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Abstract
Intersectionality has been a debated concept in recent critical studies. It has been both hailed as the most important contribution to gender studies, and criticized for being an academic buzzword. In our chapter, however, we aim to focus on the potential productive power intersectionality might still have, for example, when critically applied to the narratives of cultural homogeneity and the ‘ordinariness’ of the majority. The narrative of Nordic societal homogeneity is often constructed as unitary and unchanging – the sphere of the ordinary. The white Nordic majority has become the norm against which the other, presented as in need of emancipation, is defined, read and interpreted. In such thinking, both ‘the majority’ and ‘the margin’ are stabilized constructs, even though they both remain inherently multifaceted and ambivalent. We turn the intersectional lens to the ‘homogenous commonplace’ by discussing on which conditions intersectionality could be turned towards the majority, or ‘the ordinary’. After that, we discuss intersectionality ‘in commonplace action’, by outlining a case study: the explicitly intersectional politics of the Feminist Party in Finland, founded in 2016.
What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary, self-evident and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena such as diasporic cuisine, pet adoption narratives, Prairie writing, romance between stepsiblings, the program of a political party, and everyday shopping in poetry. The book argues that by engaging with that which is perceived as ordinary we also gain understanding of how otherness becomes defined and constituted. The volume seeks new ways to access that which might lie in-between or beyond the opposition between exploitation and emancipation, and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory to create new ways of knowing which grow out of the ordinary.
What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary, self-evident and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena such as diasporic cuisine, pet adoption narratives, Prairie writing, romance between stepsiblings, the program of a political party, and everyday shopping in poetry. The book argues that by engaging with that which is perceived as ordinary we also gain understanding of how otherness becomes defined and constituted. The volume seeks new ways to access that which might lie in-between or beyond the opposition between exploitation and emancipation, and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory to create new ways of knowing which grow out of the ordinary.