NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 145epistemic inquiry cannot begin from differences in subjectivity; it must instead
examine the conditions that generate difference. Relatedly, Puar (2012) notes that
in Crenshaw’s original depiction of intersectionality, the emphasis was not on the
stability of an interlocking grid provided by race/gender/class, but rather on the
movement of persons between multiple positions.
13 One of the risks of dispensing with the intersectional subject altogether, Puar
says, is overlooking that for “some bodies — we can call them statistical outliers,
or those consigned to premature death, or those once formerly considered use-
less bodies or bodies of excess — discipline and punish may well still be a primary
apparatus of power” (2012, 63). In other words, for Puar, intersectional subjects
still exist to the degree that disciplinary practices do. But the issue at hand is not
simply whether, and for whom, power works discursively or affectively (if in fact
they should be strictly distinguished). It is also whether, how, and to what degree
experience sticks or congeals, and how it does so differentially. The task is to ad-
dress embodied beings who both feel and think, and whose experiences substan-
tially affect them, without reducing them to discursive constructions, on the one
hand, or free- floating individuals, on the other. How might such beings be ad-
dressed? If the term subject implies a discursive construction, the more phenom-
enological term body- subject insists on a being’s material reality. But body- subject
also seems to presuppose stability. However, a body- subject can be thought of as
an agentic assemblage, whose assembling is not generic and universal but spe-
cific and multiple. Lisa Blackman, for example, adopts a pragmatic conception
of subjectivity to address the conditions that allow it to manage some sense of
what William James called its “singularity in the face of multiplicity” (2008, 138).
She sees the subject as “neither fully open nor closed” (2012, 189). Thus, body-
subjects actively hold together; they are distinctly situated in space and time,
while also potentially distributed across these, joined to other bodies and objects
through biotechnological practices, affective forces, and communication tech-
nologies, and open to further configuring and refiguring. They also hold traces
of experience that in some way provide a condition for future experience.
14 An assemblage is a combination of parts that can be refigured, or refigure them-
selves, into other combinations, as opposed to an organismic whole whose parts
cannot be rearranged. Applied to the concerns of intersectionality, assemblage
theory does not map the body- subject onto vantage points rooted in socially
determined locations, or embodied identities that are stable. Rather, it examines
the movement and rearrangement of elements that, in specific temporal and spa-
tial contexts, constitute the racialized, gendered, or sexualized body. Assemblage
theories can help conceptualize the embodied mind as a becoming that is con-
stituted only through its interactions in the world. As agentic assemblages, em-
bodied minds are not essential, fixed, or universal. Rather, they have a relational
ontology, shaped in and through experience with other body- minds, objects, and
entities in the world.
15 See Price and Shildrick 2002 for a related discussion of touch.