Intersectionality and /as Abolition

This talk weaves together two struggle concepts with intertwined genealogies that originate in Black feminist praxis: intersectionality and abolition.

Already in a co-constitutive relation, intersectionality and abolition confront us with imperatives to collective action in a world on fire. As Black feminist abolitionists argue, abolition must be intersectional if it is to be liberatory(1).

Abolition aims not only to demolish existing systems, institutions and relations, but also, to make them obsolete(2) by awakening the collective consciousness and cultivating our political imagination; and through self-organisation, the creation of alternative institutions, and the transformation of interpersonal and collective relations(3).

The presentist, prefigurative praxis of abolition requires us to imagine 'chang[ing] everything'(4). This is not only about imagining the world 'after' abolition, but also what we will need to build now, in and through collective struggle, so that abolition is conceivable.

If construed in abolitionist terms, intersectionality does some of that transitional work. The provisionality of the concept of intersectionality(5) asks something similar of us with regard to the deconstruction of categorial essentialisms and the transcendence of currently hegemonic ways of thinking and mobilising around identities to contest and dismantle interlocking systems of oppression.

Synthesising an intersectional abolitionism with an abolitionist intersectionality, the questions arise:

• How can we think and act in the present against and beyond state control, discipline, punishment, violence and logics of confinement and borders; but also with and beyond ascribed identities, often reclaimed through social movements, which we may even cherish and hold dear to us?(6)
• How, with abolition as the horizon of intersectionality, can we reconceive our subjectivities, coalesce our movements, and reignite our collective struggles? 

Notes

1. Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Ritchie, Abolition. Feminism. Now (Hamish Hamilton)
2. Angela Y. Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003)
3. See, amongst others: Mariame Kaba, We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket, 2021); Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba, No More Police: A Case for Abolition (New York: New Press, 2022); Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober, Abolition Feminisms, Vol. I: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice (Chicago: Haymarket 2022);
4. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition.” Socialism 2022 Conference, Chicago, https://www.youtube.com/live/hyBEf8VPfuY?feature=share. 
5. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1991, 1241–99. 
6. Bey, Black Trans Feminism. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).