24 RüdigerKunow
practiceswith theintentionofpresentingevidencefortheintense,often
polemical social and cultural work performed by matters biological in
multiplesubjectpositionswhereequallymultipleaxesofinequalityand
disparitydwell.
SubjectsinBiologicalDifference(RaceandGender)
Speaking as I am doing here of American Cultural Studies will take
us to many of the disciplinary quandaries with which American Studies
was also concerned. Just as the signifier "America" is troubled, so has
"culture" also lost much of its former compelling force. Instead, culture
and cultural practices are oftentimes seen as "produced within, inserted
into, and operat[ing] in the everyday life of human beings and social
formations." Against this background, research perspectives inside this
vast field are particularly interesting which explore "how power
infiltrates, contaminates, limits, and empowers the possibilities that
people have to live their lives.. ." (Grossberg 8, 29). And in this
context,intersectionality hasin recentyearsestablisheditselfasafocus
term for a multi-dimensional research on social and cultural disparities.
Evenwhile itis astill anemerging theoreticalconcept,intersectionality
already now brings in all the big names of recent cultural critique and
American Studies: gender, race, class, sexual orientation, migrants; in
other words, all the "wretched of the earth," to quote Frantz Fanon's
famousbooktitle.
"Intersectionality meanstheexaminationofrace,sex,class,national
origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in
various settings" (Delgado and Stefancic 51). Of course,
intersectionality in this original format (developed especially by
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw at New York University) does not
explicitlyspeakofandtothebiologyofhumanbeings.Instead,itscans
the social and cultural manifold for practices of discrimination and
oppression for which human biology has served as a basis or rather an
alibi. Highlighting how some people are never "just" poor, minority,
sick, or disabled but sick and poor, minority and a woman,
intersectionality is also an important perspective for the argument
unfolded here. It solicits an investigation of sites and constellations
when, where and how, multiple practices of inequity and oppression
intersect with the multiple identities of individuals or collectivities. For