Gender, Race, and Other Consequential Categories: Experiments in Intersectional Archaeology

The notion of intersectionality—conceiving identity categories such as race, age, class, and gender as covalent and entangled—is neither new nor new to archaeology. Archaeologists have long been paying simultaneous attention to multiple vectors of identity. Yet intersectionality’s agenda seems radical, even as it becomes mainstreamed within scholarly and popular contemplations of power. Within archaeology, intersectionality joins a host of postmodern approaches to categorical plurality that treat structural identity categories as fluid and multivalent. More established approaches, such as hybridity, postcoloniality, feminism, and critical theory, are compelling but have their own limitations. Does intersectionality offer something different? Can archaeology offer anything to the study of intersectionality? Is any archaeology of violence, privilege, and embodied identity intersectional, regardless of context or intent? Or does intersectionality demand a politically disruptive agenda? Is it even appropriate to apply this framework outside of the black/feminist/capitalist contexts in which it originated? With these questions in mind, session papers will take a critical, experimental approach to intersectionality within a variety of archaeological contexts.