Intersectionality, Strategic Essentialism, Third Spaces, and Charmed Circles: Using Dead Ladies’ Garbage to Explain Today’s America

Summary

Audre Lorde wrote, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." And yet, certain identities and struggles are forefronted every day. In 1903, middle-class women founded Wiawaka Holiday House in New York’s Adirondacks for "working girls" to have an affordable vacation away from unhealthy factories and cities. Using strategic essentialism and Third Space, a 1920s assemblage from Wiawaka demonstrates the deeply dependent relationships among race, class, and gender that women at the site negotiated. How these intersectional identities were expressed was shaped by the Charmed Circle – the bounding of intersections of acceptability -- itself a product of these intersections. Struggles around race, class, and gender continue today. Using Wiawaka, I describe how archaeology can be used to engage people in an understanding of the importance and challenges of an intersectional understanding of America, and how that can lead to positive change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Intersectionality as Emancipatory Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 675