Two Decades & Counting: Critical Reflections on "Intersectionality"

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December 1, Tuesday
4 to 6:30 PM

SCA Gallery Space
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Bowery @ East 5th Street
A roundtable discussion with:
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, UCLA Law
Lisa Duggan, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
Chandan Reddy, University of Washington
Karen Shimakawa, Performance Studies, NYU
This forum commemorates the 20th anniversary of the enunciation and analysis of “intersectionality” by legal theorist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw in her path-breaking essays, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991). Panelists explore the ongoing analytic purchase of “intersectionality” for anti-racist social critique and legal activism and also ask how the term has been transformed as it travels across different historical and disciplinary contexts.
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is Professor of Law at the University of California Law School. She teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. Her primary scholarly interests center around race and the law, and she was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory. She was elected Professor of the Year by the 1991 and 1994 graduating classes. She now splits her time each year between UCLA and the Columbia School of Law. At the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she received her LL.M., Professor Crenshaw was a William H. Hastie Fellow. She then clerked for Justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Professor Crenshaw’s publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993). In 2007, Professor Crenshaw was nominated the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil. In 2008, she was nominated an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow. In the same year she joined the selective group of scholars awarded with an in-residence fellowship at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. You can find out more about Professor Crenshaw’s work through her think tank, The African American Policy Forum.
Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.
Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage and co-editor (with Kandice Chuh) of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Her current project, titled Somatic Citizenship, focuses on the construction and maintenance of bodily regimes of cultural identification and her research and teaching interests include critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American Jurisprudence.
Sponsored by the American Studies Program, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU; co-sponsored by CSGS.

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