Specters of Intersectionality

Abstract

The article presents the optical and spectral facets of the notion of intersectionality in their materiality, in their forms as bodies and ghosts, doors, and thresholds. Scholarship on intersectionality has focused on critiquing the legal assumption that considers categories of discrimination to correspond to discrete aspects of identity, due to its negative effect of rendering certain experiences unrepresentable. As a consequence, the optical approach seeks to expose intersections and to reveal what remains hidden under these discrete frames. I would like to take the opportunity to write about Goodrich’s law, to delve into an additional register that is underdeveloped but, I argue, contained in the legal concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality has not addressed the spectral, the search for becoming, or the intent to conceptualize an encounter without anticipation, announcement, or previsions, even if that implies defying what a concept entails. Both are inextricably connected. Here I will distinguish the optical and the spectral aspects of the theory. The optical or operational side of intersectionality offers a door while the specter that phantasmatically sustains and holds intersectionality’s impulse in legal practice allows the manifestation of the illegible within the legible.