Page 196 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

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assume a stance of seeming racial neutrality, hooks (1992) is only too aware of the
marginal situatedness of her own point of view. She does not share the sense of
entitlement which empowers white women to imagine a world in which they are
‘on top’, as it were, successfully turning the tables on men (white and black). Yet
this is the quintessence of the all-powerful fantasy Madonna seems to offer white
women. Black women like hooks operate in the certainty that they will never acquire
the power to rule the world; they know that this world – white-dominated, Western,
capitalist modernity – is quite simply not theirs, and can never be. This fundamental
sense of permanent dislocation, this feeling of always being a foreigner in a world
that doesn’t belong to you (cf. Kristeva 1991) is what all those who are ‘othered’
– racialized or ethnicized – in relation to white/Western hegemony share.
It is important to emphasize, at this point, that white/Western hegemony is
not a random psychological aberration but the systemic consequence of a global
historical development over the last 500 years – the expansion of European capitalist
modernity throughout the world, resulting in the subsumption of all ‘other’ peoples
to its economic, political and ideological logic and mode of operation. Whiteness
and Westernness are closely interconnected; they are two sides of the same coin.
Westernness is the sign of white hegemony at the international level, where
non-white, non-Western nations are by definition subordinated to white, Western
ones (despite occasionally erupting fantasies of powerful Asian countries such as
Japan and China that they might once overtake the West). It is the globalization
of capitalist modernity which ensures the structural insurmountability of the
white/non-white and Western/non-Western divide, as it is cast in the very
infrastructure – institutional, political, economic – of the modern world (Wallerstein
1974). In other words, whether we like it or not, the contemporary world system
is a product of white/Western hegemony, and we are all, in our differential
subjectivities and positionings, implicated in it and constituted by it.
We are not speaking here, then, of an ontological binary opposition between
white/Western women and ‘other’ women. Nor is it the case that white feminists
are always-already ‘guilty’ – another psychologizing gesture which can only paralyse.
But the fracturing of the category of ‘women’ is historically and structurally
entrenched, and cannot be magically obliterated by (white) feminism through
sheer political will or strategy. As a consequence, in the words of de Lauretis
(1988: 136):

the feminist subject, which was initially defined purely by its status as
colonised subject or victim of oppression, becomes redefined as much less
pure [and] as indeed ideologically complicitous with ‘the oppressor’
whose position it may occupy in certain sociosexual relations (though not
others), on one or another axis.
Complicity, in other words, is a structural inevitability which we can only come to
terms with by recognizing it as determining the limits of political possibilities, not
as something that we can work to undo (by consciousness-raising, for example).

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