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sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Authors

Samantha Keng

Abstract

This essay explores how Claire Kim’s idea of racial triangulation complicates intersectionality in its classic sense. Specifically, I argue that the racial triangulation of Asian Americans introduces new dilemmas for intersectional frameworks by destabilizing analyses of subject formation and understandings of privilege and oppression. How, for example, can Asian American complicity in anti Blackness be incorporated into understandings of identity and its mobilization? By expanding discussions of race beyond binary thinking, racial triangulation both poses new questions and creates new possibilities in the realm of intersectional theory. Especially given today’s racial landscape, this paper attempts to engage in the critical work of addressing obstacles to BlackAsian solidarity and imagining ways of theorizing that prove congruent to lived experience.

Publication Date

2018

COinS