I found in Professor Lois McNay’s keynote abstract an optimism on behalf of feminist theories and their potential to retrieve a more direct connection to the experiences of (gender) injustice that are, arguably, the basis of any kind of feminist thinking or political action. At the core of this vision is the reminder that critical theories, for them to meaningfully be called critical, must aim to “theorise from experience”: to attend to and analyse real-life negative experiences of – depending on your theoretical framework – confusion, suffering, injury, injustice, misrecognition, oppression or marginalisation. The hope for recovery presupposes, of course, an antecedent loss. It suggests a development of critical theory in a direction where the dynamics between theory and real-life practices have started to function in a problematic way. If the raison d’être of critical theories is their “rootedness in a critical unmasking of oppression”, then the move away from paying careful attention to experiences of oppression becomes an internal flaw, something that can be subjected to a form of immanent critique.
Working on a PhD project on feminist intersectionality theories, I have seen how a similar problematic dynamic of theory and practice plays out in one of the dominant strands of feminist theory and activist practice today: the field of intersectionality studies. My contribution to the exploring of the potentials and challenges of McNay’s vision will therefore be to reflect on the aim of theorising from experience in light of some examples from my ongoing research on feminist intersectionality theory. What I am particularly interested in exploring here is the effects of the position that intersectionality theory has as, on the one hand, being for or on behalf of marginalised or oppressed subjects, in the sense that intersectionality theories are aiming to provide tools for understanding these subjects’ experiences of marginalisation or oppression; and, on the other hand, intersectionality’s status as, arguably, the paradigmatic approach to the analysis of both identity formation and oppressive societal structures in contemporary feminist theoretical and political discourse. What happens when a theoretical formation that has an explicit goal of theorising from marginalised subjects’ experience becomes paradigmatic?