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Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on the use of intersectionality by feminist student activists at the University of the Witwatersrand. I explore the conditions or viability for intersectionality to queer friendship and solidarity in activist spaces.

Paper long abstract:

I observe that the various bodies of feminist student activists at the University of the Witwatersrand use intersectionality ad a tool with which to address questions of solidarity and difference, since 2015 when Fees Must Fall at Wits entered the national scale. Some African feminist and queer scholars have offered intersectionality as a tool or method that bears the potential of rupturing the category 'woman', or perhaps queering feminist spaces that might otherwise be homogenising and essentialising. Under these conditions, solidarity and 'safety' comes at the cost of silencing desire. The use of intersectionality has coincided with the ways that the student movement has more generally involved the use of visual tactics or methods. The body, and more specifically, the queer body (and not uncontested) has been one of the visual idioms of feminist protest, coming to circulate as the principle or practice of intersectionality. My questions here press both the method/ tactic of intersectionality here related through the display of the queer body as the scene of political assembly, as well as the viability of encounters of friendship, intimacy and desire within this space.