A Thousand Tiny Intersections: Linguisticism, Feminism, Racism and Deleuzian Becomings

Inspired by Deleuze’s becoming-woman, new feminist materialists like Rosi Braidotti have offered a way of reading the sexed body that moves away from the linguistic, Lacanian one offered by Judith Butler. By proposing a monism in which the mind is an idea of the body whereas the body is the object of the mind, as Spinoza put it, they study what Grosz calls the “functioning of differential forces” as they produce mind and body in their envelopment. This new take on difference is mostly played out in theories of sexual difference, for instance when Grosz rewrites ‘a thousand tiny sexes’ of Deleuze and Guattari. But at the same time it is always already at work in Deleuzian concepts of race (as Saldanha has already done this when talking of ‘a thousand tiny races’). Following Deleuze and Guattari we can claim that race and sex are felt in every feeling. They never cease and never finish to exist in every becoming. This then we can conceptualize as ‘a thousand tiny intersections’. It is a rethinking of what is often referred to as ‘intersectionality’, i.e. the inextricable togetherness of what we consider to be various dimensions of human difference and social practices. Intersectionality then concerns in what way the race and sex immanently felt always already proposes a new praxis of the body.