The intimacy of intersectionality: annual lecture, 16th June 2021

Thank you to Northumbria University’s Social and Cultural Geography Research Group for inviting me to give the annual lecture (last year, but honestly, what’s time in an apocalypse?!).

I plan to use this lecture to work through some questions I have about embodiment and geographies of erasure. I’ve been thinking a lot about Kimberle Crenshaw saying that ‘intersectionality was always a lived reality before it became a term’ (cited in Adewunmi, 2014). This erasure of Black women (from laws and institutions of power) is so intimately implicated in our everyday interactions. We are constantly being asked to work with and beside people that can find ease in worlds that are predicated on our erasure. And I’m *tired*: I can’t keep explaining the fact of this erasure to people who can participate in willful (and often explicitly hostile) ignorance; especially as we have no choice but to feel that erasure so keenly. It’s another way that our embodied knowledges are denied and undermined.

So I’m working on how to dwell in our embodied realities: what does it mean to reject living conditions predicated on our absence. I’m not sure whether these thoughts can fit within the constraints set out by academic institutions. But I’m looking forward to working through these questions and concerns with Dr. Pat Noxolo and the wider audience.