1. Introduction: Revisualising Intersectionality

By now, numerous accounts exist of how the analysis of interlocking forms of oppression came to be associated most widely with the term “intersectionality”.¹ Intersectionality has been firmly established as a transdisciplinary research paradigm in the academy and beyond. It is also often used in online and print media reports on the contemporary strand of “intersectional feminism”. This increased circulation of the term as well as the academic institutionalisation of intersectionality as a research paradigm in the United States and more globally, especially in critical race theory and gender studies, has also attracted critical responses. Some scholars associate the academic success story with a depoliticisation and/or appropriation of the concept (cf. Bilge 2013; critically Nash 2019). Others caution that intersectionality runs the risk of reproducing notions of difference and focuses too narrowly on marginalised identities, specifically those of Black and women of colour, thus reifying, for instance, an understanding of difference from (white) “womanhood” rather than difference within groups of “women” (Puar 2012), which has been an ongoing debate in various waves and schools of feminism since at least the 1970s.

The visual metaphor of the traffic intersection as a demonstration of the effects of intersectionality was initially used by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1998: 361), who is often credited with coining the term in two influential articles that deal with social justice activism and anti-discrimination legislation in the United States published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And yet, such a metaphor tends towards the imagination of the axes of stratification as distinct and does not properly distinguish between positions and effects (Rodó-Zárate and Jorba 2020). Jennifer Nash links the term’s “irresistible visuality” to its successful life inside and outside the academy. She writes,

Given black feminists’ long-standing investment in theorizing the ‘interlocking’ nature of power, it is worth considering how and why intersectionality came to be the preeminent term for theorizing these structures. Perhaps it is the term’s irresistible visuality, its ability to be represented—even if reductively—through the crossroads metaphor that has given it a life in and beyond women’s studies, and well beyond its own investment in remedying forms of juridical violence and exclusion. (Nash 2019: 11)

Many have rightfully noted that Crenshaw’s manifold explanations of intersectionality should not be reduced to the visuality of the traffic intersection metaphor that contributes to the oversimplifying assumption of categories which collide. Crenshaw distinguishes intergroup and intragroup differences and speaks of intersectionality as a “provisional concept” (cf. Crenshaw 1995: 357–358, 1998: 378; Carastathis 2016: 4). Nonetheless, many intersectional research designs continue to use gender, race, and class in a simplistic manner and risk failing to address the complexity and dynamics of relationships between groups as well as the multiple differences within them which are at times tacit and hard to name. In a joint paper Sumi Cho, Leslie McCall and Kimberlé Crenshaw respond to some of these criticisms in the wake of intersectionality’s many usages and highlight an understanding of intersectionality as an “analytic sensibility” (Cho et al. 2013: 795) “that is not exclusively or even primarily preoccupied with categories, identities, and subjectivities” (Cho et al. 2013: 797).

Revisualising Intersectionality explores how such an intersectional “analytic sensibility” can be expanded by considering how visuality shapes and challenges conceptions of difference, and vice versa.² In using the term intersectionality in the title of this book, we acknowledge the centrality of Black feminist theory and activism in spearheading conversations around the complex interactions of various modes of oppression, focusing specifically on forms of discrimination such as racism, sexism, anti-trans violence, and ableism. These are linked to the embodiment of social attributes of difference and to how regulatory discourses are inscribed onto bodies (Mirza 2013) as well as the ways in which bodies are represented. Both embodiment and representation of difference concern the perceptibility of skin pigmentation, anatomical sex and gender performativity, bodily ability but also to a lesser degree class habitus.³ So far, the various engagements with intersectionality as a critical social theory (Collins 2019) do not address visuality explicitly, although the question of embodied differences and their social visibility remain crucial to intersectional theory building. Because the visuality of sameness and difference is always implicit in critiques of how social inequalities are embodied, it appears self-evident. But the relationship between bodily characteristics such as age or attractiveness, their social visibility, and social inequality as different dimensions of meaning is not straight-forward and cannot always be neatly captured by social categories such as race, gender, and class. Moreover, there is a discrepancy between representations of social categories, such as race and gender, and our knowledge of the non-existence of biologically discrete human races as well as the limitations of a binary conception of the sex-gender system. Instead of identifying different categories and applying them to a multi-level analysis (Winker and Degele 2011), we are especially interested in engaging with forms of visual multiplicity that do not easily fit into categories. We thus hope to avoid what Jasbir Puar describes as one of the pitfalls of intersectionality, namely the tendency to employ it as “a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid” (Puar 2007: 212).

Accordingly, Revisualising Intersectionality is concerned with a critique of the supposed visual evidentiality of categories of similarity and difference. Despite evermore creative artistic and scholarly engagements with sound, haptics, taste and smell, our emphasis on vision at the expense of other senses is motivated by the belief that visual representation holds a privileged status in relation to social recognition in an ocular-centric society. Most commonly and in everyday speech, processes of social recognition are phrased as “seeing someone” and there also exists a sometimes-naïve assumption that media representation will automatically beget greater political participation. This understanding of representation is often associated with so-called identity politics. Yet, even though visual representation and recognition are closely linked, they should not be conflated. Discrimination is frequently experienced as the non-acknowledgement of specific needs because of insufficient (political) representation. This intersectional problem cannot be alleviated simply by “positive” images and more diverse representation, as Elahe Haschemi Yekani’s contribution explains in greater detail (cf. Chap. 4). Rather we are interested in the epistemological and more mundane aspects of how this affects everyday conceptions of identity and being in the world that might not always adhere to clear-cut categories but are nonetheless influenced by powerful interpellations into Otherness. Therefore, we interrogate how one might depict difference visually in a way that does justice to intersectional processes of discrimination without reifying—often binary—conceptions of difference. Visuality is understood here in the broadest possible way, not only as pertaining to (political) representation, but also to the ways in which world-making is structured visually in relation to normative imaginations and multiple interlocking inequalities but also as harbouring a potential for imagining other ways of being.

To be clear, challenging the accuracy of representation vis-à-vis reality means neither to question the existence of real differences between humans that are independent of our perception nor to question the power of representation of human bodies (Rorty 1979). It is not enough to claim that meanings—and categories—are culturally constructed. We take the materiality of different bodies and how perceptions of embodied difference affect positionalities in relation to hegemonic norms seriously. Thus, rather than simply postulate that categories are social constructs, we want to delineate how different subject positions come to matter within social hierarchies and how this is linked to visuality. Therefore, this book, on the one hand, incorporates insights from sociology, psychology, philosophy, and the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science to explain how we visually perceive physical differences and how cognition is fallible (but not accidental), processual, and dependent on who is looking in a specific spatio-temporal context (Bhaskar 1989). On the other hand, it draws on the field of visual culture studies and approaches that are associated with, but not limited to, disciplines such as gender, queer, and transgender studies as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory which often do not use the term intersectionality explicitly but have also contributed greatly to an understanding of interwoven forms of social exclusion. Moreover, adding to these various disciplinary perspectives is the belief that artistic practice and image production is an additional critical lens to intervene into habitual modes of seeing and thinking. If intersectionality research is understood as a broad analytical sensibility rather than a fixed methodology, then such an extensive transdisciplinary approach seems especially rewarding.

Consequently, we propose to expand the framework of intersectionality research to embrace a more pronounced scepticism regarding the usefulness of identity categories as analytical lenses (McCall 2005) and instead focus more on relationalities and impurity (Lugones 1994). It is our conviction that such a transdisciplinary eclectic approach can benefit the critique of power relations. In this spirit, the second term used in the title, “revisualising”,⁴ has an epistemological and political dimension. This neologism should be understood as a heuristic tool to help describe modes of seeing differently, as an attempt to interrupt normative visual orders based on categorisation, and thus informs our overall objective of a productive revision of intersectional analytics. Revis(ualis)ing intersectionality is not a dismissal of intersectionality, quite the opposite. It should also not be misunderstood as a naïve unseeing of difference. We are deeply committed to the project of intersectionality as a concern for how interwoven processes of discrimination and hierarchisation shape systems of inequality. While our call to “revis(ualis)e intersectionality” includes the notion of revision, we comprehend this approach as aligned with and committed to the mission of intersectional justice. With Anna Carastathis this could be phrased as “intersectionality-as-challenge”, as a way to “grapple with and overcome our entrenched perceptual-cognitive habits of essentialism, categorial purity, and segregation” (2016: 4). In other words, with this publication, we want to step back and probe different “ways of seeing”—to borrow art critic John Berger’s (1977) famous formulation—and propose a revisiting and revising of intersectionality through a focus on visuality and vice versa.

To start off this transdisciplinary enquiry, in the following chapter Magdalena Nowicka asks where difference begins. She engages with conceptual responses to how bodies are categorised by drawing on cognitive, psychological, and philosophical interrogations of classification and the potential discriminatory social outcomes these might have, incorporating empirical samples. In Chap. 4, Elahe Haschemi Yekani links intersectionality research and visual culture studies to enquire into the various ends of visibility. She problematises notions of difference that rely on a binary of invisibility and visibility and discusses “other modes of seeing” in artistic practice and digital media, but also considers how visuality exceeds the realm of representation and accordingly interrogates other “modes of being”. Together, these two longer chapters deal with the perception and possible intersectional reimaginations of difference. Here our disciplinary trainings as well as our individual research foci differ somewhat in geo-political orientation. While Nowicka works on migration and race focusing particularly on Central and Eastern Europe, Haschemi Yekani is concerned with postcolonial and diasporic Anglophone cultural expressions and artistic practice. This obviously also has an impact on our respective perspectives and their limitations. A unifying principle underlying these chapters is the discussion of multiple shorter vignettes to demonstrate the various productive inroads into an intersectional engagement with visuality and a rethinking of intersectionality through visuality.

The research that made this publication possible was generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within an initiative called “Original—isn’t it?”, “Originalitätsverdacht” in German. This line of funding is explicitly intended to support transdisciplinary collaborative research that is based on a suspicion, or a hunch, rather than on already established concepts. This format more than anything gave us time and space to engage with theoretical approaches that might not be at the heart of our individual disciplinary traditions. Accordingly, this book, which results from joint readings, discussions amongst the three authors and invited guests and colleagues as well as the engagement with various visual materials, should not be understood as one unanimous or authoritative perspective on how research on visuality and intersectionality should be best combined. Indeed, we think that a spectrum of different, at times conflicting, points of view is an unavoidable and necessary aspect of any transdisciplinary dialogue.

In the preparation for this book, we had the great privilege to work with several colleagues and artists in a format that we called “conversations” which took place in Berlin at the DeZIM-Institute and the venue Südblock in the second half of 2019 and whose programme was curated by Tiara Roxanne, an academic and artist who specialises in performance and Artificial Intelligence, who collaborated with us on the project from its inception. This open conversation format invited guests to reflect on films, texts, and performance and functioned as a way of combining intersectionality with methods that might be more strongly associated with artistic research. These contributions are reflected in the text by Roxanne (Chap. 3) which is positioned between the two longer articles from our sociological and cultural studies standpoints and it presents some methodological and disciplinary reflections undergirding our overall conversation in this book. Consequently, with this publication we do not present one coherent theory or model for an intersectional analysis of visuality. Instead, we invite multiple open-ended inroads into a transdisciplinary revis(ualis)ing of intersectionality.