LITERATURE AND INTERPERSONAL FEMINISM

The term “intersectional feminism” has seen renewed currency in the last year or so, but the methodologies and theories of intersectional feminisms have a much longer history. Kimberlé Crenshaw first theorized “intersectional feminism” as a critical framework in the 1990s. Crenshaw’s initial formation, however (as she herself has recognized), was conversant with a longer history of woman-of-color, transnational, and postcolonial feminisms. This seminar focuses on historicizing and examining contemporary literature through an intersectional approach that combines woman-of-color feminisms, transnational and global feminisms, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and disability studies. How do these texts imagine these crossings? What possible complexities, conflicts, or coalitions emerge? Since formal innovation has long been critical to foundational work in gender and sexuality studies scholars and writers, who often weave together art, practice, and politics, we will read theory as literature and literature as theory, and we will closely analyze links between intersectional feminisms and form, aesthetics, and genre.