From Metaphor to Materiality: Grounding Intersectional Legal Thought

Abstract

When I first decided to investigate an intersectional approach to frame forces operating in cases of indigenous women affected by land conflicts, I had not envisioned that the metaphorical aspect would be such a crucial part of operationalizing the concept. Since its first formulation, the term intersectionality has been attached to the image of intersecting roads, and still today when searching for online videos for pedagogical purposes, the results show cars driving towards people standing on crossroads to explain the meaning. Intersecting roads, however, also emerged in my fieldwork in a literal maner. The passage from metaphor to materiality of the concept of intersectionality, I argue, can affect the identitarian logic that predominates in most proclaimed legal intersectional approaches. The paper proposes to bring intersectionality to materiality by re-imagining the metaphor of intersectionality through an ethnographic approach to indigenous peoples’ land conflicts in La Pampa, Argentina.