52 CHAPTER TWO
not bifurcated but rather multiple social locations, complicated by race,
class, sexuality, and other relations of power (Collins 1990, 2000; Cren-
shaw 1989).^9 The result of intersectionality is heteroglossic; the local and
situated character of knowledge results in the multiple and conflicting na-
ture of epistemic truths. Further, inequalities generate not only epistemic
differences but also cognitive and affective dissonance (Hemmings 2012),
involving a sense of the fractured, partial, and relational character of per-
ception and knowing.^10
These literatures also reveal the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reduc-
ing epistemic variation, embodied difference, and dissonance to prefigured
categories of the subject. Standpoint theories challenge universal ideas of
knowledge, but they risk essentializing gendered subjectivity (such as a
“women’s standpoint”), which would reify the differences between, while
concealing the diversities within, genders. Intersectionality theories are
similarly criticized for thinking “only in terms of existing sociopolitical cate-
gories, especially gender and race,” and for codifying identities (Bost 2008,
340; see also McCall 2005).^11 At their best, these frameworks do not reify
subject positions but acknowledge the mobility of knowers and knowledge
positions (Puar 2012).^12 Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledges
argues not only for the epistemic but also the ontological multiplicity of
knowing subjects. In her account vision is shaped not only by the social
locations of gendered, raced, classed individuals but also by the material
capacities and technologies that compose knowing body- subjects. She sees
knowers as cyborgian assemblages of organic and nonorganic matter (and
meaning) that can change. The result, for her, is the material- discursive
specificity, and therefore partiality, of all knowledge. She writes of “hetero-
geneous multiplicities,” which are “simultaneously salient and incapable of
being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists” (586).
As feminist and queer phenomenologists have argued, power relations
are also felt in varied bodily boundaries, perceptual tendencies, and orien-
tations toward the physical and social world. In circumstances of inequality
the result is not merely experiential pluralism but dissonance — revealed, for
example, in the “time and work [it takes] to inhabit a lesbian body” (Ahmed
2006, 564) or the feelings of shame generated by racialization (Alcoff 2006).
The felt relationality of bodies — their ability to affect and be affected — also
renders them vulnerable before or below consciousness or self- awareness