最近，至少在某些女权主义圈子里，一种叫做交叉分析的东西非常流行。最近，我与一群朋友和熟人在晚餐时激烈的谈话让我想起了这个事实。作为对某人所说的话的回应，我试图说明，虽然对某些男人来说，世界是他们的，但有很多男人被世界无情地碾压着。我问，监狱里所有的有色人种怎么办?那些被无情的全球主义抛弃的阿巴拉契亚白人怎么办?

不耐烦的反应回来了。“但让我们把种族和阶级放在一起。种族和阶级是特殊情况。”好像黑人或白人工人阶级的问题不是男人的问题，至少不是男人本身的问题。“当然，”我的对话者急忙补充道，“交叉因素很重要。但现在我们谈论的不是种族或阶级，我们谈论的是性别。我们可以以后再谈这些事情，等我们搞清楚了性别问题。”

I fully understand the impulse behind intersectional thinking. It deserves at least one cheer, maybe two. That’s because intersectional approaches contain a somewhat begrudging and belated appreciation of human complexity. But intersectionality does not, in my mind, deserve three full-throated cheers. There is a very deep problem at the core of the intersectional way of thinking. And in my opinion, it’s high time to move beyond intersectional analyses and to make a sort of fresh start.

My starting thought is the observation that there is no man who is purely and only man. Similarly, there is no woman who is purely and only woman. Indeed, there is no human who is purely and only human. Man, woman, human is each arrayed in a sprawling configuration space, constituted by many distinct locations. The many locations in each configuration space correspond, respectively, to the manifold differences among man in his totality, among woman in her totality, and among the human in its totality. Because of this fact, the very idea that some distinguished point in configuration space represents the unmarked case of the male or the female or the human is unsustainable. Black man is still fully and equally man, as is working class man or gay man. Black man and gay man are no more and no less man than privileged wealthy straight white man. However privileged white male may parade or be paraded about in the world as if he alone is purely and only man, with no modifier to mark him as but a problematic subclass of man, he remains, in the end, just one configuration of man among other configurations of man.

The early feminist mistake was to tacitly sanction and endorse his parading. Doing so may have served certain political, ideological and theoretical aims. But it also distorted reality. The same is true of woman, in her vast array of alternative manifestations and configurations. Wherever we find woman in configuration space, she is still fully and equally woman. That is, lesbian woman is still woman fully and equally. Poor woman too is still woman. Disabled woman is still woman. The same goes for the human in general. All humans, no matter where located in configuration space, no matter what modifiers and markers we attach to them, still partake fully and equally of the human.

Once this much is granted, the intersectional approach is revealed for what it truly is. It is not a progressive advance over the non-intersectional feminism of earlier days. It is, rather, a rearguard attempt to recover from what I think of as original sin—that is, from a profound and consequential error. The original sin was the sin of treating some men as the unmarked case of man, some women as the unmarked case of woman, indeed some humans as the unmarked case of human. It was as if race or class were markers that separated their bearers from those who were purely and only man, purely and only woman, purely and only human. It was as if ‘black’ or ‘poor’ or ‘gay’ or even ‘woman’—at least when woman was regarded as one configuration of the human—are markers reserved for special and problematic cases. As special cases, they were to be set aside for special treatment at some later stage of the dialectic.

交叉并不会抵制这样的想法。事实上，它接受了这一点，即使不是公开的、自信的。至少在我看来是这样。现在是时候超越这种后卫防守的思维了。我们需要的是一个新的开始。我们应该努力把男人理解为男人，在他多样化和复杂的整体中;把女人理解为女人，在她同样多样化和复杂的整体中;把人理解为人，在其更大的复杂性和多样性中。只有重新开始构建新概念和新理论，并以发展概念和理论为明确目标，使我们能够充分代表和解释我们人类在各种类型的配置中所处的广阔和多样化的景观的拓扑结构和动力学，我们才能超越过时的后卫交叉方法对男人、女人和人类的限制。