Jennifer Christine Nash

Jennifer Christine Nash is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her research interests include Black feminist theory, feminist legal theory, Black sexual politics and intersectionality.

Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (2018)

 * Duke University Press, 2018


 * Women’s studies has long constructed black feminism as a form of discipline inflicted on the field and has imagined black feminists as a set of disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape with their demands for a feminism that accounts for race generally, and for black women specifically. Of course, in an account where black women’s primary labor is to remedy—and perhaps even to save—the field from itself, ... once the field has effectively reconfigured itself, black feminism is imagined as no longer necessary or vital. Nowhere has this simplistic construction unfolded more visibly than in the context of intersectionality.
 * p. 12


 * The continued blindness to black feminism as an autonomous intellectual and political tradition that has ... done far more than ask to be “accounted for” and included in feminist theory is what enables women’s studies to continue representing black feminist theory as merely a critique.
 * p. 15


 * The emergence of the "post-" links both transnationalism and intersectionality to a kind of past tense. ... If the past tense of these terms is, in part, secured by "newer" work that challenges the hegemony of these terms, it is also secured through the fantasies of "political completion" that have swirled around the terms. ... The impossibility that any analytic can perform or produce "political completion" means that both intersectionality and transnationalism have been bemoaned and criticized for what they cannot ever accomplish. ... Because both analytics have been posited as correctives, both are imagined as exhaustible or finite. ... This conception of these analytics is at odds with the analytics themselves, both of which call for ongoing feminist engagements with questions of power, dominance, and subordination.
 * pp. 101-102