Category anxiety and the invisible white woman: Managing intersectionality at the scene of argument

Barbara Tomlinson First Published October 24, 2017 Research Article Abstract Feminists may overlook the way that our practices of reading and writing serve as discursive technologies of power, particularly if we fail to acknowledge the dominance of the invisible subject position of the (middle-class, heterosexual) white woman. Under such circumstances, specific seemingly neutral rhetorical strategies can serve as potent tools of dominance, infusing the reading situation with strategies of subordination that go unremarked because they are authorised by tradition and convention. I examine here the use of a specific rhetorical device in a specific context, the evocation of a comment by Judith Butler that I call The Case of the Et Cetera, as it appears in six critiques of intersectionality by European scholars and one by a North American scholar relying on the European narrative. I argue that Butler’s comment is used to deploy a pattern of rhetoric that I call managing intersectionality. This move depoliticises intersectionality by making it the property of a white managerial subject position that is treated as racially unmarked. My target is the metadiscursive regime that authorises this uninterrogated reinscription of racialised hierarchy in feminist academic argument. References Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar Ahmed, Sara (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Google Scholar Alcoff, Linda Martín (2007) ‘Fraser on Redistribution, Recognition, and Identity’. European Journal of Political Theory, 6(3): 255–265. Google Scholar Alexander-Floyd, Nikol (2012) ‘Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming. Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era’. Feminist Formations, 24(1): 1–25. Google Scholar Barkley-Brown, Elsa (1992) ‘What Has Happened Here? The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics’. 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