Page 188 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

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I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

‘Other’ women and postnational identities

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the problematic of race and
ethnicity has erupted as one of the most hotly debated and politically sensitive
issues in Western societies, especially in those countries with increasingly multiracial
populations as a consequence of large-scale immigration from non-European parts
of the world. In these countries, the politicization of race and ethnicity was an
effect of the increased political consciousness and activism of those who have found
themselves marginalized and discriminated against on the basis of their ‘race’ –
people who have come to be represented and represent themselves – variously
as ‘blacks’, ‘people of colour’, ‘visible minorities’ or ‘ethnic minorities’. The issue
of racism – experienced at both structural and personal levels – and the desire to
struggle against it became a passionate point of identification for many, and as such
it has become an unavoidable one for society at large to deal with. This is especially
the case for self-declared progressive movements: from the labour movement to the
feminist movement, it became impossible for these powerful political agents for
social justice and equality to ignore the calls for ‘anti-racist’ politics. This is especially
the case for feminism, which since the 1970s has been one of the most influential
political discourses and forces of cultural change in the postmodern Western world.
Feminism, after all, is itself a movement which derives its political energy from a
desire to struggle against discrimination and oppression on the basis of a collective
marker of identification: gender. It is safe to say that with the rising to prominence
of the problematic of race and ethnicity, feminism has been thrown into a crisis –
a not unproductive crisis.
I am implicated in this crisis. As a woman of Chinese descent living in the West
and who has been a (marginally) committed feminist since the emergence of the
second wave women’s movement in the 1970s, I found myself increasingly, as
the politics of race and ethnicity gained momentum, in a position in which I can
turn my racial/ethnic ‘difference’ into intellectual and political capital, where
‘white’ feminists invite me to raise my ‘voice’, qua a non-white woman, and make
myself heard. This became an increasingly insistent appeal in the 1990s. Anna
Yeatman (1995), in a thoughtful article aptly titled ‘Interlocking oppressions’,
suggests that voices such as mine are needed to contest and correct the old exclu-
sions of the established feminist order, and that they will win non-white women

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