Page 195 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

sexual agency and transgression’ (ibid.: 160). In other words, hooks contends,
Madonna’s status as a feminist heroine makes sense only from a white woman’s
perspective, and any deletion of this specification only slights the black woman’s
perspective.
The point I want to make is not that the white feminist interpretation is wrong
or even racist, or that hooks’s view represents a better feminism, but that we see
juxtaposed here two different points of view, constructed from two distinct speaking
positions, each articulating concerns and preoccupations which make sense and
are pertinent within its own reality. The meaning of Madonna, in other words,
depends on the cultural, racially marked context in which her image circulates,
at least in the USA. Nor can either view be considered the definitive white or
black take on Madonna; after all, any interpretation can only be provisional and
is indefinitely contestable, forcing us to acknowledge its inexorable situatedness
(Haraway 1988). Nevertheless, a reconciliation between these points of view is
difficult to imagine. And this is not a matter of ‘communication barriers’ that need
to be overcome, of differences that need to be ‘recognized’. What we see exem-
plified here is a fundamental incommensurability between two competing feminist
knowledges, dramatically exposing an irreparable chasm between a white and a
black feminist truth. No harmonious compromise or negotiated consensus is
possible here.
This example illuminates the limits of a politics of difference focused on
representation. The voice of the ‘other’, once raised and taken seriously in its dis-
tinctiveness and specificity, cannot be assimilated into a new, more totalized feminist
truth. The otherness of ‘other’ women, once they come into self-representation,
works to disrupt the unity of ‘women’ as the foundation for feminism. This is
the logic of Butler’s (1990: 15) claim that ‘[i]t would be wrong to assume
in advance that there is a category of “women” that simply needs to be filled in
with various components of race, class, age, ethnicity, and sexuality in order to
become complete’. That is, there are situations in which ‘women’ as signifier for
commonality would serve more to impede the self-presentation of particular groups
of female persons, in this case African-American women struggling against racist
myths of black female sexuality, than to enhance them. White women and black
women have little in common in this respect. Teresa de Lauretis (1988: 135) has
put it this way: ‘the experience of racism changes the experience of gender, so that
a white woman would be no closer than a Black man to comprehending a Black
woman’s experience’. So we can talk with each other, we can enter into dialogue
– there is nothing wrong with learning about the other’s point of view – provided
only that we do not impose a premature sense of unity or consensus as the desired
outcome of such an exchange.

Considering white/Western hegemony
But there is more. It is clear that, while white critical discourse could afford to be
silent about the racial dimension of the cultural meaning(s) of Madonna and could

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