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Intersectionality and Art



I am very honoured to have contributed a paper to the end of year Fine Art publication at Norwich University of the Arts. I explored the emancipatory potentia of intersectionality in artistic practice research, which I strive to apply in my teaching:


The term intersectionality was coined by American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, and since then it has been defined as a metaphor for understanding inequalities, particularly those involving race and sex (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 149). I would claim that intersectionality is not only a tool for identifying social obstacles, but it can also be a catalyst for positive empowerment, not only in the legal framework in which it was created, but also in the creative practice and research. If, as intersectionality proposes, a person’s experience is shaped by how individual characteristics intersect with social systems and frameworks, the experiential becomes a factor of primary consideration to understand how people relate to the world and each other.


Using intersectionality as an analytical tool with which practitioners can position their research would bring a level of understanding of the self, described by Rosi Braidotti as nomadic, dynamic and attached to multiple communities (Braidotti, 2011, p. 35). Through the experiential, artistic practices can achieve a level of plasticity and self-propelling potentia which can allow for the self to weave in and out of inflexible social frameworks. Being allowed to create and re-create the self in a permanent becoming is appropriate to the experiential nature of the artistic investigation, as Mika Hannula states, 'artistic research is a way in which experience reflectively changes itself' (Hannula et al, 2005, p. 39). As such, artistic research is different from other types of research as artists work from conditions rather than from inherited knowledges, positioning practice research towards the not yet known or the not yet articulable (Rogoff, 2021). Being comfortable with the undefined can multiply possibilities, allow for plurality of experiences, and promote plasticity, all important components of the cognitive processes of the artistic practice.


Practice, I claim, is learning-by-doing in an activity in which ‘politics of affirmation’ can become people’s own regenerative force (Braidotti, 2011). Braidotti’s stance on affirmation is not to be confused with positivism, which could be used as an artificial leveller that prevents change and does not discern between the different grades of localised precariousness in communities. Nor it is to be exercised instead of critique. Affirmation does not constitute an implicit agreement with the status quo and in fact it can be experienced as an alternative option that inserts a crack into models of accepted knowledges, thus creating new spaces for co-production of new knowledges.


Drawing on ideas of intersectionality and transforming these ideas through the works of Braidotti consolidated my feminist views and actions, empowered me and gave me permission to feel joyful, unapologetic and energised in my intersectional position of woman, lecturer, artist, immigrant, mother and researcher. Braidotti’s ethics of joy and affirmation is about developing tools to transform frustration into affirmative action, which can be seen as a philosophical and feminist way of re-valuing one’s presence and contribution in the world. My practice-based research is testament to politics of affirmation, because it empowers me and also provides a platform for critical analysis of the existing web of domination and power.


I see the spaces for teaching art as an extension of this transformation, in which, as I have understood and processed my own entanglement of overlapping experiences, I can create spaces for co-production of knowledges together with the students. It is my hope that academic artistic research can serve as an antidote to compartmentalisation and social division thanks to its way of integrating subject, researcher and process in the experiential as a form of advancing practice, because I believe that social struggles cannot be approached exclusively as political issues.



Braidotti, R., 2011. Nomadic Theory, New York: Columbia University Press.


Crenshaw, K., 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 139–67.


Hannula et al., 2005. Artistic Research, Theories, Methods and Practices. Helsinki: Academy of Fine Art.


Rogoff, I. 2021. Smart Culture Conference, organised by HKU and BAK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4XQa0XwbR0&t=1295s  Accessed 3rd March 2024




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