Vortrag von Dr. Stella Sandford, Kingston University, London

In the humanities and the social sciences, and in political and activist circles, we have become
used to the idea of ‘intersectionality’. ‘Intersectional’ analysis attempts to acknowledge and
understand the relations between different axes of oppression and discrimination in the effort
to avoid ‘race’ and ‘sex’, for example, being seen as ‘mutually exclusive categories of
experience and analysis,’ as Kimberle Cranshaw first put it in 1989. But this does not mean that
the different histories of different types of discrimination are not important, and part of
understanding these different histories and recognising their contemporary manifestations
involves understanding the different histories of the concepts of race and sex. In this talk I will
discuss some aspects of the different histories of ‘race’ and ‘sex’, focussing on their place in
the natural history tradition and within this, specifically, the idea of the ‘races’ and ‘sexes’ of
plants. This will allow us to contest the claim in some feminist philosophy that ‘sex’ (or
‘gender’) and ‘race’ can be understood ‘analytically’ in equivalent terms and allow us to ask
one very difficult question in particular: can a trans-inclusive feminism affirm a biological
concept of sex? And if so, how?