Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific

Issue 33, December 2013

From the Academy to the UN and Back Again: The Travelling Politics of Intersectionality

Kathryn Henne

Introduction

The concept of intersectionality has travelled far afield since articulated by Kimberl Crenshaw over
twenty years ago. In early analyses, Crenshaw demonstrates how the oppression endured by women of
colour is more nuanced than law recognises.[1] Figuratively speaking, she explains, these women stand
at the intersection of not simply the categories of race and gender, but of multiple social orders.
Intersectionality has since informed analyses across the humanities and social sciences. In fact, Patricia
Hill Collins acknowledges intersectionality as an established 'knowledge project' in its own right, centred
around the three interrelated concerns: how race, class, gender and sexuality are interlocking systems of
power; how social identities and problems take shape within these systems and come to reflect them;
and how remedies to these issues are also often imbued with problematic power relations.[2]

As a broad and interdisciplinary knowledge project, intersectionality has gained traction in the space
that Crenshaw originally critiqued: law. More specifically, it serves as a framework in international
human rights law. In recent thematic reports to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, Rashida
Manjoo, Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, argues that
intersectional forms of discrimination inform and exacerbate violence against women. Further,
responses to violence against women obscure 'the intersectionality of political, economic, social,
cultural, and gender factors faced by all women around the world.'[3] This application of
intersectionality has two productive functions. First, it highlights how a 'one-size-fits-all' approach is
inadequate when addressing women's human rights. Second, it suggests a guide for the development of
models that recognise how distinct social and institutional factors contribute to various forms of
violencefrom interpersonal to structuralendured by women in different parts of the globe.[4]

Manjoo's statement expands upon earlier applications of intersectionality in this area. In 2001, then-
Special Rapporteur, Radhika Coomaraswamy, used intersectionality to discuss the UN's failure to
distinguish human rights abuses as related to both gender and racial discrimination in a report prepared
for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.
Although Manjoo's statement may recognise the importance of addressing how intersectional concerns
inform violence, it is worth considering many feminist warnings regarding the limits of intersectionality,
especially as it has travelled across disciplines.

Many feminist scholars caution that intersectional analyses can negate complexities underpinning
discrimination and violence as well as other intersectional factors contributing to them, such as
sexuality, disability and age. By simplistically attributing oppression to the nexus of race-class-gender,
such analyses reproduce forms of essentialism that Crenshaw disavowed.[5] Others suggest
intersectional scholarship focuses too narrowly on subjects who endure multiple forms of
marginalisation, often failing to consider how privilege operates among populations or how privileged
positions are also intersectional.[6] A number of feminist critics, in turn, argue that intersectionality
needs to be re-examined or abandoned in favour of an alternative framework or a 'postintersectionality'
better attuned to subjectivity and context.[7] In part because of these divergent positions, Kathy Davis
argues that intersectionality exemplifies what Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott describe as 'good'
feminist theory. That is, it continues to generate 'analyses, critiques, and political interventions' that
open 'a political imaginary for feminism that points the way beyond some of the impasses by which it
has been constrained.'[8] Like other 'good' feminist theory, intersectionality does not provide definitive
answers to social problems; instead, it creates spaces for reflexive consideration and critical
engagement.

This chapter considers the promises and challenges of employing intersectionality within institutions of
governance, heeding insights obtained through intersectionality's interdisciplinary travels alongside a
reminder imparted by Sally Engle Merry's work: 'While we focus on the circulation of ideas designed to
improve the human condition, it is important to remember that they include the modes of establishing
and maintaining control of populations.'[9] In particular, this chapter focuses on an important dimension
of international governance that may undermine intersectionality's promise in this field: that is,
'indicator culture.' Indicator culture, Merry explains, is the privileging of quantitative measures in
evaluating legal interventions and their performance.[10] The growth of indicators reflects a desire for
'evidence-based' reasons to justify funding interventions, which has prompted various bodies, including
governments, nongovernmental organisations, corporations and civil society actors, to produce
quantifiable and measurable results. These assessment tools, Merry argues, communicate values that
shape governance practices in both explicit and hegemonic ways.[11] They inform what concerns
receive priority as well as how policymakers and the organisations relate to and understand social
issues. As a technology, indicators retain an embedded deductive logic, one that is resistant to change.
These 'statistical techniques, with their aura of certainty,' according to Merry, produce new ways of
perceiving the world, contributing 'to the calcification of categoriessuch as caste, race, or gender
that are subjected to categorical definition and measurement.'[12]

Indicator culture is a symptom of 'a particular strain of neoliberal governance,' which Anna
Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling characterise as 'unquestionably white, male, and bourgeois.'[13] Although
the UN provides services to conflict-ridden and impoverished communities and champions human rights
as a way to counteract violence against individuals, it also upholds 'a neo-liberal world order' that
'reflects older traditions of colonialism and patriarchy that valorize unequal treatments of race, gender,
class, and culture.'[14] UN-backed actions and the ideologies they imbue draw up and sustain a colonial
narrative of enlightened, masculine envoys from the Global North intervening to help peoples in the
Global South. As techniques used to measure outcomes or 'progress' in international governance,
indicators direct attention away from the ongoing formations of structural violence that shape those
interventions and narratives. The depoliticised appearance of indicators articulates postcolonial
inequalities as technocratic concerns. These maneuvers de-historicise contemporary problems in ways
that preserve globalised inequalities informed by earlier imperial legacies.

Here, I reflect on how intersectionality might enable a counterhegemonic response that aids in unveiling
the broader power dynamics of indicator culture. Intersectionality enables critical engagement with 'the
intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class within the context of global colonial capitalism' in part
because it is the outgrowth of black feminist intellectual thought.[15] According to Grace Kyungwon
Hong, black feminism (among other women of colour feminisms) recognises that 'the racial project of
Western civilization was always a gendered and sexualized project' and thereby has a rich tradition of
analysing the 'intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class within the context of global colonial
capitalism.'[16]

As part of a longer genealogy of critical feminist thought, intersectionality has the capacity to query the
structural forms of violence that inform international governance practices; however, it can be refigured
as it becomes translated into the terms of international governance. Academic reflections on
intersectionality are useful to consider because they document the challenges of translating the concept
through empirical measures. Like indicators, positivist social science measures can narrowly represent
the various and variant complexities underpinning intersectionality's fundamental concerns.[17] The
concern, then, is how to retain intersectionality as a robust analytic tool as it becomes deployed in a
field where indicator culture does more than inform policy; it shapes the ways problems are understood
and the adjoining responses to them. This kind of challenge, writes Mieke Bal, is inherent to travelling
concepts; roadblocks emerge as concepts cross into different disciplines and fields.[18] Travelling
concepts have 'solved major problems but at the same times [have] challenged the limitations' of the
spaces they enter.[19] These tests are the promise of travel: 'Hazardous, exciting, and tiring, travel is
needed if you are to achieve the gain of a new experience.'[20]

This chapter examines how intersectionality has travelled over the last twenty years, reflecting on its
recent use by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences.
Although law and its institutions are often the targets of feminist criticism, they offer spacesin part by
demonstrating a needfor 'good' feminist theory. In particular, I contend that intersectionality, as a
travelling concept, can illuminate problems facing violence against women while also testing the
limitations of international governance.[21] In other words, intersectionality can help to hold
institutions to account by requiring them to attend to the multi-faceted issues of violence and by
highlighting the shortcomings of the narrow prescriptions guided by indicator culture. According to
feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz, this commitment, which she refers to as an 'open' feminist future, is
'the very lifeblood of political struggle, the goal of feminist challenge.'[22]

To illustrate how intersectionality provides an opportunity for this particular kind of feminist
intervention in international governance, this chapter proceeds in two parts. It begins by sketching the
travels of intersectionality within the academy, considering how ensuing debates inform and contest the
application of intersectionality in different disciplines. Drawing guidance from Grosz's work, I then
attend to how intersectionality has been and could be employed as a framework for the international
agenda on counteracting violence against women. Overall, my intention is to initiate a conversation
about how the inclusion of intersectionality within this particular UN agenda might inform the
development of counterhegemonic tools aimed at responding to various facets of violence against
women.


Intersectionality's travels within the academy

It is not easy to map the extent of intersectionality's travels. Crenshaw herself admits that she is
'amazed at how it gets over- and under-used,' describing many applications as 'just multiplying identity
categories rather than constituting a structural analysis or a political critique.'[23] This section traces
developments around intersectionality across disciplines as a way of exploring the influence of its
travels.

Intersectionality entails multiple iterations. In 1989, through an analysis of U.S. anti-discrimination law,
Crenshaw explains intersectionality as an analogy by arguing that law requires complaints to follow a
unidirectional pattern. In contrast, she writes, the act of discrimination, 'like traffic through an
intersection, may flow in one direction, it may flow in another. But if an accident happens in an
intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all
of them.' [24] Similarly, black women can endure discrimination in multiple ways, revealing the
shortcomings of anti-discrimination law's unidirectional approach. For Crenshaw, black women's
oppression is not rooted in race or gender, or even a combination of both; instead, it is manifest at the
intersections of race and gender.

In 'Mapping the Margins,' Crenshaw further details the tenets of intersectionality. Using the case of
violence against women of colour, she describes how the 'top-down' nature of law does not attend to
the experiences of all women; rather, it addresses the most privileged members of this social group,
white women.[25] Correspondingly, in relation to racism, law privileges the experiences of men of
colour. Marginalised by discourses of gender and race, the positions and perspectives of women of
colour can seem invisible.

In response, Crenshaw develops intersectionality to capture how at least two axes of subordination
overlap in practice, focusing on structural, political and representational dimensions. Structural
intersectionality, Crenshaw writes, includes the multiple forms of subordination that render the
experiences of black women qualitatively different from those of their white female and black male
counterparts. Political intersectionality is comprised of factors that contribute to the misrecognition of
these distinct differences. For instance, like law, anti-racist and feminist coalitions are often guilty of
privileging one axis of subordination, which undermines any universal claims of ending either racial or
gender oppression. The third aspect, representational intersectionality, considers how symbolic
practices obscure women of colour in broader discourses. In other words, this last component examines
how law conjoins or interacts with other social forces to render the unique experiences women of
colour invisible.

Intersectionality reflects the focus and form of Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT, a critical response to
orthodox and critical legal scholarship's failure to analyse the complex issues of race and racism
manifest in law,[26] uses 'legal storytelling' to convey 'experiences with racism and the legal system' and
then applies those 'unique perspectives to assess law's master narratives.'[27] By juxtaposing
mainstream narratives upheld by the law with counter-narratives from people of colour, CRT scholarship
articulates the misnomers and discrepancies of legal practices and their influence on people of different
racial and ethnic backgrounds.

As a concept that reveals how hegemonic power operates, intersectionality thus delivers what appears
to be a comprehensive analytical toolkit for activists and scholars concerned with counteracting
oppression. On the one hand, it enables closer reading of the relationships between experiences of
marginalisation, the impact of structural inequality, and the implications of discourse. On the other
hand, it assists in pinpointing how and where the law fails to attend to the multi-faceted dimensions of
violence. Further, according to Trina Grillo, intersectionality and anti-essentialism provide important
'checks' by revealing how individual experiences are often divergent, even within social groups.[28] It is
perhaps not surprising, then, that so many scholars use intersectionality to guide research on a variety
of social problems.

As intersectionality has crossed into other disciplines, it has taken on other dimensions. For instance, in
recognition of changes in Europe stemming from economic downturns, immigration, legal responses
and civil unrest, some scholars have adapted intersectionality to advance theories of globalised
inequality, gender and non-gender specific.[29] In contrast, other feminists engaging broader issues of
transnationalism have employed queer theoretical insights to reworkand in part rejectthe claims of
intersectionality's widespread applicability.[30] While these particular innovations may have promise, a
number of feminist scholars, among them Crenshaw, contend that many intersectional analyses merely
attribute issues of inequality and marginalisation to the nexus of 'race-class-gender' instead of
analytically unpacking their relations as intersectionality prescribes.[31] Yet, as a 2013 special issue on
intersectionality attests, there is still a need for more intersectional analyses attuned to the
transnational dimensions of discrimination and violence against women.[32]

The genesis of intersectionality as a catch-all category for various forms of inequality is an unsettling
development. Crenshaw expressed intersectionality as a tool to unveil the consequences of
misrepresentation, yet its deployment has led to scholarly work that overlooks social relations
contributing to oppression rather than unpacking them.[33] Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd contends that this
problem transcends research findings, arguing that the proliferation of intersectionality has diluted the
contributions of black feminists and other women of colour. Specifically, she charges that the use of
positivist and quantitative methods to 'prove' intersectional problems not only results in marginalising
the voices of women of colour as subjects, but also as scholars.[34] The travels of intersectionality,
Alexander-Floyd argues, have unfortunately contributed to 're-subjugating black women's
knowledge.'[35]

Intersectionality's proliferation has sparked debates about what factors should count and what should
be abandoned within intersectional analyses, as well as questions about whether attending to various
forms of difference (for example, sexuality, disability, age actually undermine the development of more
robust theoretical approaches to the nexus of race, gender and class.[36] Some scholars, such as Dorthe
Stauns, point out that a limitation of intersectional scholarship is the lack of critical attention paid to
the performance of multiple identities as practices distinct from the structural coalescence between
categories of race, class and gender.[37] Nancy Ehrenreich argues that this development is an outgrowth
of intersectionality's narrow reliance upon identity, which is a limited construct for analytical and
political mobilisation. Instead, Ehrenreich states, rallying against a common enemy and 'a single,
complex set of [subordinating] structures and ideologies' can serve as a more productive basis for
coalitions.[38] One problem with her solution, however, is there is not always a space of neutrality or a
rallying point that avoids conflict between groups. [39]

Amidst these debates, there are discussions about how to study intersectionality.[40] Ange-Marie
Hancock, for instance, suggests that intersectionality should be applied as a general research paradigm
used to study populations other than women of colour. Although acknowledging intersectionality's
origins as being reliant upon women of colour, Hancock characterises them as but one 'content
specialization' of intersectional research.[41] Hancock advocates the utility of incorporating quantitative
methods, a recommendation supported by Leslie McCall.[42] In particular, McCall states that a post-
positivist framing of intersectional research facilitates the incorporation of a variety of methodologies,
including quantitative approaches. What constitutes a post-positivist and feminist framing, however, is
not clear in McCall's analysis, and Alexander-Floyd argues that both Hancock and McCall minimise the
important contributions of black feminist intellectual thought in favour of appealing to dominant modes
of knowledge productionthe very systems to which intersectional critique initially responded.[43] She
aptly notes that Hancock's and McCall's recommendations to embrace mainstream methods 'invites and
enables criticisms of intersectionality scholars' perceived lack of sophistication or inadequate
methodological elaboration.'[44] In turn, their calls to expand (and in essence change) intersectionality
threaten to negate forms of knowledge about and produced by women of colour.

The travels of intersectionality thus yield some problematic outcomes. Responding to these concerns,
Sora Han discusses on how women of colour influenced intersectionality through both scholarship and
activism, employing a critical theoretical reading to explore how these histories might inform the
cultivation that she refers to as an 'intersectional sensibility.'[45] She emphasises the utility of
intersectionality as a practiceand praxisof reading the texts and narratives presented to us.
Providing a careful reminder that all commentaries are mediated and incomplete in their account, she
presents the intersectional sensibility as an approach attuned to the role of representation and how it
obscures marginalised persons. She acknowledges that there is an array of experiences, identities and
structural constraints that a researcher (as a critical reader) cannot fully know. Intersectionality, she
elaborates, requires 'an acute and self-conscious sense of history, not as events of the past, but as past
events that are instantiated by the work of a text and the reader's desire to work with the text.'[46]
Han's recommendation embraces what Donna Haraway famously describes as 'feminist objectivity,'
which accepts that knowledge is inherently partial in nature and retains nuances that cannot be
understood through a positivistic lens.[47] Although intersectionality has been challenged through its
travels, Han's reconsideration of its tenets and debates around them reiterates its methodological
promise as a feminist concept.[48]

Although taking distinctly different positions, the stances of Hancock, McCall, Alexander-Floyd, and Han
taken together demonstrate how intersectionality can reinvigorate scholarly debate and contribute to
'good' feminist theory. More importantly, as Han's analysis demonstrates, an essential facet of
intersectional work is to query the power and politics of representation on a variety of levels. The next
section of this chapter focuses on the UN agenda regarding violence against women and how it evokes
an intersectional lexicon. As the embrace of intersectionality within international legal agendas reveals
tensions similar to those revealed by academic deliberations, its incorporation prompts the need for a
sustained feminist inquiry into the mechanisms of international governance, not a celebration of law's
recognition of intersectionality's promise.


International law as a feminist future of intersectionality

Within platforms concerned with gender and international human rights law, intersectionality is a
recognised agenda.[49] Despite this recognition, Nira Yuval-Davis explains that the deployment of
intersectionality by 'UN-related bodies is just emerging and often suffers from analytic confusions that
have already been tackled by feminist scholars who have been working on these issues for longer.'[50]
The inclusion of intersectionality is nonetheless notable, particularly in the ways that the UN Special
Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences applies it to highlight policy
failures. First, as Manjoo acknowledges, intersectional forms of discrimination contribute to violence
against women, and second, responses to these forms of violence do not address the nature or extent of
intersectional factors underpinning violence against women across the globe. This recognition opens a
space to reconsider policy interventions, but, as Yuval-Davis warns, this process is challenging and
requires more than merely adding intersectionality to the language of UN agendas.

Merry's insights on indicator culture help to explicate the difficulties of overcoming the law's tendency
to misrepresent different women's experiences. Even though the UN agenda on violence against women
evokes intersectionality as the framework, indicators emerge as the empirical measures of violence and
the progress made in counteracting it. In doing so, evaluations can render complex connections as
narrow or causal links, actively directing attention away from the structural forms of violence that
inform them.

To get a better sense of how indicators exercise this level of power and influence, consider the
development of indicators in relation to violence against women. In a report delivered by the UN
Statistics Division, the first step in developing an interim set of indicators and guidelines for surveys on
violence against women was an assessment of 59 nationally representative surveys.[51] Looking at their
similarities, differences and scope, it found variances across data with regard to a rather limited cluster
of variables: the age groupings of victims, the frequency and severity of violence, and relationships to
perpetrators. Providing a breakdown of each category and the relationships between them (where
possible), the report concluded with only narrow recommendations, all of which focus on refining UN
indicators.

The specific suggestions made by the UN Statistics Division include the need to enhance and then
standardise categories pertaining to the perpetrator so as to accomplish three objectives: to broaden
their scope beyond a focus on the current or former sexual intimate partner, to qualify indicators
around physical and sexual violence in the last twelve months, and to remove redundancies in the
language of specific indicators. Identifying problems of measurability, the report suggests the next steps
as:

to define and develop a set of classifications of violence, severity of violence, definition and classification
of relationship to the perpetrator and frequency; the need to develop international guidelines that will
provide a sound and comprehensive methodological package for instituting violence against women
statistical surveys in national statistical systems; and the need to follow-up these activities with training
and capacity-building.[52]

This technocratic answer illustrates Merry's observations of indicator culture by demonstrating how a
reliance on indicators can undermine the application of an intersectional framework in two important
ways. First, these recommendations privilege a focus on victims' direct relations and to experiences of
physical and sexual violence, foreclosing broader connections to other forms of structural violence
(unless captured through other statistical analysis). Second, the proposed solution to measurement
problems is the refinement of categories so as to obtain better data on specific kinds of violence and
their frequency rather than employing more open-ended questions to better grasp connections
between violence, subordination and contextpriorities explicitly articulated by the UN Special
Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences.

In addition to those stated priorities, a Working Group on Women and Human Rights, part of the UN
Commission on the Status of Women, recommends other forms of data collection and analysis. They
include disaggregated data collection to more accurately depict women's lived experiences of
discrimination, contextual analysis to identify 'the root causes and context of the problems that women
face as a result of convoluted identities,' intersectional review of policies and systems of
implementation to evaluate how policies impact women from various backgrounds across the world and
the design and implementation of intersectional policy initiatives to improve mechanisms of
counteracting identified patterns of discrimination.[53] Yuval-Davis acknowledges these proposals as
significant steps forward, but acknowledges that they pose complex methodological challenges.[54]
Foremost among them, she explains, is that they can essentialise 'specific social identities' and overlook
'crucially important political struggles being carried out in many parts of the world that problematize
and contest the boundaries of social collectivities.'[55]

Combined with indicators, methods of data collection and analysis recommended by the Working Group
offer no corrective mechanisms to avoid portraying race, gender, class, sexuality and other social forces
as static or additive variables. Similar to academic criticisms of intersectionality's deployment, Yuval-
Davis provides an important reminder that the purpose of using intersectionality is not to detect 'several
identities under one,' but instead, 'to analyse the differential ways in which different social divisions are
concretely enmeshed and constructed by each other and how they relate to political and subjective
constructions of identities.'[56] She argues that field methodology must 'carefully separate, and
examine separately, the different levels in which social divisions operate in the communities where they
work' and scrutinise 'the subjective constructions of identities. Only when such a contextual analysis is
carried out can there be an intersectional review of policy initiatives and systems of
implementation.'[57]

Yuval-Davis' clarification regarding intersectional methodology reflects concerns expressed by other
feminists who have weighed in on intersectionality. Rather than asking how to fit intersectionality within
international agendas, her suggestions offer a preliminary step toward incorporating an intersectional
sensibility within the apparatuses of global governance. A recent statement made by the UN Special
Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, It's Causes and Consequences to UN Commission on the Status
of Wome,n reflects a some of Yuval-Davis's concerns by rejecting a 'one-size fits all programmatic
approach' to combating gender-based violence by arguing for the inclusion of 'multiple approaches' that
focus on localised tactics and account for 'differences within their community populations.'[58] This
builds upon previous UN Rapporteurs' efforts to expand perspectives about the nature and scope of
violence against women and to encourage the international community and its member nation-states to
confront intersectional issues unpinning gender-based violence.[59] Thus, it seems that, at least in
relation to attempts to prevent and counteract violence against women, there is a willingness to
consider forms of intersectional knowledge that exceed the logics of the prevailing indicator culture.

The intense academic debates around intersectionality may yield productive techniques that can be
applied to international governance, especially if we take a page from Grosz's 'Histories of a Feminist
Future' and shift our attention toward instilling an 'indeterminate future' for intersectionality within this
domain. According to Grosz, committing to 'an open future' requires rejecting the belief that past
developments should predict future projections. The one condition of such a trajectory is
institutionalised feminist praxis, which encompasses more than one strand of feminism and
contestations between producers of feminist knowledge. In fact, according to feminist legal scholar
Janet Halley, the irreconcilable splits between different camps of intellectual thought are inherently
valuable. Rather than support a project of feminist compromise, she advocates 'a politics of theoretical
incommensurability,' which includes contributions of 'people involved in a context of deep internal
critique, debates so intense that they were sometimes experienced as "war".'[60] Like Grosz, Halley
does not characterise a feminist future as a linear sequence of validating existing knowledge. Rather,
Halley embraces the ruptures and disjunctures that complicate prevailing ideas. Advancing such a
project requires engaging the shortcomings of many intersectional analyses alongside the resulting
possibilities of their proliferation. It is a project of travel and dialogue, not a model seduced by notions
of linear development or progressive evolution.

Using intersectionality to frame an international legal agenda is therefore not about refining variables
and correlations between them, but about embracing how feminist debate might inform an
intersectional sensibility within law. Although disputes around intersectionality showcase divergent
perspectives, they do evidence some shared commitments to questioning how both law and research
represent women and their experiences. While not a picture of harmonious solidarity, it is one
committed to enhancing feminist knowledges. For instance, sceptics of intersectionality call for further
critical attention to how legal prescriptions fail to help persons subject to multiple forms of
marginalisation by pursuing contextually specific knowledge. If anything, such critiques actually enhance
the concept of intersectionality by reiterating a continued commitment to Crenshaw's original criticism
of law's essentialist and 'top-down' disposition.

The acceptance of an intersectional vocabulary at the international level opens up a space for feminist
engagement. It offers the future possibility for feminist dialogue within the lawas opposed to one that
merely focuses on the law. Such an approach keeps with intersectionality's counterhegmonic impetus by
offering an epistemological guide to engage law's political, symbolic and structural limits and how
structural conditions inform them.

Predicting the outcomes of this line of interrogation is not possible hereand perhaps not desirable if
we take Grosz's and Halley's suggestions to heart. What we can do is query the tools and analyses
available to us, even those that do not look like the usual tools of the feminist legal trade. This is akin to
what Bal refers to as 'unfixing,' the method of travelling concepts.[61] Travel, she writes, supplants 'the
loss of methodological guidelines of the sort built into disciplinary paradigms,' because concepts must
be carefully brought to bear on problems and objects in ways that do not tacitly accept a particular
disciplinary perspective as 'truth.'[62] Travel prompts us to interrogate existing knowledge about
concepts and the fields in which we apply them. In this example, we might ask: how do we know what
we think we know about discrimination and its relationship to violence against women? What insights
gleaned from academic debates around intersectionality could guide a more critical approach to
producing and understanding knowledge about violence against women? How could processes of
unfixing shed light on the hegemonic influences coming to bear on law and intersectionality?

Intersectionality prompts inquiries into 'the messiness of difference,' which, as Merry argues, is buried
by indicators.[63] It provides a method of pursuing the knowledge we lose when relying on an uncritical
indicator culture imparted by the UN and its neoliberal appeals. As indicators are statistical abstractions
that enable 'easy comparison among groups and countries by converting values into numbers,' this lost
knowledge is likely vast.[64] However, adopting intersectionality as Crenshaw originally employed it to
analyse law's unidirectional focus provides a mode of confronting the hegemonic claims of indicator
culture. Specifically, it enables a critical engagement with how appeals to equivalence and comparison
create and reinforce a kind of empirical 'subaltern'that is, experiences that are so multiply
marginalised they are unintelligible.

The subaltern, as illustrated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a figure silenced by forces of modernity.
'Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation,' writes Spivak, 'the
figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling that is the
displaced figuration of the "third-world woman" caught between modernisation, culturalism, and
development.'[65] The subaltern, as a category, is a warning to onlookers who seek to fully grasp or
represent the experiences of such people. This is an important insight to consider in relation to both law
and indicator culture, as colonisation is not simply a process that shapes the territorial spaces people
occupy; it infiltrates knowledge through which we come to know about those people.[66] Indicator
culture, however, compounds the dilemmas of the subaltern because its empirical appeals dismiss other
narrative approaches and the voices that speak them.

Rather than embrace an indicator culture that aims to refine the variables used to measure violence
against women, intersectionality requires scholars and practitioners to ask: How do indicators obscure
women's experiences or render them invisible? What techniques and methods are necessary to
unveiling them? What alternative techniques might we employ in order to better grasp the workings of
structural, political and representational intersectionality?

Although the subaltern could be characterised as an 'intersectional location,' its genealogy and scope
are distinctas are many insights from other global feminisms I do not discuss in this paper, which are
concerned with how discursive politics inform gendered formations of discrimination and
oppression.[67] As a travelling concept, intersectionality offers purchase in a legal space that other
feminist concepts do not yet have. If employed in a way that pursues an open feminist future,
intersectionality can serve as a starting point to generate a dialogue about the tacit assumptions and
values built into international law and indicator culture. This would require taking seriously how
intersectionality has travelled and how other feminist concepts have taken shape in and moved through
other parts of the world. Combined, these feminist knowledges provide further insight into how
structural forcesincluding law, imperialism, war and even developmentobfuscate different women's
experiences, even those women not recognised as among the legalised categories of woman. They
reflect a commitment to a kind of legal storytelling that is distinctly different from that of the indicator
culture.

Although we cannot predict intersectionality's future within international law, we can acknowledge that
itand the contestation it entailsoffers a vehicle through which to bring other feminist insights into
dialogue with the UN agenda on violence against women. Intersectionality serves as a cautionary
reminder not to speak for those who cannot or 'ask others to share our agenda while they wait for their
own.'[68] Retaining this anti-essentialist core means resisting applications that succumb to empirical
colonialism. While this is perhaps a doubtful strategy within the domain of international governance,
there are some feminist scholars already devising strategies. Agathangelou and Ling, for instance,
prescribe a three-pronged approach that focuses on local-regional-global interactions, identity-
formations, and institutional learning opportunities.[69] S. Laurel Weldon proposes another alternative,
suggesting alternative comparative and statistical methods attuned to intersectional concerns.[70]

Intersectionality, as a travelling concept, facilitates a strategic promise for international law because of
its current purchase in the discourse. While some may read the UN's limited embrace of
intersectionality as a hegemonic appropriation, it is one with counterhegemonic potential. Bal reiterates
the importance of committing the labour necessary to retain 'well-thought-out' concepts by rejecting
narrow disciplinary prescriptions. The contested praxis of an open feminist future instills this as a value
of travel. It serves as a mode through which to discern and unveil how particular evidence-based forms
of knowledge simultaneously obscure and contribute to violence against women in its various forms
within and beyond the academic and UN platforms.


Notes

[1] Kimberl Crenshaw, 'Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of
antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics,' University of Chicago Legal Forum,
vol. 14 (1989): 13867; Kimberl Crenshaw, 'Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics,
and violence against women of color,' Stanford Law Review, vol. 43 (1990-1991): 124199.

[2] Patricia Hill Collins, 'Piecing together a genealogical puzzle: intersectionality and American
pragmatism,' European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 2 (2011): 88112, p.
88.

[3] Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
Including the Right to Development, United Nations General Assembly, UN Doc A/HRC/11/6, 18 May
2009, online: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/11session/A.HRC.11.6.pdf,
accessed 25 November 2013; Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes
and Consequences, Rashida Manjoo, United Nations General Assembly, UN Doc A/HRC/17/26, 2 May
2011, online: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A-HRC-17-26.pdf,
accessed 25 November 2013; Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes
and Consequences, Rashida Manjoo, United Nations General Assembly, UN Doc A/HRC/20/16, 23 May
2012, online: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Women/A.HRC.20.16_En.pdf, accessed 25
November 2013.

[4] Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, Rashida
Manjoo.

[5] Jennifer Nash, 'Re-thinking intersectionality,' Feminist Review, vol. 89 (2008): 115.

[6] Ange-Marie Hancock,'When multiplication doesn't equal quick addition: examining intersectionality
as a research paradigm,' Perspectives on Politics, vol. 5, no. 1 (2007): 6379.

[7] Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, 'Disappearing acts: reclaiming intersectionality in the social sciences in a
post-black feminist era,' Feminist Formations, vol. 24, no. 1 (2012): 125; Robert S. Chang and Jerome
M. Culp, 'After intersectionality,' University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review, vol. 71 (2002): 48591;
Peter Kwan, 'Intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation: Jeffrey Dahmer and
the cosynthesis of categories,' Hastings Law Journal, vol. 48 (1997): 125792.

[8] Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott. 'Introduction,' in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith
Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. xiiixvii, p. xiii; Kathy Davis,
'Intersectionality as buzzword: a sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory
successful,' Feminist Theory, vol. 9, no. 1 (2008): 6785.

[9] Sally Engle Merry, 'Epilogue: the travels of gender and law,' Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in
Asia and the Pacific, vol. 33, December 2013, online:
intersections.anu.edu.au/issue33/merry_epilogue.htm.

[10] Sally Engle Merry, 'Measuring the world: indicators, human rights, and global governance,' Current
Anthropology, vol. 11, no. S3 (2011): S8395.

[11] Merry, 'Measuring the world,' p. S85.

[12] Merry, 'Measuring the world,' p. S93.

[13] Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, 'Desire industries: sex trafficking, UN peacekeeping, and the
neo-liberal world order,' The Brown Journal of World Affairs, vol. 10, no. 1 (2003): 13348.

[14] Agathangelou and Ling, 'Desire industries,' p. 133.

[15] Grace Kyungwon Hong, '"The future of our worlds": black feminism and the politics of knowledge in
the university under globalisation,' Meridians, vol. 8, no. 2 (2008): 95115, p. 100.

[16] Hong, '"The future of our worlds",' p. 100.

[17] Alexander-Floyd, 'Disappearing acts.'

[18] Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2002.

[19] Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, p. 4.

[20] Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, p. 4.

[21] Elizabeth Grosz, 'Histories of a feminist future,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol.
25, no. 1 (2000): 101721.

[22] Grosz, 'Histories of a feminist future,' p. 1017.

[23] Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, 'A conversation with founding scholars of
intersectionality Kimberl Crenshaw, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Michelle Fine,' in The Intersectional
Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, & Gender, ed. Michele Tracy Burger and
Kathleen Guidroz, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009, pp. 6178.

[24] Crenshaw, 'Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex,' p. 149.

[25] Crenshaw, 'Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex,' p. 151.

[26] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York
University Press, 2001.

[27] Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, p. 9.

[28] Trina Grillo, 'Antiessentialism and intersectionality: tools to dismantle the master's house,' Berkeley
Women's Law Journal, vol. 10, no. 1 (1995): 1630.

[29] Sylvia Walby, Globalisation and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities, London: SAGE,
2009.

[30] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007.

[31] I use 'race-class-gender' here only for consistency, not to suggest their order of importance.

[32] 'Intersectionality: theorizing power, empowering theory,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, vol. 38, no. 4 (2013): 7851055.

[33] Kathleen Daly, 'Feminist perspectives in criminology: a review with Gen Y in mind,' in The SAGE
Handbook of Criminological Theory, ed. Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn, London: SAGE, 2010, pp.
22546.

[34] Alexander-Floyd, 'Disappearing acts,' p. 19.

[35] Alexander-Floyd, 'Disappearing acts,' p. 1.

[36] Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, 'Race, class, gender: reclaiming baggage in fast travelling theories,' European
Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (2005): 24965; Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class &
Gender: Becoming Respectable, London: SAGE, 1997.

[37] Dorthe Stauns, 'Where have all the subjects gone? bringing together the concepts of
intersectionality and subjectification,' NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 11,
no. 2 (2003): 10110.

[38] Nancy Ehrenreich, 'Subordination and symbiosis: mechanisms of mutual support between
subordinating systems,' University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review, vol. 71, no. 2 (Winter 2002):
251324, p. 319.

[39] Chang and Culp, 'After intersectionality,' pp. 48689.

[40] Examples include: Stauns, 'Where have all the subjects gone?'; Buitelaar, Marjo, '"I am the
ultimate challenge": accounts of intersectionality in the life-story of a well-known daughter of Moroccan
migrant workers in the Netherlands,' European Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (2006): 259
76; Nash, 'Re-thinking intersectionality'; Baukje Prins, 'Narrative accounts of origins: a blind spot in the
intersectional approach,' European Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (2006): 27790.

[41] Hancock, 'When multiplication doesn't equal quick addition.'

[42] Leslie McCall, 'The complexity of intersectionality,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
vol. 30, no. 3 (2005): 17711800.

[43] Alexander-Floyd, 'Disappearing acts.'

[44] Alexander-Floyd, 'Disappearing acts,' p. 21, n. 5

[45] Sora Han, 'Intersectional sensibility and the shudder,' in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor
Adorno, ed. Rene Heberle, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006, pp. 17391, p.
174.

[46] Han, 'Intersectional sensibility and the shudder,' p. 185.

[47] Donna Haraway, 'Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective,' Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1988): 57599.

[48] In a different paper, I explore how incorporating such an approach can productively shift the
scholarly focus of intersectionality within a field of inquiry. See Kathryn Henne and Emily Troshynski,
'Mapping the margins of intersectionality: criminological possibilities in a transnational world,'
Theoretical Criminology, vol. 17, no. 4 (2013): 45573.

[49] Anastasia Vakulenko, 'Gender and International Human Rights Law: the intersectionality agenda,' in
Research Handbook on International Human Rights Law, ed. Sarah Joseph and Adam McBeth,
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010, pp. 196214.

[50] Nira Yuval-Davis, 'Intersectionality and feminist politics,' European Journal of Women's Studies, vol.
13, no. 3 (2006): 193209, p. 206.

[51] United Nations Statistics Division, Methodological Overview of Surveys on Violence against Women,
2009, online: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/meetings/vaw/docs/Paper1.pdf, accessed 19
November 2013.

[52] UN Statistics Division, Methodological Overview of Surveys on Violence against Women, p. 12.

[53] UN Commission on the Status of Women, Draft Agreed Conclusions on Gender and All Forms of
Discrimination, in particular Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, 2001,
online: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/draftacrace.htm, accessed 19 November 2013;
Vakulenko, 'Gender and International Human Rights Law,' pp. 20405; Yuval-Davis, 'Intersectionality and
feminist politics,' pp. 20405.

[54] Yuval-Davis, 'Intersectionality and feminist politics,' p. 205.

[55] Yuval-Davis, 'Intersectionality and feminist politics,' p. 205.

[56] Yuval-Davis, 'Intersectionality and feminist politics,' p. 205.

[57] Yuval-Davis, 'Intersectionality and feminist politics,' p. 205.

[58] Statement by Mrs Rashid Manjoo United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women,
Its Causes and Consequences, New York: Commission on the Status of Women, 29 February 2012,
online: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw56/statements/statement-spec-rap-manjoo.pdf,
accessed 25 November 2013.

[59] United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences
(Yakin Ertrk), 15 Years of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its
Causes and Consequences (19942009)A Critical Review, 2009, online:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/women/rapporteur/docs/15YearReviewofVAWMandate.pdf,
accessed 19 November 2013.

[60] Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006, p. 3.

[61] Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, p. 328.

[62] Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, pp. 32728.

[63] Merry, 'Measuring the world,' p. S86.

[64] Merry, 'Measuring the world,' p. S86.

[65] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing
Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 304.

[66] Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, p. 327.

[67] This alludes to a broader critique of the centrality of U.S.-based scholarship. See Elora Halim
Chowdhury, 'Locating global feminisms elsewhere: braiding us women of color and transnational
feminisms,' Global Dynamics, vol. 21, no. 1 (2009): 5178.

[68] Grillo, 'Antiessentialism and intersectionality,' p. 30.

[69] Agathangelou and Ling, 'Desire industries,' p. 148.

[70] S. Laurel Wheldon, 'The structure of intersectionality: a comparative politics of gender,' Politics &
Gender, vol. 2, no. 2 (2006): 23548.
Published with the support of Gender and Cultural Studies, School of Culture, History and Language,
College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
URL: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue33/henne.htm