“Intersectionality” is a tremendously important notion – it’s the insight that every demographic abstraction is leaky as hell, and that no identity category captures us without remainder, and that power never operates uniformly, but adapts itself to every facet of our complexly textured lives. This means that any grounds we put forth for solidarity are going to risk hardening into something deceitful and procrustean, or even outright oppressive, if they don’t remain open to a sort of universalism. But [a universalism] that proceeds from the concrete particularities of the situation. This is a tricky point, because we also see universalist gestures being used as an excuse to ignore the situations we’re dealing with – “All Lives Matter” being an easily recognizable example of sham universalism. This isn’t an intersectional and genuinely universalist gesture; it’s a retreat, a way of emptying a real struggle of its content, so as to make it more palatable to those who don’t want to be disturbed.