Page 192 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

be achieved – we might do better to start from point zero and realize that there
may be moments at which no common ground exists whatsoever, and when any
communicative event would be nothing more than a case of speaking past one
another. I want to suggest, moreover, that these moments of ultimate failure
of communication should not be encountered with regret, but rather should be
accepted as the starting point for a more modest feminism, one which is predicated
on the fundamental limits to the very idea of sisterhood (and thus of the potency
and salience of the category ‘women’ to anchor feminist community) and on the
necessary partiality of the project of feminism as such.
In other words, I suggest that we would gain more from acknowledging and
confronting the stubborn solidity of ‘communication barriers’ than from rushing
to break them down in the name of an idealized unity. Such an idealized unity is
a central motif behind a politics of difference which confines itself to repairing
the friction between white women and ‘other’ women. The trouble is that such
reparation strategies often end up appropriating the other rather than fully
confronting the incommensurability of the difference involved. This is the case, for
example, in well-intentioned but eventually only therapeutic attempts on the part
of white women to overcome ‘our own racism’ through consciousness-raising, a
tendency particularly strong in some strands of American liberal feminism. White
feminists worried about their own race privilege typically set out to overcome
their feelings of guilt by identifying with the oppressed other. Thus, Ann Russo
(1991: 308) claims that her ability to ‘connect with women of color’ is greater
when she faces the ways in which she herself has been oppressed in her own life
as a white, middle-class woman. She would be less able to empathize, she says,
if she would see herself ‘as only privileged’ and ‘as only an oppressor’, because
then she would see herself as ‘too different’ from ‘women of color’. In other
words, the white woman can become a ‘politically correct’ anti-racist by disavowing
the specificity of the experience of being a racialized ‘other’, reducing it to an
instance of oppression which is essentially the same as her own, gender-based
oppression. This form of appropriation only reinforces the security of the white
point of view as the point of reference from which the other is made same, a
symbolic annihilation of otherness which is all the more pernicious precisely because
it occurs in the context of a claimed solidarity with the other. The very presumption
that race-based oppression can be understood by paralleling it with gender-based
oppression results in a move to reinstate white hegemony. Such a move represses
consideration of the cultural repercussions of the structural ineluctability of white
hegemony in Western societies. (I have used the terms ‘white’ and ‘Western’ in an
over-generalizing manner here, but will specify them later.)
Of course, the most powerful agents of white/Western hegemony are white
3
middle-class males, but white middle-class females too are the bearers of whiteness
which, because of its taken for grantedness, is ‘a privilege enjoyed but not acknowl-
edged, a reality lived in but unknown’, as one of Ruth Frankenberg’s informants
says in her pathbreaking study White Women, Race Matters (Frankenberg 1993).
To her credit, Russo is aware of the possible ramifications of this shared whiteness.

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