Embracing and Utilizing Intersectionality: Third Wave Feminists and Runaway Slaves

I at first struggled to understand why two readings written in response to the white traditionalism of second-wave feminism were assigned the same week as an article analyzing newspaper advertisements.  While Tom Bell and the other runaway slaves that David Waldstreicher describes lived in eighteenth century America, they embraced an intersectionality of identity, a principle upheld by the third-wave feminist theories of Evelyn Higginbotham and Elisa Brown.  Using print advertisements in newspapers as primary sources, Waldstreicher argues that a number of runaway slaves exercised agency as self-fashioners and confidence men, transforming their identity by shifting their appearance and character.  They defied the boundaries of race, gender, and class.  Waldstreicher clarifies, however, that this agency existed mainly in the Mid-Atlantic in the eighteenth century before slavery and servitude became racialized and the connections between race and class solidified.  Runaway slaves utilized the loose intersections between race, class, and gender to gain freedom. 

            Waldstreicher’s runaway slaves corroborate the arguments Brown and Higginbotham craft around identity intersectionality.  Responding to the failure to mention the significance of race to womanhood in second wave feminist literature, Higginbotham describes the role of race as a “metalanguage” integral to the formation of all other facets of the American identity.  She succinctly states, “The representation of both gender and class is colored by race.”  Gender does not exist in a vacuum outside of race, class, and a number of other factors.  Consequently, she urges traditional feminists and historians to embrace the intersecting relations between all of these factors.  Only at this intersection will historians be able to analyze the complexities of the American experience. 

            In response to fears of too much of a recent focus on differences among women, Brown similarly asserts that highlighting differences not necessarily lead to confusion, chaos, and misunderstandings.  She provides a number of vivid analogies to feminist studies, such as the work of jazz artists who create their own individual art to make a collective song.  She additionally suggests that historians should steer away from using the experiences of white middle class women as the female gendered norm.   Waldstreicher’s analysis of confidence men and the historiographical arguments of Higginbotham and Brown embrace the intersectionality of race, gender, and class as a means of subverting societal norms and practices.