Important Dates

Lyn Ossome

As part of the Lecture Series "African FeminismS Past and Present" the Junior Research Group "Sexualities, Political Orders and Revolutions in Africa: into the heart of Tunisia, Ethiopia and Sudan" invites everyone to a lecture by Lyn Ossome, Associate Professor of Political Studies, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

The lecture's topic will be "Intersectionality from the Margins: Historical Subjects/Subjectivation in the Global South". Discussants at this event will be Prof. Dr. Stefan Ouma, Chairholder of Economic Geography at UBT and Dr. Hibist Wemdemu Kassa, Associate with the Centre for African Studies and Land Reform in Democracy in South Africa, Universit of Cape Town.

Intersectionality theory has come closest to a response to the question regarding how identities function in relation to multiple injuries. Its paradigmatic utility, however, remains in question, precisely because it is built upon a presumption that stabilises certain forms of oppression for Black women (the triad of race, gender and class), without illuminating how it is that Black women find themselves permanently located at that intersection. Stated differently, in intersectional theory, Black women cease to be historical – and thus political – subjects. What is left out of our purview are the specific historical trajectories through which women emerge (or which demand women’s appearance) at the ‘intersection’ as either female, or Black, or both. It is, in other words, not enough to simply highlight discrimination, but rather to also ask what it is that different forms of discrimination do at particular historical conjunctures. Drawing on these concerns, this lecture examines the limitations of intersectionality theory in relation to historical subjects whose identities and injuries have been shaped by colonialism and its legacies in the global south.

Lecture by Lyn Ossome, Associate Professor of Political Studies, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Intersectionality from the Margins: Historical Subjects/Subjectivation in the Global South"

• 27 October 2022 2-4 pm (CET), RWI, S58
  
• For the Zoom Meeting please follow the link - Meeting ID 679 4833 0883 - Passcode: 201 486
• Find the flyer here