Page 202 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

Aboriginal relations (as Jolly suggests), as it is this relation which marks the original
sin foundational to Australian white settler subjectivity, which can now no longer
be repressed. However, this intense investment in the postcolonial problematic,
which is the locus of the distinctively Australian quandary of ‘white guilt’, may be
one important reason why there is so little feminist engagement with the challenge
of constructing a ‘multicultural Australia’. ‘Migrant women’, lumped together
in homogenizing and objectifying categories such as NESB, are still mostly talked
about, not spoken with and heard (see Martin 1991); they remain within the
particularist ghetto of ethnicity and are not allowed an active, constitutive role
in the ongoing construction of ‘Australia’ (see, for example, Curthoys 1993).
Multiculturalism remains, as Gunew (1993: 54) complains, ‘the daggy cousin of
radical chic postcolonialism’.
It is this context which makes it problematic to construct an ‘Asian’ voice
in Australian feminism. Despite the increasingly regular presence of Asians in
contemporary Australia and despite the recurrent official rhetoric that Australia
is becoming ‘part of Asia’, Asianness remains solidly defined as external to the
symbolic space of Australianness, in contrast with Aboriginality, which has now
been accepted by white Australia, albeit reluctantly, as occupying an undeniable
place, however fraught by the injustices of history, in the heart of Australian national
identity. To define myself as Asian, however, unavoidably and logically means
writing myself out of the bounds of that identity and into the margins of a pre-given,
firmly established Australian imagined community, the boundaries of which ‘are
still Eurocentric, cemented together around a core of white traditions’ (Schech
and Haggis 2000: 236). The only escape from this marginalization, from this
perspective, would be the creation of a symbolic space no longer bounded by
the idea(l) of national identity; a space, that is, where ‘Australia’ no longer has to
precede and contain, in the last instance, the unequal differences occurring within
it. Of course, such a space is utopian, given the fact that ‘Australia’ is not a floating
signifier but the name for an historically sedimented nation–state. Yet the imagi-
nation of such a space – a space without borders, a giant, limitless borderlands of
sorts where differences exist and intertwine without predetermined categorization
(see Chapter 9) – is necessary to appreciate the permanent sense of displacement
experienced by all racialized and ethnicized people living in the West, including,
I want to stress, indigenous peoples. 10
What does this tell us, finally, about the feminist politics of difference? As I have
already said, too often the need to deal with difference is seen in light of the greater
need to save, expand, improve or enrich feminism as a political home which would
ideally represent all women. In this way, the ultimate rationale of the politics of
difference is cast in terms of an overall politics of inclusion: the desire for an
overarching feminism to construct a pluralist sisterhood which can accommodate
all differences and inequalities between women. It should come as no surprise that
such a desire is being expressed largely by white, Western, middle-class women,
whom Yeatman (1993) calls the ‘custodians of the established order’ of contem-
porary feminism. Theirs is a defensive position, characterized by a reluctance to

191