CHAPTER 11 On the Depoliticisation of Intersectionality Talk. Conceptualising Multiple Oppressions in Critical Sexuality Studies Umut Erel, Jin Haritaworn, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Christian Klesse

Queer theory offers itself as a radical epistemology to uncover pervasive forms of power, not only around sexuality but also around ‘race’ and transgender. Queer of colour theorists and some trans theorists have remained sceptical about these grand claims, and pointed out the notorious silence about racism and transphobia in the mainstream of queer theorising (Helen (charles) 1993, Cathy Cohen 2001, Jin Haritaworn 2007). Their critique echoes an older tradition of theorising multiple relations of oppression that has been particularly advocated by lesbians of colour like Audre Lorde (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (1982; 1983). While the anti-racist feminisms of the 1980s have produced their own silences, especially around transgender and dissident sexualities, we will here argue that their call to positionality is vital in developing a queer theory and research practice that addresses the silences around raciality subject to this volume. This article is an attempt to find a language for our dissatisfaction with the silencing of the knowledge productions and political activisms of trans people of colour, queers of colour, women of colour and migrant women in the UK and Germany, as at the same time it is about exploring the possibilities and limits of the concept of ‘intersectionality‘. In nearly two decades of critical debate about how multiple oppressions around gender, ‘race‘ and class interlock, ‘intersectionality‘ has emerged as a concept which promises a comprehensive theorising of various power relations. In this article we explore the potential of an ‘intersectionality perspective‘ for critical queer theorising and research practice. We argue that the concept has been used as an umbrella term for

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divergent debates and political projects, both radical and hegemonic ones. This is reflected in its reception and dissemination in different political, cultural and historical contexts. O ur1 transnational experiences in Britain and Germany have prompted us to reflect on how the concept of ‘intersectionality’ has travelled between these spaces and how some of its potential for critique and resistance has been diminished in this process. In both countries there is a tendency to disavow the roots of the concept in anti-racist struggles. This problem is particularly pronounced in Germany where critical migrant, Jewish and researchers of colour have much more tenuous access to the institutionalised knowledge production of academia. The German case, for example, demonstrates how the concept of ‘race‘ can be adopted for purely academic purposes without considering local practices, histories and epistemologies of resistance. The notion of ‘intersectionality’ has been used as a historically disembodied cipher which serves to erase home-grown anti-racist feminist struggles and theoretical debates which go back to the 1980s and 1990s. We consider these processes of translation and transfer by (a) showing the pitfalls in academic discourses of neglecting and neutralising the theoretical input of political movements; and (b) critically interrogating the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as a tool for understanding the complexity of the social. We will do this in four steps. First, we will retrace the feminist debates in the UK and the USA that gave rise to the concept of ‘intersectionality’. Second, we will examine the exclusionary effects of the ‘intersectionality’ concept towards other social differences, especially sexuality, transgender and transsexuality, and the limiting ways in which it has been translated into queer discourse. These exclusions also shed light on the failure of the concept to give progressive impulses to the current debate around ‘multiculturalism’,

1 We are a collective of authors who share experiences of living and working academically in both

Britain and Germany. While sharing a political, theoretical and empirical interest with multiple oppression, influenced by anti-racist feminism, Black, Chicana and Third World feminism, our political engagement and research diverged along the axes of gender, transgender, ‘race’, class and sexuality, spanning such diverse research areas as gender and migration, ‘race’ and labour, racialised genders and sexualities, and gay male and bisexual non-monogamy.