Quote: “The concept of intersectionality has everything to do with the interdisciplinary ethos of contemporary feminist theory…As we will see in the chapters to come, contemporary feminists pay particular attention to parallel, reinforcing, and crisscrossing routes of intersectionality across gender, sexual orientation, disability, ability, class, race, postcolonialism, and environmentalism” (Parker 187). 

Comment: This quote stuck out to me as, throughout our class discussions, we have talked about how different modes of literary criticism can apply to various texts and even more than one type of critique can be utilized on the same piece. From a feminist perspective, there is value in the multifaceted nature of women and how we interact with different parts of ourselves – there isn’t one right way to be a feminist or a woman; there are layers and connections to such a wide variety of life. This quote aligns with all how in literature, there might be the same type of variety that instead of pinning down one lens of critique or one right way to grasp the concept, there is a multitude of possibilities. I felt the same idea was applied in the poem “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman. We all have different ideals about what it means to be American or what democracy entails, but we can no longer define it through one historical lens and avoid the glaring subjectivity that comes from people having so much more than one characteristic to represent us. 

Question: I might wonder how some of our more traditional literary critics might feel about intersectionality and contemporary feminism. For instance, structuralists think the author and the background context shouldn’t apply to the written work or new criticism where we shouldn’t try to get into the author’s head. Is there a way when taking the methods highlighted in feminist theory where those types of inquiries can interfere with the piece?