Page 189 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

authorship and authority within a renewed, less exclusionary feminism. In this
sense, feminism acts like a nation; just like Australia, it no longer subscribes to a
policy of assimilation but wants to be multicultural.
In many respects, this is a laudable aim: the politics of multiculturalism, as I have
argued throughout this book and especially in the chapters about Australia in Part
II, is not without problems, but it can be said to be a necessary governmental
strategy for the harmonization and management of racially and ethnically diverse
nations in an increasingly plural, globalizing world. Isn’t it more than under-
standable, then, that feminism, too, wishes to embrace the multicultural ideal?
Isn’t it necessary for the feminist movement to bring women from ‘other’ races and
ethnicities into its fold, if only in their own interests as women?
In this chapter, I want to complicate this scenario by looking at the problems
of what we can term ‘multicultural desire’ in feminism. Rather than positively
representing a ‘Chinese’ or ‘Asian’ contribution to Australian feminism, which
would only risk reinforcing the objectification and fetishization of ‘Asianness’,
I want to argue that the very attempt to construct a voice for self-presentation in
a context already firmly established and inhabited by a powerful formation – the
formation of what is now commonly called, rather unreflexively, ‘white/Western
feminism’ – is necessarily fraught with difficulty. To me, non-white, non-Western
women in ‘white/Western’ societies can only begin to speak with a hesitating
‘I’m a feminist, but . . .’, in which the meaning and substance of feminism itself
become problematized. Where does this leave feminism? Feminism, I argue, must
stop conceiving itself as a nation, a ‘natural’ political destination for all women, no
matter how multicultural. Rather than adopting a politics of inclusion, which is
always ultimately based on a notion of commonality and community, it would do
better to develop a self-conscious politics of partiality, and imagine itself as a limited
political home, which does not absorb difference within a pre-given and predefined
space but leaves room for ambivalence and ambiguity. In the uneven, conjunctural
terrain so created, white/Western feminists too will have to detotalize their feminist
identities and be compelled to say: ‘I’m a feminist, but . . .’.

The politics of difference and its limits
In the early days of the second wave, feminist theory and practice were predicated
on the assumptions of women’s common identity as women, and of a united global
sisterhood. It was the universalization of white, middle-class women’s lives as
representative of the female experience which made it possible for modern Western
feminism to gather momentum and become such an important social movement.
In this sense feminism, like any other political philosophy, is an ‘interested
universalism’ (Yeatman 1993), based on the postulate that women have common
experiences and share common interests qua women.
By the 1980s, it was precisely this homogenizing idea of sisterhood which came
under increasing attack within feminism itself. After all, not all women share the
same experience of ‘being a woman’, nor is shared gender enough to guarantee

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