Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies

6. Constitutive Intersectionality and the Affect of Rhetorical Form

147 Chapter 6 Constitutive Intersectionality and the Affect of Rhetorical Form Leslie A. Hahner Over the past few decades, the incorporation of intersectional approaches into feminist scholarly practice expressed important challenges against orthodox views on power and identity formation . Intersectionality and similar theorizations reconfigured predominant assumptions on this complex relationship, and, in so doing, prompted scholars in a variety of disciplines to ask provocative questions: How does power influence identity formation? How might we theorize the variability of oppression? Is identity singular, a multiplicity, and/or mobile? In communication, the influence of these models encouraged similar questions inflected with our own disciplinary tendencies: How does communication impact identity construction? How do subjects narrate their identities? Does rhetoric offer recourse to resistance? Our current disciplinary conversations on communication, power, identity, and subjectivity suggest that these questions still motivate much of our research, even if the key terms of intersectionality rarely appear in the pages of our journals . Moreover, as the contributions of this collection demonstrate, feminist communication scholars continue to invigorate scholarly inquiry on intersectionality by couching communication methods as engines for discovering the cartography of identity’s travels. This chapter will continue that project by situating intersectionality as a distinctly rhetorical machination. I read intersectionality not simply as the term used to describe interlocking conditions of identity, but rather as that which also designates the symbolic, material, and affective connections through which a subject engages a particular discourse. Put in the language of rhetorical studies, Leslie A. Hahner 148 intersectionality shapes how an audience reads an address. Ultimately , I argue that intersectionality may be productively reconsidered as the juncture between the constitutive power of discourse and the audience’s affective, embodied acts of identification.1 By understanding how the constitutive form of discourse interacts with the subject’s investments, feminist communication scholars might better comprehend how—despite the mobile, multifaceted layers sedimented in our identifications—particular assertions of identity become more significant than others. In order to pursue this thesis, I first offer a brief overview of the potentially problematic tensions manifest in intersectionality scholarship. I then detail my own theorization of constitutive intersectionality and the aspects of affect that underpin this model.2 To concretize this theorization, I will frequently reference a brief contemporary example: Feminist Coming Out Day. Finally, I conclude by discussing the advantages of this theory and the possibilities for future research. Intersectionality and Identity For feminist scholars, intersectionality is an oppositional method that interrogates the ways in which focusing on singular categories of identity (e.g., woman) narrows the complex identities of subjects . These authors dissect machinations of power that might limit identity to an isolated category (e.g., the subject is raced or classed, not raced and classed) as well as paradigms of identity construction that view it as additive (e.g., the subject is raced, then sexed, then classed).3 Typically, intersectionality is employed as a methodology that explores how modes of identification intermingle as they travel across the social. In this way, intersectionality is a resistant approach deploying the multiplicity of identities to reconfigure the oppressive social norms that govern everyday performances of self.4 These critics contend that by reading the intersections, we might profitably express richer formulas for identity formation. In nearly all of this scholarship, the individual’s identity is the most significant theoretical concept.5 That is, intersectionality research typically attends to those disciplinary norms that restrict the way in which individual human subjects fashion their own identities. Although identity remains an important term for critical scholarship, focusing on identity as it emerges in the individual human subject orchestrates some key tensions within intersectional analyses that bear consideration. As I will suggest later in this chapter, a reconfigured understanding of intersectionality as a constitutive juncture could productively negotiate these tensions. Intersectionality and Rhetorical Form 149 First, intersectional analyses tend toward a stable view of identity that may replicate some of the problematic assumptions this method purported to critique. Commonly, academic investment in the stability of identity emerges in those scholarly efforts to highlight the duplicity of singular identity categories. That is, when feminist critics lament the social construction of identity as particularly oppressive for certain peoples, they situate this effect as created by the subject continually living within multiple categories of limited social mobility. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality is illuminative of this tension. Crenshaw astutely identifies the ways in which systematic mechanisms ideologically fashion...