Assembled Development: Moving Beyond Intersectionality in Development Studies

Author: Kramer Paul  

Publisher: St Antony's International Review

E-ISSN: 1746-4528|10|2|168-191

ISSN: 1746-451X

Source: St Antony's International Review, Vol.10, Iss.2, 2015-02, pp. : 168-191

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Abstract

Feminists originally deployed intersectionality to expose the deep disjunctures between white and black women's lives in late twentieth-century America. Notably, Patricia Hill Collins argued that any analysis of gender or sexuality must also account for that category's relationship with the distinctive historical and cultural implications of race. More recently, Development Scholars and practitioners have begun incorporating gender and sexuality, as well as geographic, racial, ethnic, and other oppressions, into 'matrices of domination' that purportedly allow us to understand and plan for difference. But intersectionality is not without its shortcomings. The subject is forced to reside within a pre-existing site of difference, wherein a specifically Western framework governs non-Western ontologies. Using a range of examples to explore the pros and cons of the intersectional approach, this article argues that the Deleuzian notion of 'assemblage' provides a more sophisticated means of understanding marginalized subjectivities. In so doing, it considers a future wherein assemblage supplants intersectionality as the preferred method of involving development-subjects in their own interventions.