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Re-Reading Intersectionality as

assemblage

As It Relates to Contemporary Feminism

Bristol Johnson

 

Within this “Re-reading Intersectionality as Assemblage” section of the article ‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’ by Jasbir Puar, Puar discusses the notions of assemblage and its relation to intersections and intersectionality with a detailed analysis of Crenshaw’s work, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”. In many scholarly readings, intersectionality is depicted in opposition to assemblage, but Puar places intersectionality within assemblages. It is the intersections that make up intersectionality that creates assemblages and more importantly creates the questions that assemblage theory seeks out to answer. Assemblages seek to answer the question of why and under what circumstances an assemblage of affects and intersections can take place or can be stopped from taking place. Crenshaw also seeks out to show how these two concepts of intersectionality and assemblage are more related and more useful when we use them together. This section will be discussing both Puar’s and Crenshaw’s conceptions of intersectionality as assemblage, how they relate to feminism and modern, current issues, as well as how intersectionality and assemblage are being used now to create change. 

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Kimberle Crenshaw describes intersectionality more as the event and it is the becoming of intersectionality that is where assemblages come into place to create the identity or intersection. Crenshaw describes the issues stemming from focusing too much on intersectionality with the traffic metaphor that “there is emphasis... on how the halting of motion produces the demand to locate.” This phrase illustrates how systems that only focus on the events and these “intersections'' often fail because they only acknowledge the halting of motion and how to get things moving again but not what caused the halt in motion, what were the circumstances that allowed this to happen. This is why assemblages are needed especially within feminist subjects, which are notoriously intersectionality complex. This also reflects many systems within our society today that only seem to function on a “temporary fix”, case by case basis. Crenshaw specifically mentions the issue of domestic violence and the different assemblages that create a situation where domestic violence happens, such as unequal access to resources and biases in the legal system. It is from assemblages that you come to these conclusions that domestic violence cases go up in places with less access to services, whether legal or healthcare services or the biases in the legal system contributes to domestic violence, how long it lasts for someone, how much it escalates, how often it happens, etc. It is only until we fix these structural issues with our whole society, specifically legal and healthcare institutions, that you then can actually cut off the sources and perpetrators of the problem. Another example of this intersectionality as assemblage as Crenshaw sees it is in the work and research surrounding obstetric violence. Similar to domestic violence, much of it was simply description of cases and events, by using assemblage theory, the question then changes to “what does obstetric violence do” as well as a focus on its consequences as ‘affects’. For example, a consequence discovered this way was performative docility by pregnant patients in the hopes of getting better care, because obstetric violence had conditioned them to believe anything not docile would be punished. Crenshaw's ideas of assemblage and intersectionality helped to spark the thoughts of Puar who describes more in detail the processes of assemblages.

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Puar’s analysis of the text and her own interpretation of assemblages and intersectionality differs mostly in her focus which is on intensification and affect which are things that are made and produced by assemblages. Affect is not used as it normally is by Puar, Affect refers to an object, event, or person's ability to be affected on or affect others, while intensification refers to the intensity to which that person, object,or event is affected and how concentrated the affect is. One topic that Puar discusses that is very relevant to modern day feminism and current affairs is the idea of significance within an assemblage. Her analysis of Massumi’s super bowl quote states that, “an intensification of the body’s relation to itself, produced not only by the significance of the game, Superbowl Sunday, but by the bodily force and energy given over to this significance”. Within this she is saying that the affect is intensified by these things of “significance” which in this case is the game itself and energy is being given to the game. The same sort of theory could be applied to how men sexually regulate women, which is often done through language of significance. For example words used to sexually regulate women such as “bitch” or “slut”, but feminist discourses and cultures are actually finding that more women are going through the process of resignification. This is nothing new in that this is what Black people have done with the n-word over the last 50-60 years, reclaiming it and actually changing its significance within the society. Women now proudly wear the labels slut and bitch as words of significance but also words of empowerment. 

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Assemblage and intersectionality are two very complex concepts to grapple with. But introducing more assemblage theory based ideas and projects can create more solution oriented fixes to institutional issues rather than simply tending to the metaphorical fires as they happen. Some other real world practices of intersectionality as assemblage in the real world is the creation of sexual ethnography. Sexual ethnography is the mapping of sexual cultures, essentially are cultures of sexuality but not limited to just sexuality but also sexual pleasures and fantasies. Sexual ethnography could be used for many things but mainly as a tool to challenge hegemonic research practices and focus on the experiences of the individual cultures. This would not only promote a collaborative FemTech style research tool but also aid in research about different sexual minorities and LGBTQ groups. This approach to research and issues can also be used within charting the intersections of health and sexuality in this new time of telehealthcare and teletherapy, which is especially useful to see how these minority groups are affected by the inability to access health care or services in person.  Assemblage can also be used for mapping by feminists today, mapping what is known as “hotspot” of affect, places where people and events are extremely susceptible to being affected, and thus figuring out areas most in need of help or care. This is especially relevant during pandemic times that we are currently experiencing, where people are seeing an up tick in domestic violence cases at home due to being forced to stay home for health reasons. By analyzing the assemblages of pandemics or national health crisis and a link to rises in domestic violence there could be more work towards extra focus on domestic violence and family welfare during this pandemic in an effort to curb those statistics.  Both Puar and Crenshaw promote the ideas of assemblage and using intersectionality to help guide the creation of assemblages to then find answers to the real problems causing inequality. 

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BRISTOL'S SOURCES

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“Bodily Assemblages & Queer Sexuality.” gexcel, n.d. Accessed June 3, 2020.

 

Chadwick, Rachelle. "Ambiguous subjects: Obstetric violence, assemblage and South 

African birth narratives." Feminism & Psychology 27.4 (2017): 489-509.

 

Puar, Jasbir. “'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess'.” 'I would rather be a cyborg 

than a goddess' | transversal texts, n.d. Accessed June 3, 2020.

 

Ringrose, Jessica, and Emma Renold. "“F** k rape!” Exploring affective intensities in a 

feminist research assemblage." Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 6 (2014): 772-780.

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EMERSON STEWART

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Intersectionality is basically the idea that people’s identities are not one dimensional. Intersectional theorists like Kimberle Crenshaw argue that race, gender, and class all intersect and create individual identities that influence people’s lives. Assemblage is an idea that takes intersectionality and conceptualizes it, shaping it to be a more expansive way of looking at social issues. Puar compares Kimberle Crenshaw’s ideas surrounding intersectionality as a traffic intersection with Brian Massumi’s ideas about domestic abuse as an “event space”. The main difference between Crenshaw’s argument and Massumi’s is that Crenshaw situates issues as occurring at a certain time when certain factors collide like in a traffic intersection while Massumi suggests that issues can happen with a myriad of factors that can commingle at different times and places. Crenshaw’s traffic intersection is a two-dimensional space while Massumi’s is three-dimensional. Puar quotes Crenshaw, “Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them”. Assemblage is the combination of factors with far more focus on the depth and scope of all factors while intersectionality is simply the combination of a few very clear factors. 

The example that Puar uses is about domestic violence during the Super Bowl. The point that is being made here is that the television, the husband and wife’s relation to each other, and the heightened energy of the setting, in general, all lead to the actual act of domestic abuse. Puar quotes Massumi: “The home entry of the game, at its crest of intensity, upsets the fragile equilibrium of the household. The patterns of relations between household bodies is problematized. The game event momentarily interrupts the pattern of extrinsic relations generally obtained between domestic types, as typed by gender. A struggle ensues: a gender struggle over clashing codes of sociality, rights to access to portions of the home and its contents, and rituals of servitude. The sociohistorical home place converts into an event space”. Massumi’s emphasis on bridging gaps between different factors is the key to assemblage. Assemblage allows all of these different factors to have a place in the discussion.

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I think that assemblage is just important if not more important than intersectionality. Issues such as domestic abuse must have a comprehensive analysis that includes all possible factors in order to get comprehensive data. Without the foundation of comprehensive data, it is difficult to theorize solutions for these issues. This is, in my opinion, is Puar's main argument in this section. Intersectionality is a good foundational theory, but it must be expanded to assemblage to ensure that research stays as comprehensive as possible.

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AARON BERKNESS

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Crenshaw’s argument relates to Puar’s in its discussion of intersectionality. The core principle of Puar’s is that it is better to be a cyborg than a goddess. This means that it is better to be void of gender than to a woman in its highest form. This argument is continued by stating how the situation is improved when someone has less identifying factors and is worsened with more identifying factors. For example, a person who is black and LGBTQ will run into significantly more prejudice than someone that only has one of the signifiers. Puar discusses “Intersectionality is thought by many feminists to be the primary rubric for theorizing difference” (Puar). The more differentiating factors, the more difficult living can be for a person. Thus, making intersectionality an important theory for studying. It allows us to learn ways to improve the quality of life for all who are not straight, cis-gendered men. Crenshaw expands on this conversation by introducing the difficulties of tracing the origin of intersectional conflict. She attempts to explain it by posing an analogy “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.” The analogy describes how difficult it is to determine what specifically causes conflict. It could be one signifying factor or it could be multiple.

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Another addition Crenshaw adds to the discussion would be her comparison between domestic violence and the super bowl. She argues how the super bowl creates a visual representation of America’s structural forces of prejudice. This country has several forces in play that cause someone to be mistreated for being other. Currently, the country is going through an unprecedented protest because of these forces in play. There is significant structural racism that causes the police to show brutality towards anyone who is not white. Relating this to Crenshaw’s intersection analogy, it would be tough to determine specifically what causes police brutality. Black lives are more at risk of police violence. Although, they are not the only ones who are at risk. The LGBTQ community has also historically been targeted by police (albeit at a lower rate than people of color). Crenshaw’s argument points out that if an LGBTQ black person were to be attacked by the police then it could be difficult to determine if both or just one factor caused the violence. Violence caused by prejudices happens in a second causing it to be difficult to pause the situation and try to break down what caused everything. It is, of course, easy to see that prejudice caused the violence but it would be difficult to look closer at the issue than just prejudice. For example, was the prejudiced violence caused by structural issues in the police force, or is it this single person’s prejudice?

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The intersectional issues regarding the police take shape in more than just brutality. Queer black males have reported higher rates of being mistreated by the police than other groups, proving that the problem is not simply race-related. During a study on sexuality’s relation to mistreatment by police, results showed that “half of the 12 participants of color were not surprised that the police responded unsupportively, but they were surprised that their sexuality played a role in the negative response” (Doug Meyer). It has unfortunately become expected that the police will hunt down black men but it interesting to note that sexuality adds to the situation. This surprise is likely due to Crenshaw’s discussion of the difficulties in uncovering why police brutality happens. If someone were to try to analyze an instance of police brutality then they would likely only take into account the race of the victim. This is especially the case because homophobia can at times be too subtle for an outsider to notice. In one situation where a rape victim reported their trauma to the police, the victim “…thought that homophobia was informing the officer’s reaction, as he said, ‘His whole demeanor was, ‘This is disgusting.’ . . . He hated gay people’ (Doug Meyer). Something as subtle as an officer’s demeanor would be difficult for an outsider to notice causing the sexuality aspect of the situation to go unnoticed. Intersectionality is important because if everyone only thinks about police brutality as racially charged then problems will continue for those in the LGBTQ community. Particularly, it will continue for black LGBTQ people, as the study shows that “these findings have implications for theorizing the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and age, given that results indicate younger White queer men may now increasingly perceive the police as providing protection” (Doug Meyer). This shows that it is an issue that only affects people who are both black and queer, proving intersectionality’s importance.

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AARON'S SOURCES

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Meyer, Doug, Matthew J Ball, and Henry F Fradella. "“So Much for Protect and Serve”: Queer 

Male Survivors’ Perceptions of Negative Police Experiences." Journal of Contemporary 

Criminal Justice 36.2 (2020): 228-50. Web.

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Puar, Jasbir. “'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess'.” 'I would rather be a cyborg 

than a goddess' | transversal texts, n.d. Accessed June 3, 2020.

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