The Invisible ‘And’

Abstract

Basing itself on Kristie Dotson’s outline and critique of the assumptions necessary to justify the avoidance of intersectional questions, this paper will develop an additional line of criticism separate to the one Dotson provides. In doing so, I will construct the meta-philosophical concept of the “invisible ‘And’ ” to reconciliate the failure of the disaggregation assumption with the seemingly prominent existence of singular gender investigations in feminist theory. The “invisible ‘And’ ” is my claim that professedly “gender-only” (singular) inquiries are in reality “gender-and” (intersectional) ones, a fact which remain hidden due to the propensity of dominant social perspectives to falsely pass as neutral and subsequently fail to be mentioned.