Love Letter from a Critic, Or Notes on the Intersectionality Wars -- talk by Jennifer Nash '01

"Love Letter from a Critic, or Notes on the Intersectionality Wars" follows the word “critic” around the black feminist archive, endeavoring to trace its myriad meanings by asking: Who are intersectionality’s critics, and what precisely makes those scholars’ works critical?  Why has the term “critic” come to circulate and proliferate around intersectionality in recent years? Why are black feminists so deeply invested in exposing the “critic”?   The talk explores the affective lure of the term critic, engaging how the term “critic” has become the centerpiece of the intersectionality wars that black feminism has found itself mired in, and asking how the constant invocation of the malicious critic as a pernicious outsider becomes a crucial strategy through which black feminists reassert their territorial hold on intersectionality.

WGS is thrilled to host a public talk by alumna Jennifer Nash. Nash graduated from Harvard in 2001 with an A.B. in Women’s Studies and subsequently received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2004 and her Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Nash is currently an Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on black sexual politics, black feminist theories, black motherhood, and intersectionality and the debates around it. Her newest book, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, was released by Duke University Press in January 2019.

She is also the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014) which was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. She also edited the anthology Gender: Love (MacMillan, 2016). Her articles have been published in journals including GLQ, Social Text, Feminist Theory, Feminist Studies, American Quarterly, and Signs.