5. Conclusion: Revising Intersectionality

This book is the result of a transdisciplinary dialogue about the role visuality plays in ordering people along categories of difference and the potential of this enquiry for a revising of intersectionality. Revisualising Intersectionality considers the resulting discriminatory effects of this sorting, as well as possibilities for disrupting visual preconceptions. Our endeavour was informed by the assumption that we need to radically challenge the supposed visual evidentiality of categories of difference and similarity, a goal which we understand as aligned with the demand for greater social justice. To begin with, we explored disciplinary differences in how to approach questions of intersecting and intertwined forms of discrimination. There is a more pronounced interest in the formation of habitual modes of categorisation in the cognitive and social sciences in contrast to a stronger emphasis on aesthetic conventions and normativity in cultural studies. But despite these different approaches, we identified a common productive potential for disruption, or what we have described as the need to “revis(ualis)e” intersectionality. This is based on insights both from our disciplinary perspectives as well as on the dialogue with Tiara Roxanne and our interlocutors in the “conversations” events that informed the research for this book, specifically in relation to artistic research practices (cf. Chap. 3). It was clear to us from the beginning that a simple proclamation that “categories are sociocultural constructs” would not suffice to help us understand how difference is anchored in everyday perceptions and the concomitant belief of its visual evidentiality. Since scholars are not free from this fallacy, we need to work towards a reimagination of the analytic use of categories in academic knowledge production more broadly.

The interrogation of the mechanisms of visual evidentiality thus is crucial vis-à-vis the ongoing tendency in intersectionality studies to rely on and reproduce essentialising categories of visual similarity and difference to understand discrimination. To counter a naturalising and fixing of bodies along hierarchical, often binary, categories, involves an understanding of categories as part of the production of a particular social—and, we would add, a visual—order, of assigning people to social locations (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993; Anthias 2021). Specifically race and gender are often invoked in ways that imply that these are already self-evident, self-explanatory, and universal concepts despite our knowledge of their socially constructed and thus dynamic and locally as well as historically specific nature. This criticism is not new, but it is seldom taken up more explicitly in relation to visuality.

Traditionally, intersectionality research approaches the problem of the essentialisation of difference via an emphasis of intra-categorical heterogeneity. In fact, as outlined in some more detail in relation to the formation of the field of intersectionality studies in the introduction to this volume (cf. Chap. 1), from its initial wider circulation in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of intersectionality has highlighted the very limitations of an understanding of categories as distinct or simply additive. Intersectionality was introduced precisely to analyse relations of power in society which marginalise those who experience multiple and intertwined forms of subjugation that are often not legible within legalistic frameworks that distinguish between racist and sexist discrimination, for example. This insight however requires a continual reflection of how to describe the intersectional effects of categories and categorising rather than reproducing an analytical framework which reinforces categories as universal, durable, and discrete and then analyses how they interlock only in a second step. Accordingly, Floya Anthias (2021) urges scholars to correct the tendency of intersectionality research to treat categories of difference such as race and gender as both explanandum and explanans, and thus explaining the workings of race with reference to racism alone, or gender in relation to heteropatriarchy. Anthias (2021: 64) stresses that there is no equivalence between a population category (socially defined groups such as women and men, white and Black) and the ways in which group-making processes and inequalities occur. The central dilemma of intersectionality research, as Anthias (2021: 74) puts it, thus is how to navigate categorical separation and the idea of their “mutual constitution”. She identifies this “mutual constitution” as a heuristic to study contextual and situational operations of power (Anthias 2021: 75). By locating the mutual constitution of categories of difference and similarity in the realm of actual social relations, in contrast to a level of social ontology, and by focusing on their interlocking effects, Anthias evades the trouble with categories and investigates the intertwined processes, such as racism and heteronormativity, instead. These produce positionalities (but not categories) of subjects as women of colour or underage working-class fathers, for instance.

A different line of critique concerns not only the question of the mutual interdependence of categories and how to put this insight to use heuristically, but rather a more radical dismissal of categories that are deemed oppressive. Such a proposal is discussed controversially in anti-racist scholarship in relation to the question of whether it is analytically and politically expedient to continue operating with race at all. Alana Lentin (2008), for example, proposes to speak exclusively of racism instead of races since it is racist oppression that produces and utilises racial categorisation.¹ She argues that analysing the motility of racism in time and space allows us to understand how it roots culture in nature, fixing ethnic, cultural, or religious differences within an oppressive system (Lentin 2015).² For different reasons, Touré Reed (2020) also dismisses race as a category of analysis. In his view, race alone cannot explain the social phenomenon of racism, nor is there a simple causality between a person of colour’s experience of injustice and race or racism. Treating race as an explanans, a tendency which Reed calls “race reductionism”, essentialises race as a category and in turn misses to address the complexity of social inequality.

As these examples demonstrate, the “trouble with categories” is often considered in relation to their mutual interdependence³ or the more fundamental concern for how categories themselves are complicit in fostering oppression. These conceptual objections that have shaped intersectionality studies to date, however, do not do away with what we have discussed as the “problem of visibility” that impacts discrimination and the experience of being discriminated against. Consequently, a revis(ualis)ing of intersectionality emphatically does not assume that we can—or should—naïvely unsee difference. Challenging the essentialism of identity categories or rejecting categories entirely might be a tedious and ineffective exercise if it is uncoupled from the every-day embodied experience of categorising and being categorised. Instead of rejecting categories, or criticising their essentialism, we believe a more productive form of disruption focuses on the question how essentialising and fixing proceeds through reference to visible features and a reliance on supposed visual evidentiality. Scientific knowledge production, too, is not excluded from such scopic regimes. To provide an intersectional critique of how visuality is linked to knowledge formation thus requires a more fundamental disturbance of established ways of perceiving and representing difference and similarity.

As Magdalena Nowicka shows in Chap. 2, the impulse to categorise is part of cognitive and affective processes. To assign something or someone to a category means to decide which feature(s) is/are essential in justifying the belonging within a category, and to ignore others.⁴ As some features might be difficult to observe, atypical objects can be miscategorised; uncertainty is thus inherent to categories. The interplay of self-identification and ascription, for example, as a woman or a man, makes categorising fuzzy (Kalish 1995). Through the reference to visibility, categories appear more natural, and thus durable, timeless, and relatively stable. At the same time, the ability to “categorise correctly” is also connected to an inability to perceive intersectionally, and it is linked to a process of learning to notice some but ignore other features, to report about our sensory experience, and the way selected differences and similarities are represented. As Crary (1999) demonstrates with respect to the work of French impressionists, most prominently Paul Cézanne, it is possible to learn an alternative gaze that captures many seemingly disconnected areas of the visual field simultaneously. Such a way of seeing enables a visual synthesis, “the rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogeneous and temporally dispersed elements” (Crary 1999: 297), which we could consider one form of perception that would also benefit a more intersectional mode of seeing.

Some cognitive science researchers suggest that we might be well advised to analytically distinguish between categories and concepts. We share a concept of race or gender which is shaped by culture. It is thus contextual and specific to a particular time and space. This involves visual evidence (perception), but it is not identical with categorising humans, for example, based on their skin according to the intensity of its pigmentation from light to dark. A concept of race influences our decisions of how to categorise skin tone into a category of “white” or “black”. Some visual categorisations are independent of concepts (Deroy 2019), but the relationship between concepts and categorisation is dynamic and not yet fully understood.⁵ It seems that instruction can impact this relationship to some extent. For example, telling people that their reactions are biased by their concept of race influences the way they categorise skin shades (Travers et al. 2020). It means that through instruction regarding concepts, people can partly adapt their reliance on visual evidence in categorising similarity and difference. More importantly, such a distinction between concepts and categories in research designs and analyses would also constitute an important step towards implementing more intersectional academic knowledge production.

In Chap. 4 Elahe Haschemi Yekani focuses on cultural representation and critiques notions of colour-blindness and an overtly representational understanding of intersectionality. She argues that we do not arrive at a more intersectional visual culture relying on the depiction of an individual body as representing difference or the portrayal of multiple different bodies as representing diversity. In contrast to (often neoliberal) notions of surface diversity, post-representational, queer and trans artistic expressions, in avoiding objectifying aesthetics, engage not with categories of difference and similarity as given but instead with visual regimes of rendering bodies intelligible. Such approaches open up a space for new arrangements and relationalities of sameness and intimacy that do not rely on identities and fixity but that also do not neglect experiences of discrimination. As Tiara Roxanne illustrates in Chap. 3, artistic practice has much to offer when it comes to how intersectional research frameworks could be expanded. Art is often rooted in a shared experience and explores modes of becoming through practice rather than preconceived modes of being. In a sense, it points towards the potential for developing identity not as difference from, but in relation to another person.⁶ But post-representational as well as queer and trans artistic practices are more than just a possibility for resisting being represented by someone else in ways which do not correspond to our identity, and thus regaining control over self-representation. Via its use of imagery, such art engages in a queering and transing of binaries and preconceptions. Both verbs queering and transing therefore do not simply mean the representation of queer and trans people but concern a more fundamental interrogation of how embodiment is understood within a cis-heteronormative image repertoire and what alternative imaginaries could be developed in their stead.

From our analyses, we draw the conclusion that a continued revising of intersectionality would not only require more emphasis on the mutual constitution of categories but an acknowledgement of their inherent indeterminacy and impurity. This is of course not limited to fields of research that are explicitly concerned with questions of intersectionality. We consider this an urgent form of self-reflexivity that is required more broadly across disciplines, including cognitive science. When intersectionality is reduced to a form of shorthand for political activism in the public debate, the epistemological potential of the concept as a more fundamental challenge to the production of scientific knowledge is cut short. This does not mean that there is no need for emancipatory political projects that rally around politicised identity categories. But too often, the idea of “political identity” is reduced to notions of “essential embodied difference”. Therefore, we need a more pronounced exploration of in-betweenness and instability and of how this in turn modifies notions of identity. This has been a line of critique that is associated less with intersectionality research and more pronouncedly with queer of colour, transnational feminist, Latinx and Chicanx schools of thought, probably most prominently exemplified by Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness (1987) and María Lugones’ critique of purity (1994).⁷ Lugones criticises the fragmentation of individuals within the larger “hierarchical ordering of split social groups” that renders some individuals as “thick”, that is, invisible within certain group identities, as opposed to those who are “transparent” in these orders that endorse a logic of purity (1994: 474). Lugones considers such fragmentation as “conceptually at odds with seeing oppressions as interlocked” (1994: 473).⁸ In her discussion of intersectionality, Anna Carastathis also draws on this tradition and proposes a coalition of decolonial and intersectional feminism (2016: 201). The potential for success of such coalitions, however, very much concerns the underlying assumptions of each enquiry and their compatibility. Carastathis posits that the “hermeneutic question here is whether intersectionality constitutes a representational theory of identity (as the dominant interpretation assumes), or whether it can be understood more fruitfully as a critique of representations that rely upon extant categorial axes of oppression” (2016: 223). According to Carastathis, to arrive at the second understanding of intersectionality, the less dominant but more “fruitful” one, and the potential foundation for stronger coalitions, requires a framework which would be less concerned with the representation of identities and more with a critique of the categorical preconceptions underlying representation.

Despite the acknowledgement that the intersectional experience of discrimination (which brings about the invisibility—or “thickness” in Lugones’ terms—of subject positions such as women of colour) cannot be entirely separated from the realm of political and cultural representation, such a critique of the representational limits of intersectionality in our view however is not just a question of political and disciplinary coalitions. Rather than imagine intersectionality in relation to visually perceptible features of people or a complete dismissal of categories, we believe intersectional research needs to engage more concretely and practically with how visuality is implicated in processes of producing in/visibility that hinder but could potentially also be mobilised in enabling social justice and more equitable participation. Intersectionality research tells us what the outcome of categorisation is. Categories of difference and similarity can naturalise, collectivise, binarise, hierarchise and inferiorise, and they build “blocks for unequal resource allocation” (Anthias 2021: 75). But intersectionality research rarely tells us how categories acquire meaning and operate. In Revisualising Intersectionality, we argue that categories like race and gender retain part of their power through their association with visual evidentiality. In other words, the categorisation of people into racialised categories like Black and white is predicated on a cultural concept of race that guides the visual perception of difference. To challenge this notion, intersectionality research needs to incorporate new vocabularies of similarity and interdependency that explain categorisation rather than risk an over-emphasis on difference.

Such a revision of the visual anchoring of difference that informs scientific knowledge production requires methodological rethinking and can yield different epistemological outcomes. In cognitive and psychological research which investigates biased, additive, or selective perception of gendered or racial difference, the very premise that the perceptions of gender or race can be accessed solely by relying on visual inputs needs to be questioned. In the social sciences, a careful analysis of scopic regimes of difference would help to overcome simplifications both of social constructivism and of biological determinism, which would be advantageous both to qualitative and quantitative scholarship. A focus on the visuality of gendered and racialised difference surely generates new insights around the questions of misperceptions, and their social impacts. In analyses of cultural representation, we need to avoid circular explanatory models of stereotypes producing “bad images” which would be alleviated through forms of “positive images”. An intersectional study of visual culture thus requires more expansive methods and conceptual tools for analysing (dis)identification and recognition.

To this end, we propose that we can learn from artistic research and practice to see things in a different light, to assume another point of view and disrupt preconceived orders. In other words, we quite literally need more creative forms of intersectional research across the disciplines. In the context of artistic research, creativity is not limited to aesthetic innovation but is understood as a form of epistemological reimagination. Anke Haarmann describes “imagination” as a crucial technique of artistic research. Imagination does not refer to arbitrary fantasy here but to a process of deconstructive and projective knowledge production, as a form of testing new meanings within the realm of the possible (Haarmann 2019: 290). With this publication, we do not aim to produce one coherent new theory of visual intersectionality studies. But based on transdisciplinary curiosity and dialogue, we discuss numerous often radically diverging shorter vignettes in this book. The result highlights how different kinds of visual experiences and visual artefacts can help reimagine preconceived notions of categorical difference, demonstrating the productivity of a more self-reflexive and hesitant interrogation of the processes, rather than the effects of visual categorisation. By focusing on the nexus of the radical ambiguity of visual experience and the material—often discriminatory—effects of categorisation that operates precisely by negating ambivalence through ordering, we believe there is a potential to disrupt the predominance of an understanding of categories that reifies difference.

Comprehending how visuality works—neither as biological determinism nor cultural construction alone—helps us to expand the framework of intersectionality research and stimulates different conceptions of how to approach inequity. This also means that we need to continue to engage in transdisciplinary dialogue and come up with new methods to understand the role visuality plays in our conceptions of difference and the potential to foster other political imaginaries. Such a continual revision of intersectionality means to strengthen it radically.