Intersectionality has become a buzzword in the past decade not only in North America, but also increasingly in Europe. Reflections on intersecting systems of oppression have a long tradition in feminist thought, particularly in Black feminist thought and in Lesbian Theory. The European debates and appropriations of intersectionality as a research perspective have been marked by the exclusion of ex-colonial researchers perspectives as well as a general project to cut off intersectionality from its theory traditional roots in Critical Race Theory and Feminist Thought. A majority of scientific studies and demonstrations in Europe have then proceeded to make intersectionality a positivist tool to examine and administrate populations. In this conference we not only want to emphasize and reconnect to the critical tradition of the thought that has brought up intersectionality as a research perspective.
Furthermore and in order to go beyond a simple stating of the mistranslations of intersectionality to European contexts, we wish to gather recent studies and works that already present more promising translations of intersectionality. In the past years we observe that what distinguishes today’s reflections on the intersection of race, gender and sexuality is the place that religion has started to take in today’s expressions of racism and also in phenomena that have been described under the term of homonationalism. We wish to understand in which ways positionality is key to critical intersectional research? How do different historical and political contexts in Europe challenge the intersectional critique and how can we adapt it?
Starting from the productive tension between the concepts of agency and resistance, we also would like to find alternatives to the Universalist and humanist premises of the dominant concept of agency. Especially in the realms of race, religion and sexuality, the ascribed or denied agency of religious or sexual practices brings about immediate issues on the ways in which the modern subjectivity is defined and the difference between agency and resistance is discussed.