About

The aim of this PhD project is to provide a philosophical grounding for the ideas about subjectivity and experience underpinning the concept of ‘intersectionality’ whilst simultaneously reflecting the criticism from intersectional feminism back on that philosophical grounding.

Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term ‘intersectionality’ refers to the idea that in order to grasp the particular form of oppression experienced by women of colour we cannot understand gender and race oppression separately but must try and understand how they intersect. Investigating the tradition of intersectional feminism via structuralist philosophies of the subject, will allow me to throw light on a tension between two ideas dominating the field of intersectional feminism: the idea that oppressed people have an epistemic advantage when it comes to understanding their own oppression and the idea that oppression is reproduced by invisible power structures that operate in diffuse ways behind the backs of the subjects they affect and dominate.

The study explores the idea that there is a dual subject at stake in intersectional analysis: whilst the subject underpinning structural analyses of power is subjugated and stands in an opaque relation to its lived experience, the subject underpinning standpoint theories is sovereign and stands in a transparent relation to its lived experience. The problem to be investigated is how these two accounts of subjectivity can be thought together, in order to realize a robust theory of oppression that recognizes a necessary opacity in the way in which the racial, capitalist and patriarchal order of oppression reproduces itself but without thereby depriving its ‘subjects’ of agency.

By confronting the philosophies of the subject with the discourses on intersectionality developed within other disciplines, the research further seeks to problematize the theoretical framework for understanding the subject of oppression within Western philosophy.