Jennifer Christine Nash is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University within its Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.[1] Her research interests include Black feminist theory, feminist legal theory, Black sexual politics, black motherhood, black maternal health, race and law, and intersectionality.[2]
Nash earned her PhD in African American Studies at Harvard University, her JD at Harvard Law School, and an AB in women's studies at Harvard College.[3]
Nash is critical of approaches to intersectionality that demand either uncritical, unqualified support or outright rejection, calling instead for a critical engagement with the discursive formations produced under the heading of intersectionality. In particular, Nash has identified and problematized an emerging posture of territoriality and defensiveness characterizing some intersectionality discourses. This territorial posture objects to a critical regime created by and for Black women being "appropriated" for the struggles of other marginalized groups. Professor Nash sees this posture as a reiteration of a regime of territoriality, which threatens to make intersectionality into property to be defended and guarded despite black feminism's longstanding anticaptivity orientation, and the tradition's deep critiques of how logics of property enshrine boundaries and ensure that value is communicated exclusively through ownership.[4]