144 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
body, hence escaping the limitations of the local historical particularities of time,
place, and relationship. When we began with our experiences as women, how-
ever, we were always returning to ourselves and to each other as subjects in our
bodies” (1992, 89).
9 African American women, for example, have historically different experiences
than both white women and black men, and Patricia Hill Collins (1990, 2000)
argues that their collective knowledge offers a distinct epistemology. The concept
of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) resists essentializing body- subjects based
on sex/gender, and it allows for the inclusion of many possible configurations of
subjectivity. For these reasons, it has been the preferred framework for acknowl-
edging the differentiating effects of social relations and stratifications on individ-
uals and groups.
10 The embodied character of knowledge contests assumptions of rationalism and
scientific objectivity. If rationalism assumed a male subject, mainstream phe-
nomenology assumed a generic (male) body. Smith (1988) drew from Alfred
Schutz’s social phenomenology to situate embodiment in an institutional con-
text. Men could partake in abstract rationality, the dominant logic of the public
sphere, by relying on women’s labor to take care of bodily needs, while their loca-
tion in the domestic sphere meant that women had no choice but to attend to the
everyday, actual, practical constraints of living. Nancy Hartsock (1983) argued
from a Marxist- feminist perspective that men and women are differently posi-
tioned in relations of ruling through the gendered division of labor, which gives
them divergent experiences and vantage points. Iris Marion Young (1990) argued
that bodily engagement with the world enacts social differences, and thus there
is no generic, ungendered phenomenological body. Later feminist phenomenol-
ogists address the perceptual and embodied differences that not only gender but
also race and sexuality make (Ahmed 2006; Alcoff 2006).
11 The intersectional approach still involves the “homogenizing generalizations that
go with the territory of classification and categorization” (McCall 2005, 1783).
Intersectionality theory has the effect of securing body- subjects in stable (even
if intersected and multiple) social locations, which tend to be treated as both
sites and sources of identity. Critics challenge this framework in two respects.
First, they contest the assumption that the body provides a stable location for
experience. If the body is not passively inscribed by culture or securely located
by social relations, but rather is always materializing, the body does not provide
a ground for identity or subjectivity. Relatedly, they contest the reification of the
subject, which depends on “an epistemological capture of an ontologically irre-
ducible becoming” (Puar 2012, 54).
12 For example, in defending her work against criticisms of essentialism, Smith
(1992) insisted that embodied knowledge is not reducible to the subject. Instead,
she argued for an ontology of the actual, where the actual is what is prior to
the distinction of the subject and object. If the subject and object do not arrive
already delineated, but rather gain their specificity only within experience, then