Resituating the Crossroads: Theoretical Innovations in Black Feminist Ethnography

In her “Poem for my Black Feminist Anthropology Sisters Today and Forever,” Irma McClaurin writes that Black feminists within the discipline are treated as “dangerous beasts” and “intruders,” whom feminist anthropologists “still don’t cite” and whose “words and experiences … are not part of the canon.”[1] Often, general histories of feminist anthropology practice “tropes of erasure and banalization,”[2] either ignoring the presence of decades of Black feminist anthropological scholarship or by trivializing a vast body of work. For example, in her introduction to the reader Feminist Anthropology, Ellen Lewin details the history of waves of feminist anthropology, from earliest anthropologists to the contemporary era. She describes Black feminist anthropologists in one paragraph, listing Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, as well as Caroline Bond Day and Vera Green.[3] However, Black feminist anthropologists writing after this first generation receive no mention, except in reference to histories of Hurston, Dunham, Day, and Green. For example, she cites Irma McClaurin and Faye Harrison, but not their ethnographic work. Similarly, in Anthropology and Social Theory, Sherry Ortner neither gives specificity to anthropologists of color, nor does she cite them.[4]

Against such erasures, McClaurin’s 2001 ground-breaking edited volume Black Feminist Anthropology and the genealogical work of Faye Harrison and A. Lynn Bolles have provided much-needed forums for redressing the invisibility of Black feminist ethnographic work. Still, as Harrison argues, “We need to work against commonly believed myths such as ‘blacks don’t do theory.’”[5] Thus, this essay highlights the theoretical contributions and innovations in Black feminist ethnography.

In her genealogy of Black feminist anthropology, Bolles observes that intersectionality or the “concept of ‘simultaneity of oppression’” forms a “thread” among Black feminisms across disciplines.[6] Taking this observation as a start, this paper shows how intersectionality works in ethnographies. As a Black feminist anthropologist, my goal is to counter the erasure and trivialization of Black feminist ethnography. Unfortunately, intersectionality has often functioned in multiple forms of academic and popular media as a “meme,” having a reductive and flattening effect.[7] As Mullings reminds us, multiple and sometimes conflicting Black feminisms exist, and thus, the body of scholarship requires deeper examination.[8] For example, Mullings describes several different types of Black feminisms emerging before the 1990s, including those centered on liberal or civil rights; cultural continuities; cultural critiques of the intersections of race, gender, and capitalism; and Marxist analyses of the intersections of race, gender, and class.[9]

I begin by exploring the bibliography of Black feminist anthropological work listed in Black Feminist Anthropology, specifically book-length ethnographic work published around the same time that the term and concept of “intersectionality” emerged from critical race theory, particularly Kimberle Crenshaw.[10] I put these in conversation with a small selection of later Black feminist book-length ethnographies, which, although published as late as 2009, do not use the term “intersectionality” or reference Crenshaw’s work. I read these ethnographies alongside Ange-Marie’s Hancock’s Intersectionality: An Intellectual History because the work traces a genealogy of “intersectionality-like thinking” back to the 19th century in both activism and scholarship. While Hancock covers ten disciplines, anthropology is not among them, indicating a need to still make visible the works of Black feminist anthropology. The ethnographies covered here are by no means exhaustive. For example, I have chosen authors located at universities in the United States and only publications written in English. Thus, this project is only a beginning.

An “Intersectional” Point of Departure

As Cheryl Mwaria writes, Black feminists “live our anthropology.” Mwaria uses this remark to emphasize the distinctiveness of Black feminist anthropologists’ work.[11] While Mwaria spoke of the distinctiveness of Black feminist anthropology from White or mainstream feminist anthropology, I argue that Black feminist anthropologists’ work provides a theorization of intersectionality distinctive from scholarship in other disciplines. First, their internationalist perspective and ethnographic methodology call for a critical view of race, class, and gender that forms not so much an “anti-categorical”[12] stance, as much as a mechanism for detailing the cultural formation of categories—their contingency, construction, meanings, and materialization.[13] I found that Black feminist ethnographers often use the conception of “the conjunctive” to refer to intersections or co-constitution of these cultural formations, and do so in ways that differ from dominant theories of “conjuncture.” Second, while much work on intersectionality ends at analyzing the simultaneity of “race-class-gender,” the ethnographies reviewed here consider the simultaneity of conjuncture and disjuncture—that is, the production of differentiation, disconnect and displacement between subjects, knowledges, expectations, and conceptions/ experiences of time and space. Third, I claim that Black feminists’ location in African Diasporic politics and geographies provides a distinctive interpretive framework for analyzing the simultaneity of conjunctures and disjunctures, not as Western, Cartesian intersections, but as African diasporic “crossroads.” This interpretive framework, deployed both in the uses of metaphors of crossroads and trickster and in merged terms, provides a richer conceptualization of the complexities of “interlocking oppressions” by attending to the possibilities of miscommunications and failures at the intersection, yet also dexterity and negotiation.

In speaking of how Black feminists “[live] our anthropology,” Mwaria cautions against assumptions that “we are all the same or that we speak with one voice,” yet argues that, still, a common “vantage point” exists from which we formulate research questions.[14] In terms of Mwaria’s caution against homogenizing Black feminist ethnography, it is important to note that ethnographers draw on different theoretical traditions and write from different class positions and ethnic identifications. I also see differences across Black feminist ethnographies in notions of diaspora, activism, and experience. While some draw on a notion of diasporic consciousness—a view rooted in Pan-African politics and conceptions of sameness across national borders, exemplary of scholar activism by anthropologist St. Claire Drake for example—others theorize diaspora more in terms of “identification”[15]— where the question shifts to tracking the processes of whether and how people identify (or disidentify) with Africa or Blackness. Others still, theorize diaspora as performance, where racial identities, “Africanness,” and solidarity are even more contingent and linked to subjective performances. Feminist scholar activism is viewed and practiced in multiple ways, including as (1) politics of knowledge in terms of creating awareness, new theories, and more visibility of Black women’s contributions, but also (2) ethnographies on Black women’s forms of activism, and then (3) ethnographies of engaging alongside or within activist movements. Third, I discerned different conceptualizations of experience, ranging from a more realist approach of standpoint theory to a more constructivist/discursive approach.[16]

In terms of “vantage point,” several Black feminist anthropologists credit their subject positions in the intersection of race, gender, class, and nation with providing a perspective to search for accounts of the complexities not only of race, class, and gender, but multiple social and cultural formations. McClaurin states in her ethnography, Women of Belize,

I have seen gender and how it interacts with race and class in my own life. As a result, I feel obligated to discuss gender as an active, dynamic, and contradictory system that interacts with and affects social structures and is also affected by the same.[17]

In Performing Africa, Ebron “invoke[s]” Anna Julia Cooper’s emblematic phrase “When and Where I Enter,” a key symbol of intersectionality, to “mark the importance of … seeing the multiple influences and contingencies that make social histories and theories possible.”[18] Similarly, Williams writes that her “intent” is to “expose … the multidimensionalities” of identity formation, emphasizing throughout the ethnography “interrelatedness,” “intersection,” “entangle[ment],” and “heterogeneity.”[19] Here then, intersectionality forms a situated positionality, perspective or research standpoint from which to consider multiple research questions including, but not limited to a sole focus on gender, sexuality, or women. It is from this intersectional point of departure from which Black feminist ethnographers theorize the conjunctive, disjunctures, and crossroads.

The Conjunctive

In her ethnography of Guyana entitled Stains on My Name, War in My Veins, Williams provides a theorization of conjunctive and disjunctive processes. As I subsequently read other Black feminist ethnographies, I found conjunction and disjuncture to be emerging concepts across the ethnographies. Williams uses the term conjunctive to describe the historical “linkages” and “experiences” of “common oppression,” while using disjunctive to describe “differential experiences, strategies, and symbolic encoding of their significance.”[20] So, for example, in Guyana, “historical conjunctures” produce an egalitarian ethos developed across ethnicities to identify with one another against or in contrast to the common colonizing power. Yet, co-existing with and troubling this egalitarianism are differentiating gendered and ethnic-based hierarchies.

In addition to Williams’s conception of the conjunctive as creating common oppression or identification, Black feminist ethnographers used the term conjunction to signify the coming together of multiple “cultural formations” or processes, even beyond the three categories of race-class-gender. For example, in Women of Belize, Irma McClaurin uses conjunction in discussing the problematic view of contraceptives, sex-education, and family-planning that complicates the lives of young Belizean women: “I would suggest that the conjunction of moral codes and religious values, when combined with community ideals about family and children, produces an ambiguity and contradictory relationship with the emerging adolescent sexuality that is thought to be best left alone.”[21] Similarly, in Performing Africa, Ebron uses conjunction to describe the overlapping and contradictory processes of the development of tourism as a glocal industry in The Gambia and what she calls “the national allegory of the decay of contemporary society.”[22] So, the more that The Gambia promotes the tourism industry, the more that tourism is viewed as a site for immorality (against tradition), particularly given the ways in which sex tourism establishes Gambian men as sexual targets/exploits for European women. Discussing her ethnography of Kenya, Shaw uses the term conjunction synonymously with intersection to discuss the reality of belonging to multiple “part societies,” a phenomenon she also names as “interculturality.”[23] For Shaw, the “conjunction of ideas, meanings, images, discourses, and actions emanating from different social and cultural domains” reveal the ways in which “society and culture can be fragmentary, multivocal, and emergent” as well as how “contradictions and tensions are continually negotiated and manipulated by actors in society.”[24]

Here, the uses of conjunctive/conjunction lie in contrast to uses of conjuncture predominant in social theory, particularly in the works of Gramsci, Bourdieu, Sahlins, and Balandier. In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci defines “conjunctural” movements as “occasional, immediate, almost accidental,” distinct from “organic movements ([which are] relatively permanent).”[25] He also defines conjuncture as “the set of immediate and ephemeral characteristics of the economic situation.”[26] Similar to Gramsci, Bourdieu defines conjuncture as “a particular state of this structure,” and cautions against studies that reduce the “objective structure” contextualizing social interaction to the “conjunctural structure of the interaction in a particular situation or group.”[27] The adverb conjuncturally as used by Bourdieu conveys a sense of an immediate, discrete historical moment, to be contrasted with the occurrence of social position “at all times and all places.”[28] Comparing Bourdieu’s use of conjuncture to that of Sahlins, Johnson-Hanks writes that Sahlins “sees conjunctures as intermediate between social structure and individual events.”[29] Sahlins uses the concept of “structure of the conjuncture” to point to the “relations” and “dynamics of practice,” wherein conventions, presuppositions, and “the received cultural order” potentially become subject to agentic contradictions and differentiations that can in turn produce social, structural transformation.[30] Allen reads Sahlins’s concept of the “structure of the conjuncture” as moments in which “interpellations or received meanings collide with audacious ‘acting out’ impelled by subjects’ own will, creating new discourses and practices.”[31] In a different use, Balandier equates the concepts of “situation” and “particular social conjuncture,” which both describe the “totality” of the social, political–economic, historical contexts determining a particular moment.[32]

In summary, the notion of conjuncture predominant in social theory refers to a discrete, immediate or practical manifestation of structure, as used by Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Sahlins, and conveys a holistic perspective of a particular historical moment in its usage by Balandier. In contrast, the conjunctive in the Black feminist ethnographies embodies the temporal and spatial metaphors used by the Combahee River Collective of “simultaneous” and “interlocking,”[33] and represents moments of co-constitution of multiple stratifications and cultural formations. Religious and moral codes, colonial histories, racial and ethnic senses or routes of belonging, and nation-state building, as stated above, function as multiple processes through which genders are “made” and experienced. Importantly, these processes are contradictory, ambiguous, and often at odds with an economic base, and thus are not epiphenomenal of class. In Black feminist ethnographies, the conjunctive describes moments that are not necessarily discrete or immediate. For example, Williams’s use of “historical conjuncture” and Ebron’s use of “historical conjunction” describe processes representing the accumulation of historical memories, reproduction of colonial relationships, and shifting conceptions of “‘traditional’ values.”[34] If we follow Allen’s understanding of Sahlin’s notion of “a structure of the conjuncture” as the “collision” of structure and agency or interpellation and resistance, then these Black feminist ethnographies provide a perspective of the conjunction/conjunctive as the collision among multiple cultural forms of reality or social constructions. In this perspective, attention to conjuncture is not an illusory reduction or myopic view of history, as cautioned against by Gramci and Bourdieu. Rather, subjective experiences and material realities “at the intersection” shed light on multiple processes occurring simultaneously that signify important contradictions and tensions.[35] Perhaps two of the closest theorizations of conjuncture to Black feminist theories of the conjunctive are the concepts of “feminist conjuncturalism” by Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, as well as the concept of “articulation” by Stuart Hall. Frankenberg and Mani develop the methodological approach of “feminist conjuncturalism” as a synthesis of U.S. Third World Feminist theoretical insights on the complexities of “intersecting axes of domination” and of “subjectivity and political agency” on the one hand, and Marxist cultural studies theorists’ conceptions of “postmodern conjuncturalism” on the other.[36] While the authors’ use of conjuncture echoes Balandier’s notion of situation, their development of conjuncturalism emphasizes the centrality of articulation as a bridge between cultural studies and U.S. Third World feminist theories—in other words, a bridge from theories of conjuncture to those of intersectionality.[37] In my reading, what facilitates this link is Hall’s definition of articulation as the “combination” of different modes of production, mechanisms of hierarchization, and/or types of political organization within a single “social formation.”[38] Further, political–economic structures and ideological and “interpellative structures” can be thought of as articulated or linked, rather than as (pre)determined. Citing Mouffe and Gramsci, Hall also associates articulation with ideological struggles, using the metaphor of “harness” to describe how disparate discourses can be unified even if contradictory.[39] As Hall points out, one of the disadvantages of the term articulation is that in English it means both “joining up” and “giving expression to.”[40] Thus, articulation tends to be used as a description of the discursive. The uses of conjunctive/conjunction on the other hand, in the Black feminist ethnographies above connote experiential, embodied and spatialized dimensions.

Disjuncture

One of the common aspects of the use of the conjunctive across the ethnographies read here is the coexistence of the conjunction with contradictions and tensions, in other words disjuncture. In the ethnographies, uses of the term disjuncture reference moments of division and differentiation between subjects or collectivities, as well as moments of contradiction or “collision” between opposing realities, ways of thinking, or social realms. Ebron locates the attention to disjuncture in “precisely … feminist concerns,” a positionality from which to “appreciate cultural tensions and interruptions rather than to assimilate them into a singular understanding of cultural communities or political causes.”[41]

In Williams’s ethnography, “historical disjunctures” signify accumulated historical moments of ethnic differentiation—for example, colonization, slavery, and indentured servitude—that, in turn, produced various hierarchical schemata. For example, in opposition to the hierarchies constructed by European elites, Guianese ethnic groups developed ideologies that “evaluate” each ethnic group as either “givers or takers,” based on “comparisons of their participation in the estate labor force and their experiences of the physical suffering and discrimination associated with it.”[42] In other ethnographies, disjuncture symbolizes differentiations based on power and privilege. McClaurin uses the term to signify ideological divides between leaders and members in women’s organizations in Belize.[43] Reflecting on her ethnographic work in the Dominican Republic, Simmons uses the term disjuncture to signify the disconnect between the lives of privileged (White) feminist anthropologists and their research subjects.[44]

Alternatively, the term disjuncture signifies moments of encountering contradictory and competing knowledges or realities. Reflecting on her ethnography of Kenya, Shaw discusses a “disjuncture between my knowledge as a woman and my learning to foreground that knowledge.”[45] Similarly, McClaurin uses the term disjuncture to describe irreconcilable, yet co-existing realities that, similar to Shaw’s experience, can often be a “turning point” for women’s political conscientization.[46] In her ethnography in The Gambia, Ebron uses the phrase “temporal and spatial disjunctures”[47] to describe contradictions in a heritage tour to the Senegambian region, a tour curiously sponsored by McDonald’s that targeted African Americans in celebration of Alex Haley’s Roots. During the tour, the conception of “return” for many African American tourists locked “Africa” in the past. For the tourists, the central focus on remembering slavery, albeit through a deeply embodied experience, tended to displace any interest in contemporary African politics or the specificity of place, such as the nationalist politics characterizing relations between Senegal and The Gambia.[48]

A particular kind of disjuncture that sheds light on the connection between Black feminist ethnographers’ “intersectional” positionalities and theorizations is what Williams defines as “the shock.” In Guyana, Cockalorums described “getting a shock” as the moments of “disjunctions” between expected material or social status based on ethnic identity and that which is actually achieved.[49] For example, African workers described “dismay, fear, and anger” and loss of “composure” when encountering an Amerindian man whose status and cultural capital far exceeded their expectations—so much so that the two men “yelled profanities at the man.”[50] In an ethnography of race in Brazil, Twine extends Williams’s theorization of “the shock,” by conceptualizing how “containing the shock” operates as a strategy by which Afro-Brazilian high achievers attempt to “maintain racial harmony” with elites.[51]

Indeed, “the shock” is often explored as an experience of the Black feminist ethnographer herself, in terms of both how her own positionality creates disjunctures in expectations and how she negotiates these tensions. In contrast to the “culture shock” taught to budding ethnographers in the United States, Twine, Gilliam, Simmons, and McClaurin expressed their surprise at being accepted as an insider in the field, even to the point of their Americanness being called into questioned by locals. In describing how she adopted strategies of containing shock, Ebron writes, “I soon decided that I could not present myself as a ‘male’ apprentice; to keep a sense of my respect within the Gambian context, I would have to behave more like a ‘proper’ woman.”[52] This was particularly the case given the jali’s experiences with another Western female researcher, whose aggressive assuming of male privilege for them paralleled Western women’s exploitation of Gambia men in sex tourism. In Downtown Ladies, Gina Ulysse recounts how her identity as a feminist Haitian anthropologist and her choices of hairstyles and clothes shocked Jamaican women and men among whom she was studying. She learned that for locals, she had mixed too many gendered signs of class, creating “disjunctures in my self-making practices,” which she called “cross-dressing-across-class.”[53]

One observation in these examples is that “the shock” occurs at the conjunctions of cultural formations, particularly of race/ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender. The shock exists because the breakdown of expectations threatens the boundaries others use to define their own identity. Here, the hypervisible threat of the “both/ and” is similar to what Gibel Azoulay (Mevorach) describes in her ethnography of the experience of being both Black and Jewish: “to be an interruption, to represent a contestation, and to undermine the authority of classification.”[54] At the same time, the shock indicates that experiential possibilities outside of the expected remain invisible. Attending to, observing, and experiencing “shocks,” Black feminist anthropologists engage in the two projects of intersectionality defined by Hancock: the development of “an analytical approach to understanding between-category relationships and a project to render visible and remediable previously invisible, unaddressed material effects of the sociopolitical location of Black women or women of color.”[55] Another observation is that disjunctures are “productive” and “polyvalent.”[56] In the examples above, the disjunctures between people produce privilege—between ethnic groups, researchers and subjects, organizational leaders and members, and tourists and locals. At the same time, disjunctures between knowledges have the potential to produce conscientization. Temporal and spatial disjunctures produced a whole “experience” and memory of slavery for African American tourists, which nevertheless reproduced colonial conceptions of “the Africa.” Disjunctures between reality and expectation produce both “structures of feeling,” for example a palpable anger toward a nonconforming person, as well as strategies for maintaining or disrupting hegemony.

Crossroads: An African Diasporic Perspective

In his influential chapter “Disjuncture and Difference,” Appadurai argues that globalization has intensified disjunctures between multiple “scapes.”[57] These scapes—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes—constitute worlds or domains that may come into conflict and are marked by instability and fluidity. Disjuncture in his chapter signifies the “profoundly unpredictable,” “nonisomorphic,” that which is “embattled,” for example, the “battle of imagination between nation and state,” and that which subverts “master narratives” and homogeneity.[58] While Appadurai imagines disjunctures occurring between scapes, Black feminist theorists provide a sense of disjuncture and conjuncture coexisting as a scape. Like Anzaldua’s borderlands, this “scape” where conjuncture and disjuncture meet is the crossroads. In African diasporic studies and discourses, upon which Black feminist ethnographers draw, the concept of crossroads is also associated with the trickster. In Yoruba-based cosmologies, this trickster is Exu, Eshu, Elegbara, Legba, described by Browning as “the principle of communication (this is why he is found at the intersections)—the mercurial dispatcher and receptor of messages—and it is this function which also makes him the principle of confusion. Any communication is potentially a miscommunication.”[59] Further, analyzing Audre Lorde’s writing of Afrikete as the female manifestation of Eshu, Provost emphasizes “the verbal dexterity, indeterminacy, gender ambiguity, and ability to mediate seeming contradictions … [of] Afro-Caribbean trickster figures,” qualities that appealed to Lorde because they provided strategic and tactical templates for navigating the lines between “insider” and “outsider.”[60]

In the Black feminist ethnographies analyzed here, the concepts of the “crossroads” and the “trickster” provide a heuristic for addressing the complexity of power relationships, specifically what Hancock asserts are key components of intersectional ontology: the “acknowledg[ment of] the permeability between oppressor and oppressed,” recognition of “contingency” in both situation and privilege, and attention to “relationships between what are traditionally perceived as conceptually distinct analytical categories of difference.”[61] Further, these relationships are analyzed reflexively.

For example, in Downtown Ladies, Ulysse uses “crossroads” as a type of scape representing her own positionality in “the field,” where multiple cultural formations connect, yet coexist with power differentials and contradictions:

the intersections of the crossroads of class, color, gender, sexuality, and nationality constantly in flux because of my ability to manipulate different types of capital. … I caused class trouble …[62]

McClaurin uses the phrase “the ‘trickster’s’ approach to social action” to describe how Belizean women use “domestic” activities, such as cooking, crocheting, sewing, or child-rearing strategies, as ways to subversively gather and organize.[63] In describing how Gambian men negotiate White women’s sexual tourism, Ebron calls them “trickster African men” to recognize both their subjugation as sexual objects in the context of global relations of inequality (and the hypersexualization of “the Africa”) on the one hand, yet also their agency in manipulating this objectification or sexualization on the other.[64] For Ebron, the trickster allegory both “challenge[s] the common presumption that power structures allow us to easily separate oppressor and oppressed,” and also calls her to reflexively question the extent to which she herself, as an African American female anthropologist in The Gambia, is implicated in these complex and contradictory power relationships.[65]

Merged Terms

The crossroads as a scape where conjunctures meet disjunctures is also embodied in the terms generated by Black feminist ethnographers to capture the co-constitution of racism, sexism, exploitation, and other stratifications. Some examples of merged terms in Black feminist ethnographies, while not exhaustive, include “economicsexual cycle,” “gendered racism [and] racialized sexism,” “raced sexual-political ideology,” and “Sojourner syndrome.”[66]

McClaurin uses economic-sexual cycle to describe the reinforcing mechanisms by which women in Belize are made economically vulnerable, even dependent on men, yet responsible for reproductive labor.[67] While women “exchange” reproduction or child-bearing with men for “temporary economic stability,” this “commodification” places them in economically and socially vulnerable positions, particularly if repeated in subsequent relationships or exchanges.[68] The economic-sexual cycle contains (and produces) disjunctures between societal valuation of children as a sign of female adulthood, yet a discourse of individual choice that (dis)places blame for women’s economic vulnerability on their inability to choose relationships with men wisely.[69] Further, the line between oppressor and oppressed becomes blurred as some of the mothers within this cycle project violence onto children in the form of abuse. Even though women’s fear of “abandonment” maintains the cycle, McClaurin shows, in the case of Evelyn, how abandonment actually provides opportunities for women to prove that economic dependence on a man is unnecessary.

In Other Kinds of Dreams, Sudbury uses the terms gendered racism and racialized sexism to describe the ways in which the conjunction of racism and sexism create specific and differentiated experiences. When she uses the terms, she emphasizes the subjective disjunctures occurring between Black women and Black men, between Black women and White women, but also within the category of “Black,” whether based on ethnic differences or classed ones.[70] As she states, “racisms—a plural becomes essential here—utilize gendered discourses of nationhood, culture, religion and phenotype in different ways at different moments.”[71] For Sudbury, interested in women’s organizations, these subjective disjunctures help explain the difficulties of forming political solidarity within categories of difference assumed both to be self-contained and produced by homogeneous experiences. As well, they explain the reproduction of forms of racism or sexism within spaces assumed to be safe.

Another merged term, used by Davis in Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform, is raced sexual-political ideology to describe the neoliberal project of regulating black women’s reproductive lives through welfare.[72] In particular, Davis discusses how Black women get caught in the middle of the historical conjuncture of two contradictory moral panics: one over the supposed threat of black women’s productive labor to patriarchal family structures, and another panic over the public cost of the so-called idle and hyper-fertile black “welfare queen.”[73]

While distinct from the others, Mullings’s concept of Sojourner syndrome represents another merged term in many ways because Mullings uses it to signify “the multiplicative effects of class, race, and gender on health.”[74] Importantly, the term signifies the disjuncture between Black women’s strategies for “economic, household and community” empowerment and survival, and the detrimental toll engaging in such strategies poses to their own health. Mullings also found that middle-class status exacerbated rather than alleviated physiological stressors for Black women, suggesting a wholly new meaning of “oppressor within.”

As Mullings argues, we must consider the political implications of metaphors such as simultaneity and intersection.[75] Using the African Diasporic metaphor of “crossroads” as an interpretive framework has implications for both the politics of knowledge and activism. In terms of the politics of knowledge, an African diasporic notion of “crossroads” can disrupt the assumed universality of Western constructions of reality. The metaphor of intersectionality as a point in traffic relies on the mathematical metaphor of two-dimensional lines in Cartesian space, which intersect at single points. As Garry points out, this conception of social positions as a priori lines (or streets) that meet at single points does not quite capture the dynamism of co-constitution.[76] The African metaphor of crossroads evokes a different visualization of space that incorporates not linearity, but contradictory possibility, and thus not sites of predetermination, but processes of negotiation. Viewing “crossroads” as a site of potential trickery, a place where miscommunication or dexterity can happen, and the lines between oppressor and oppressed are blurred, “crossroads” better helps to theorize conditions of “material impossibility,” as noted by Kandaswamy, such as those experienced by Black women as they encounter policies developed on contradictory notions of womanhood and racial(ized) citizenship.[77]

In terms of activism, a conception of “crossroads” in my view disrupts the conflation of intersectionality with multiplicity and thus with coalition, particularly because it cautions about potential disjunctures. For example, in the post-2016election feminist marches, activists and participants tended to use “intersectionality,” the coming together of race, class, and gender formations, as synonymous with the coming together across race, class, and gender. This conflation belied moments where certain groups of women were denied recognition, particularly Native women in the DC march. Not only were they often excluded from speeches, the positions organizers did give them occurred once marchers dispersed from the listening area, a situation which also appeared as silencing. A notion of the simultaneity of conjunction and disjuncture within the metaphor of crossroads has the potential to caution against potentials for miscommunication within coalitions.

Conclusion

For Black feminist ethnographers, an intersectional social position provides a research standpoint to consider the complexity, contradictions, and contingencies within social formations. Black feminist ethnographies consider the simultaneity of conjuncture and disjuncture—where conjunctures refer to the coming together of common histories, cultural formations, and social processes at moments that can be either immediate or long term, and disjunctures refer to the production of differentiation, disconnect, and displacement between subjects, knowledges, expectations, and conceptions/experiences of time and space.

In my view, more than the metaphor of intersection, the twin concepts of conjuncture and disjuncture convey the complexity of living between contradictory forces (coming together and splitting apart). The African diasporic heuristic of “crossroads” more than the Cartesian notion of the intersection of straight lines signifies the miscommunication, equivocation, and confusion, yet dexterity, manipulation, and mediation of outsider-within positions, particularly the blurring of the lines between oppressor and oppressed. Ethnographies, with their focus on social processes and the complexities of the everyday, make it possible to also blur the lines between what Hancock characterizes as two separate projects of intersectional approaches: making visible the (silenced) experiences of women of color and exploring “categorical complexities” extant in the simultaneity of oppressions.

This preliminary inquiry into the theoretical contributions and innovations of Black feminist ethnography yields even more questions for investigation. How has the field of Black feminist ethnography grown since McClaurin’s publication, and how is intersectionality approached within those ethnographies? What multiple Black feminist anthropologies exist, produced not just by scholars within the United States, but also by scholars across the African Diaspora? And considering Mullings’s question about political implications, how have Black feminist ethnographies shown the interplay between activism and intersectional theorizing, and engaged in what the Combahee River Collective called a “very definite revolutionary task”[78]? As Irma McClaurin notes in her poem, Black feminist anthropologists are “saying ‘We are here to stay— deal with us’:/but with justice, with equality, and above all else/ with Respect./ But deal you must.”[79]