From metaphor to materiality: grounding intersectional legal thought

ABSTRACT

When I first decided to investigate an intersectional approach to frame forces operating in cases of indigenous women affected by land conflicts, I had not envisioned that the metaphorical aspect would be such a crucial part of operationalizing the concept. Since its first formulation, the term intersectionality has been attached to the image of intersecting roads, and still today when searching for online videos for pedagogical purposes, the results show cars driving towards people standing on crossroads to explain the meaning. Intersecting roads, however, also emerged in my fieldwork in a literal maner. The passage from metaphor to materiality of the concept of intersectionality, I argue, can affect the identitarian logic that predominates in most proclaimed legal intersectional approaches. The paper proposes to bring intersectionality to materiality by re-imagining the metaphor of intersectionality through an ethnographic approach to indigenous peoples’ land conflicts in La Pampa, Argentina.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• new materialisms
• property
• indigenous peoples

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Margaret Davies, Law Unlimited (Routledge 2017) 7.

2 Sarah Keenan, ‘Bringing the Outside(r) in: Law's Appropriation of Subversive Identities’ (2013) 64 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 299, 300.

3 The Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center has approved this research study and the research activities conducted are considered Exempt. IRB #: 2018-9585.

4 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Basic Books Inc. 1983) 215.

5 Doreen Massey, ‘Questions of Locality’ (1993) 78 Geography 142, 148.

6 Ibid 144.

7 Kimberlee Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’ (1991) 43 Stanford Law Review 1241.

8 Mieke Bal and Sherry Marx-MacDonald, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (University of Toronto Press 2002) 11.

9 Joanne Conaghan, ‘Intersectionality and the Feminist Project in Law’ in Emily Grabham et al. (eds), Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location (Routledge-Cavendish 2008) 22.

10 Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (U of Nebraska Press 2016) 79.

11 Vivian May, ‘Intersectionality’ in Catherine M Orr and Ann Braithwaite (eds), Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies (Routledge 2011) 156.

12 Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (1989) 140 University of Chicago Legal Forum 139, 143.

13 Carastathis (n 10) 81.

14 Crenshaw (n 12) 140.

15 Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, ‘Reframing the Law: Derrida, Women's Studies, Intersectionality’ (2017) 7 philoSOPHIA 79.

16 Crenshaw (n 12) 149.

17 Carastathis (n 10) 90.

18 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Flesh of the Law: Material Legal Metaphors’ (2016) 43 Journal of Law and Society 45, 47.

19 Massey (n 5) 145.

20 John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government (Routledge 1887).

21 Sarah Keenan, Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging (Routledge 2014) 31.

22 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (Routledge 2014) 3.

23 Carastathis (n 10) 151.

24 Sumi Cho et al., ‘Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis’ (2013) 38 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 785, 795.

25 Gill Jagger, ‘The New Materialism and Sexual Difference’ (2015) 40 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 321, 322.

26 Ibid 326.

27 Joanne Conaghan, ‘Feminism, Law and Materialism: Reclaiming the “Tainted” Realm’ in Vanessa E. Munro, and Margaret Davies (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory (Routledge 2013) 46.

28 Ibid 46.

29 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007) 212.

30 Ibid 212.

31 Ibid 215.

32 Ibid 215.

33 Jasbir Puar, ‘“I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess”: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics’ (2013) 8 Meritum, revista de Direito da Universidade FUMEC 381.

34 Nicholas Blomley and Joel Bakan, ‘Spacing out: Towards a Critical Geography of Law’ (1992) 30 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 661.

35 Kate Green, ‘Being Here- What a Woman Can Say about Land Law’ in Anne Bottomley (ed), Feminist Perspectives on the Foundational Subjects of Law (Cavendish Publishing Limited 1996).

36 Nicholas Blomley, Territory. New Trajectories in Law (New York: Routledge, 2023) 68.

37 Margaret Davies, Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (Routledge-Cavendish 2007) 26.

38 Ibid 37.

39 Davies (n 1) 146.

40 Davies (n 1) 152.

41 Davies (n 1) 152, 153.

42 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (John Wiley & Sons 2013) 120.

43 Keenan (n 21) 44.

44 Keenan (n 21) 44.

45 Silvina Ramirez, Matriz Constitucional, Estado Intercultural y Derecho De Los Pueblos Indígenas (Ad Hoc 2015) 78.

46 Ibid 266, 267.

47 Article 1897, 1898 and 1899. Civil and Comercial Code of Argentina, October 1st, 2014.

48 Maria Eugenia Comerci, Estrategias en espacios de borde (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa 2018) 14.

49 Keenan (n 21) 40.

50 I. and E. Field Interview, November 2019.

51 Keenan (n 2) 304.

52 Leticia Barrera and Sergio Latorre, ‘Ethnography, Bureaucracy and Legal Knowledge in Latin American State Institutions: Law's Material and Technical Dimensions’ in Rachel Sieder, Karina Ansolabehere and Tatiana Alfonso Sierra (eds) Routledge handbook of law and society in Latin America (Routledge 2019) 103.

53 Keenan (n 21) 95.

54 Keenan (n 21) 120.