CMNS 50th Speakers' Series: Sarah Banet Weiser
About the talk:
In this talk, I will discuss the various histories, practices, and uses of the political and cultural concept of intersectionality. I then turn to a contemporary cultural use of intersectionality, where the concept has been commodified and branded. Despite the fact that the concept was conceived of by Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other Black feminists as an explicit intervention to think through the ways that Black women are left without a dominant narrative through and around which to organize their lives within the power structures of the US, I argue the consumerist branding of intersectionality has a core logic of whiteness. The move to brand intersectionality is a move that does not examine nor challenge structural relations of power when it comes to race and gender, but is rather a strategy that narrowly focuses on identity as a way to build a brand and to accumulate both economic and cultural capital. Branding intersectionality functions to not only erase history, but also to shed a light on singular acts of racism—by a cop, a celebrity, a social media influencer—without ever interrogating how these “singular” acts are merely one in centuries of unquestioned acts of racial discrimination that have been sedimented into law, policy, and everyday life.
About the speaker:
Sarah Banet-Weiser's teaching and research interests include gender in the media, citizenship, consumer culture, popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012) and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018), and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2019-2020, she had a regular column on popular feminism in the Los Angeles Review of Books.