Risking Catachresis: Reading Race, Reference, and Grammar in “Women”

Abstract:This essay reconsiders the deconstructive claim that political terms, and specifically the term woman, are catachrestic. By tracing genealogies of rhetoric in deconstruction and grammar and representation in Black feminisms, I show how racial categories overdetermine reference. In order to address this vis-à-vis feminist theories that employ deconstructive, poststructural, transnational, or critical Black analytics, I trace conversations around catachresis and how these theoretical insights might afford a rhetorical concept that has no literal referent but emerges from lack and need. Thinking in this tension that better attends to the material conditions of those considered as referent, the risk of catachresis offers one possible way to think at the limit of the term woman with an attention to ethics in theory.