Deterritorializing intersectionality

This chapter critically engages Jennifer Nash’s claim that Black feminists must “deterritorialize” intersectionality. I suggest that Nash’s call to refuse Black feminism’s “proprietary relationship” to intersectionality is a vital contribution to a critical tradition that interrogates what Roderick Ferguson calls “the will to institutionality.” But the chapter also extends Nash’s arguments by insisting upon the ways that territory - an analytic deeply resonant with Native thinkers - poses complex political and conceptual challenges for Black feminists. I offer a reading of the territoriality of the university through the lens of the Morrill Act, showing that the university’s raced-gendered institutionality is an effect of settler colonial territorialization, and I argue that this lens ought to invite new ways of engaging Black and Native entanglements. Considering intersectionality through the lens of decolonized territory thus promotes precisely the “embrace of ideas of intimacy, proximity, vulnerability, and mutual regard” that Nash insists must guide Black feminists.