as prespecified by descriptive characteristics or existing structural conditions and elides the fact that political solidarity is also a function of what subjects posit justice as consisting, something irreducible to the former conditions. The problem is not with blacks or queers; it is with people who hold certain normative visions of the world, whether queers, blacks, both, or neither. Because we are dealing with collective actors whose shared qualities are normatively envisioned rather than historically or descriptively given, we should not ground the intersectional contours here exclusively on the demographic fact that these are gays, blacks, and churches but, instead, must attend, as a distinct matter, to the contested world-making practices and posited visions of justice, which in fact underwrite political solidarities and alliances. We need to take history and social structures seriously while attending to the distinct world-making practices, lest we slip back into yet another essentialism—this time a structural and historical one.Footnote ¹⁹

If we feminists want to respond adequately to the political problems that our intersectional research seeks to overcome, then we need to go beyond the paradigms hitherto employed. Our approaches will omit how, for politicized identities, “who we are” is founded by “what we wish for us to become.” We need to incorporate into our work an attention to the normative political theories and practices that found the politicized collectivities of whom we are ostensibly aiding. The distinctive character of the history of queer politics and theory—its relentless attention to world-making, a refusal to be contained by its own historical conditions of possibility—shows that otherwise intersectional researchers will not even grasp what makes queer “queer.”