Page 191 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

disturbing? Are we prepared to hear what they say, even if it requires
learning concepts or whole languages that we don’t yet understand?
(1988: 163)

Spelman’s very phrasing brings to bear a deep and disturbing gulf between ‘us’ and
‘them’ (i.e. ‘other’ women). This suggests that ‘difference’ cannot be ‘dealt with’
easily, and can certainly not just be ‘overcome’.
Therefore, I want to stress here the difficulties of ‘dealing with difference’. These
difficulties cannot be resolved through communication, no matter how complex
the dialogue. Indeed, the very overwhelming desire to resolve them in the first
place could result in a premature glossing-over of the social irreducibility and
inescapability of certain differences and the way they affect women’s lives. To focus
on resolving differences between women as the ultimate aim of ‘dealing with
difference’ would mean their containment in an inclusive, encompassing structure
which itself remains uninterrogated; it would mean that ‘these differences must
comply with feminism’s . . . essentialising frame’ (Kirby 1993: 29). In such a case,
difference is ‘dealt with’ by absorbing it into an already existing feminist community
without challenging the naturalized legitimacy and status of that community as
a community. By dealing with difference in this way, feminism resembles the
multicultural nation – the nation that, faced with cultural differences within
its borders, simultaneously recognizes and controls those differences among its
population by containing them in a grid of pluralist diversity (Bhabha 1990b).
However, reducing difference to diversity in this manner is tantamount to a more
sophisticated and complex form of assimilation. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty
puts it:

The central issue . . . is not one of merely acknowledging difference;
rather, the more difficult question concerns the kind of difference that
is acknowledged and engaged. Difference seen as benign variation
(diversity), for instance, rather than as conflict, struggle, or the threat of
disruption, bypasses power as well as history to suggest a harmonious,
empty pluralism. On the other hand, difference defined as asymmetrical
and incommensurate cultural spheres situated within hierarchies of domi-
nation and resistance cannot be accommodated within a discourse of
‘harmony in diversity’.
(1989: 181)
To take difference seriously, then, we need to examine the sources and effects of
the threat of disruption Mohanty talks about. Concretely, it would mean a focus
on how the gulf between mainstream feminism and ‘other’ women is constructed
and reproduced, and paying attention to, rather turning our gaze away from, those
2
painful moments at which communication seems unavoidably to fail. Rather than
assuming that ultimately a common ground can be found for women to form
a community – on the a priori assumption that successful communication can

180