About S.B.

 There is a current, seemingly unilateral emphasis on identitary intersectionalities that dictate the validity with which one might do certain forms of intellectual work; that is, one’s “identity”—that unfixed, constantly changing social determination that one categorically “possesses”—determines if one can have “knowledge” of a certain “lived experience.” These quotations are not to belittle these ideas, as the guarding of identity borders has become part of an arsenal of vitally important protective measures and the prerogative of those of us articulated within those borders. As Aurora Levins Morales has noted, “For oppressed people, defining the boundaries of group membership is often a life-and-death decision...The more embattled a community is, the more narrowly it patrols its borders” (36). The quotations, rather than belittling, are meant to earmark how these particular words will surely be replaced by other, equally axiomatic charges within the decades to come, as these ideas have done for centuries. My concern with this pathway of thought is that it establishes lived experience as “incontestable…and as an originary point of explanation” to follow Joan Scott, which then functions as the “origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence upon which explanation is built.” This then disallows the deconstruction of the very notion of the individual, who is at its core, also a fabrication, a social ontology that is reified by that which is uniquely poised to tear it down: knowledge that supersedes notions of both “individual” and “experience.” To my mind, lived experience does not produce knowledge, it produces data. The interpretation of that data becomes richer the more widely it is interpreted. To again follow Scott, the fetishization of lived experience “reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems—those that assume that the facts of history speak for themselves and, in the case of histories of gender, those that rest on notions of a natural or established opposition” Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 777.  More recently, standpoint epistemology theorists have maintained that increased levels of oppression does automatically produce better or deeper understandings of that oppression, just as social dominance does not necessarily produce ignorance about oppression or an inability to deeply understand such oppression (Emily C. R. Tilton, “‘That’s Above My Paygrade’: Woke Excuses for Ignorance,” Philosophers’ Imprint, forthcoming).

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As Levins Morales, Jennifer Nash, and Marquis Bey have noted, the notion of the intersectional configuration of identity leaves much to be desired. Levins Morales sustains that “Oppression is more like a landscape with its layered geology, its pollen drift, its leaching of minerals from one level to another” (25) as Nash flags the roots of intersectionality within forms of property, territoriality, and other property relations embedded in notions of ownership, theft, and use-value. Bey too constructs a vision of the intersection as lacking the ability to attend to “what is happening on the sidewalks along the road, the sewers underground, the skyscrapers up above; or what it sounds like out there, how hot it is outside, what snoozed alarm made the person late for work and in need of going fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit in the first place” (7). I think about this often, what this means for me, who it makes me, how I will be-coming, always coming to be. I wonder what lies in the pollen and the sewers of myself. I wonder how I might recover those pieces in a way that does not cause harm.  Understanding humanity as a product of who one is born to, as a flat piece of colonized land gridded by lanes, leaves so much of us lost, discarded and unwanted in the gutters. (Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals, 25; Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Bey, Black Trans Feminism, 7.