Circular Consciousness in the Lived Experience of Intersectionality: Queer/LGBT Nigerian Diasporic Women in the USA

Introduction "My passport is green and my lover's a woman," writes 'Z,' a half Nigerian, half Malaysian woman living for many years in the USA. The colour green is a reference to the Nigerian passport, which has a green cover, and by claiming this 'green' marker of nationality, Z is identifying herself as Nigerian-not Malaysian, and not American. Z's words are exemplary of how lived experiences of intersectionality can entail a conscious understanding of the various circuits that one's multiple identities move, or are pulled, through: geographic locations, embodied positionalities, invisible lines. This understanding can foster strategies for daily living which include shifting, reorganizing, and strategically deploying identities. The privileging of certain subject positionings in some contexts and alternate subject positionings in other contexts becomes a strategic tool for daily survival given, as Kimberle Crenshaw has described, "the need to split one's political energies between two sometimes opposing groups [that] is a dimension of intersectional dis-empowerment" (1991:1252). However, my interest is in the mindfulness which can shift this "intersectional dis-empowerment" into a tool for empowerment-a tool for redefining, transgressing, and critiquing hegemonic constructions of identity categories. In the example above, Z is making a conscious choice to be 'this and not that' by privileging her Nigerian-ness over her other potential national identities. And in choosing 'this,' she is making an unspoken critique of 'that. ' In this case, the critique is against dominant ideas around what it means to be Malaysian or to be American. She is inferring that those categories, and the ways she feels they have been constructed, are not flexible or inclusive enough for her. She is encouraging us to engage in further interrogations of Malaysian-ness and American-ness. Furthermore, although Z is privileging her Nigerian nationality by stating that her passport is green, by adding the phrase "and my lover's a woman," she is bringing her sexuality, her queerness, to push against her Nigerian-ness in a move that simultaneously embraces yet challenges and redefines what is means to be Nigerian, as well as challenging and redefining what it means to be queer in the Western world. Thus, Z is criticizing existing knowledge while also creating new knowledge, an action that Patricia Hill Collins has described as a component of the work that subjugated knowledge does, creating "empowerment [that is] twofold" (2000:286). The conscious, strategic deployment of identity carries an understanding that identities can be hierarchised even though they are simultaneously experienced. I use the term circular consciousness to describe this particular lived understanding of intersectionality. This paper stems from a from a 2011 research project involving six self-identified LGBQ Nigerian diasporic women ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-30s. Three of the women-Nkechi, Fayola, and Amaka (pseudonyms)-were interviewed one-on-one via telephone, and three women-Z, Fly, and Spectra-are prolific online bloggers whose websites are rich with essays, audio recordings, and video diaries chronicling their lived experiences. One essay and one audio interview are used as data for each of the online bloggers, who are referred to by their online aliases. All of the women, except Fly, were born in Nigeria, and raised in America, where they continue to live. The women live under the weight of several narratives--for example lesbian, queer, immigrant, woman, black, American, Nigerian-yet they do not "properly" belong to any of them; rather the narratives are all brought into relation through the women's daily lives. Thus, belonging and not belonging become recurring themes for the women, and they have self-definitions that are circuitous, always on the move, sometimes seeking fixity, sometimes not, and each informing the other. This paper will begin with an exposition of circular consciousness, and then demonstrate how it permeates negotiations of racial and national positionings through an analysis of Blackness and Nigerian-ness. …