Page 137 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 128

5

The cultural politics of difference

Différance, we have seen, is one of the key notions in post-
structuralist cultural theory. But it was also, according to Derrida,
what was most irreducible about our ‘era’. Taking this remark
as a cue, we turn now to the kind of cultural theory inspired, at
least in part, by the politics of difference associated with the ‘new
social movements’, as the French sociologist Alain Touraine
dubbed them (Touraine, 1981, pp. 9–10). From feminist movies to
gay newspapers, there is no doubting the practical achievements
of these new movements in effecting an unprecedented ‘decen-
tring’ of white, straight, male, cultural authority. When cultural
theory embraced this new ‘postmodern’ pluralism, it opened up
the theoretical space within which some, at least, of the culturally
marginalised could assert their own cultural specificities. The
results have become familiar, not only in cultural studies, but also
across many of the older humanities: radical feminism, queer
theory, postcolonial theory, black studies and so on. This ‘differ-
ence theory’, as we termed it in chapter 1, has been characterised
by an attempt to theorise the nexus between the operations of
différance in language and culture and those of socio-historical
difference, especially in respect of gender and sexuality, nation-
ality, race and ethnicity. The key concepts in this theoretical
formation are difference itself, and its apparent antonym, identity.
In this chapter we will track these and related concepts as they
have been figured and refigured in cultural theory.

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