Page 194 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

‘white/Western’ women. Even more perniciously, this universalist feminist
assumption implicitly finds wanting all women who do not have these cultural
resources. As a result, these different women are, as Mohanty says about Third
World women, ‘stripped of their existence as concrete historical subjects living,
working, acting and fighting in particular societal circumstances, and are objectified
as a generalised, always-already oppressed “other woman” (e.g. the veiled woman,
the chaste virgin)’ (1984: 353), against whom Western women become elevated
as the self-professed avant-garde of liberated womanhood (see also e.g. Jolly 1991;
Mohanty et al. 1991; Kirby 1993; Ong 1988).
In acknowledgement of the need to deconstruct such universalizing assumptions
of white/Western feminism, feminist theorists have concerned themselves increas-
ingly with the issue of representation, of ‘who is permitted to speak on behalf of
whom’. If speaking in the name of the other is no longer politically acceptable, how,
then, should the other be represented? Or should white feminists refrain from
representing ‘other’ women at all? Would the problem be gradually solved if more
‘other’ women start raising their voices and presenting ‘their’ points of view? Here
again, the implicit assumption is that a diversification of discourse would eventually
lead to a broader, more inclusive representation of ‘all’ women. However, what
implications the resulting contesting discourses can and should have for feminist
politics remain glaringly unresolved. In other words, where does the emanating
‘complexity of dialogue’ lead us?
Let me address this question through an example, again derived (mainly) from
American feminist criticism. As is well known, there has been much controversy
in the academy about the cultural and sexual politics of the pop singer Madonna.
Her many white feminist defenders see her as a postmodern proto-feminist heroine,
a woman who manages to create a cultural space where she can invent and play
with daring representations of feminine sexuality while remaining in control and
in charge (see Schwichtenberg 1993). While white critics have generally appreciated
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Madonna in terms of her clever subversion of male dominance, however, black
feminist critic bell hooks has argued that Madonna’s gender politics can only be
interpreted as liberating from a ‘white’ perspective:

In part, many black women who are disgusted by Madonna’s flaunting of
sexual experience are enraged because the very image of sexual agency
that she is able to project and affirm with material gain has been the stick
this society has used to justify its continued beating and assault on the
black female body.
(1992: 159–60)

According to hooks, what Madonna’s white feminist fans applaud her for, namely,
her power to act in sexually rebellious ways without being punished, cannot
be experienced as liberating by the vast majority of black women in the USA, as
dominant myths of black females as sexually ‘fallen’ force them to be ‘more
concerned with projecting images of respectability than with the idea of female

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