Page 197 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

In other words, it is important to realize that the white/‘other’ divide is a histor-
ically and systemically imposed structure which cannot yet, if ever, be superseded.
Until now I have deliberately used the term ‘other’ to encompass all the disparate
categories conjured up to classify these ‘others’: for example, ‘black women’,
‘women of colour’, ‘Third World women’, ‘migrant women’, ‘ethnic minority
women’, or, a specifically Australian term circulating in official multicultural
discourse, ‘NESB (non-English-speaking-background) women’. Of course these
different categories, themselves labels with unstable and shifting content and
pasting over a multitude of differences, cannot be lumped together in any concrete,
historically and culturally specific sense. In structural terms, however, they occupy
the same space insofar as they are all, from a white perspective, relegated to the realm
of racialized or ethnicized ‘otherness’, a normalizing mechanism which is precisely
constitutive of white/Western hegemony. As we have seen, feminism in Australia
and elsewhere is not exempt from such hegemonizing processes: in most feminist
theory, too, whiteness is the unmarked norm against which all ‘others’ have to be
specified in order to be represented. Spelman (1988: 169) points this out astutely:
‘Black women’s being Black somehow calls into question their counting as straight-
forward examples of “women,” but white women’s being white does not.’
What difference can a politics of difference make in the face of this fundamental,
binary asymmetry? Sneja Gunew (1993: 1) claims that ‘[t]he dismantling of hege-
monic categories is facilitated by the proliferation of difference rather than the
setting up of binary oppositions that can merely be reversed, leaving structures
of power intact’. This postmodern celebration of a ‘proliferation of difference’ as
a utopian weapon in the destruction of hegemonic structures of power is also
proposed by Jane Flax, as in this oft-quoted statement:

Feminist theories, like other forms of postmodernism, should encourage
us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity
as well as expose the roots of our needs for imposing order and structure
no matter how arbitrary and oppressive these needs may be. If we do our
work well, reality will appear even more unstable, complex and disorderly
than it does now.
(Flax 1990a: 56–7)

For reasons which will become clear, I am generally sympathetic to Flax’s emphasis
on ambivalence, ambiguity and multiplicity as theoretical principles in our approach
to ‘reality’. But she surreptitiously displays another form of psychological
reductionism when she ascribes the imposition of order and structure to the
obscurity of ‘our needs’, and suggests that we should learn to ‘tolerate’ ambivalence,
ambiguity and multiplicity. To be sure, the consequence of Flax’s postmodern
equation of ‘doing our work well’ with making reality ‘appear even more unstable,
complex and disorderly’ amounts to an underestimating of the historical tenacity
and material longevity of oppressive orders and structures, such as those entailing
sedimented consequences of white/Western hegemony. This postmodern

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