Page 190 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

a commonality in social positioning. As Elizabeth Spelman (1988: 14) rightly
stated, ‘even if we say all women are oppressed by sexism we cannot automatically
conclude that the sexism all women experience is the same’. This is an important
realization which has undermined any reductionist, essentializing definition of
‘women’s oppression’ as a universal female experience. It also means the end
of the authority of the category of ‘women’ as the ‘natural’ binding factor for
feminist politics. Instead, as Judith Butler (1990: 3) has noted, ‘women has become
a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety’.
It is now widely acknowledged that differences between women undermine the
homogeneity and continuity of ‘women’ as a social category: differences produced
by the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. So by the 1990s
‘difference’ has become an obligatory tenet in feminist discourse, and feminism’s
ability to ‘deal with it’ is often mentioned as a condition for its survival as a move-
ment for social change. The so-called politics of difference recognizes the need to
go beyond the notion of an encompassing sisterhood, and acknowledges that
feminism needs to take account of the fact that not all women are white, Western
and middle-class and take into consideration the experiences of ‘other’ women
as well. 1
What does it mean, however, to ‘deal with difference’? Australian feminist
theorist Jan Jindy Pettman (1992: 158) suggests among other things that it means
‘recognising unequal power and conflicting interests while not giving up on
community or solidarity or sisterhood’. But this sounds all too deceptively easy,
a formula of containment that wants to have it both ways, as if differences among
women could unproblematically be turned into a ‘unity in diversity’ once they are
‘recognized’ properly. Yeatman (1993: 241) suggests that the politics of difference
should encourage ‘the complexity of dialogue’ between differently situated
feminists (e.g. Aboriginal and Anglo-Australian women) who are not positioned
as mutually exclusive selves versus others, but ‘who understand themselves to
be complexly like and different from each other’. However, isn’t ‘women’ being
surreptitiously smuggled back in here as the essential way in which the interlocutors
are assumed to resemble each other?
The way difference should be ‘dealt with’, then, is typically imagined by the
feminist establishment through such benevolent terms as ‘recognition’, ‘under-
standing’ and ‘dialogue’. The problem with such terms is first of all that they
reveal an over-confident faith in the power and possibility of open and honest
communication to ‘overcome’ or ‘settle’ differences, of a power-free speech
situation without interference by entrenched presumptions, sensitivities and
preconceived ideas. It is a faith in our (limitless?) capacity not only to speak, but,
more importantly, to listen and hear. Spelman, speaking to fellow white feminists,
relentlessly questions the (white) feminist ability to listen in this regard:

Is the reason we haven’t heard from them before that they haven’t spoken,
or that we haven’t listened? ...Are we really willing to hear anything and
everything that they might have to say, or only what we don’t find too

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