Backtalker: An American Memoir with Kimberlé Crenshaw

One of most influential thinkers today offers a deeply engaging story of justice and power in America.

When Kimberlé Crenshaw was five years old in Ohio during the civil rights era, she was the only girl denied a lead role in her nursery play. Puzzled by her teacher's behaviour, she spoke up—and never stopped. That instinct to question power, to challenge what others accepted as fair, would shape not only her own life but the way we now understand race and gender.

In Backtalker, Crenshaw traces her journey from a spirited girl in Canton, Ohio to one of the most influential legal thinkers today. Through childhood lessons and painful reckonings—a boyfriend’s violence in college, a back door at Harvard Law, the silencing of women in the civil rights movement—Crenshaw learned to see the patterns others missed, refusing to stay behind the lines the world drew for her.

Out of those experiences came two ideas that changed everything: intersectionality, the recognition that race, gender, and class overlap to create unique forms of discrimination; and critical race theory, the argument that racism is structural. Crenshaw’s voice has since echoed through some of the most charged moments in recent history—from Anita Hill’s testimony to the rise of Black Lives Matter—insisting that true justice means seeing the whole picture.

Meet the chair and speaker

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum.

Dr Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies and an Associate Academic at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, LSE. Her research is interested in transnational movements of knowledges and of people, and how these are produced by and productive of gendered and racialised (in)security. Her first monograph, Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Peacekeeper Training (Oxford University Press 2024), interrogates these themes through an examination of the practice of ‘gender training’.

Prof Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, where she has worked since 1999. Her main interests are histories of queer feminist theories and the development of alternative stories and methods (with a particular focus on archives). She’s the author of Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018), and editor of nine edited volumes and special issues on these themes. Her current project is Feminist Knowledge Struggles: Telling Stories Differently, which develops original queer feminist methodologies to challenge the amenability of gendered and sexual discourses to the Right.

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