Identity politics used to be obligate: I am a woman of color, because the world sees me as such. Now there is an elective element: I identify as X and Y and Z right now. That can distract from the overriding class privilege of élite education. “Intersectionality is taken as a kind of gospel around here,” Blecher complained. For this he put a lot of the blame on Comparative American Studies, an influential program among Oberlin activists.
Wendy Kozol, the director of the program, agreed that many students glom on to intersectional ideas too broadly. “But that’s why we teach,” she told me. “When people are learning any theoretical framework, they learn it in stages, with various levels of nuance.” She calls the critiques of intersectionality “very compelling” but difficult. Many of them suggest that casting experience as an intersection of super-abstract social identities, such as “femaleness” and “blackness,” elides historical specificity. One of Kozol’s favorite critics, the Rutgers scholar Jasbir K. Puar, charges that intersectionality posits people whose attributes—race, class, gender, etc.—are “separable analytics,” like Legos that can be snapped apart, when in truth most identities operate more like the night sky: we see meaningful shapes by picking out some stars and ignoring others, and these imagined pictures can change all the time.
