Page 203 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

question the status of feminism itself as a political home for all women, just as
Australia will not – and cannot, in its existence as a legislative state – question
its status as a nation, even ‘one nation’, despite its embrace of multiculturalism.
Yeatman herself, for example, considers the politics of difference as an ‘internal
politics of emancipation within feminism’ (1993: 230, emphasis added). In this
conception, difference can only be taken into consideration insofar as it does not
challenge the rightfulness of feminism as such. Feminism functions as a nation
which ‘other’ women are invited to join without disrupting the ultimate integrity
of the nation. But this politics of inclusion is born of a liberal pluralism which
can only be entertained by those who have the power to include, as pointed out
poignantly by Spelman (1988: 163): ‘Welcoming someone into one’s own home
doesn’t represent an attempt to undermine privilege; it expresses it.’
Taking difference seriously necessitates the adoption of a politics of partiality
rather than a politics of inclusion. A politics of partiality implies that feminism
must emphasize and consciously construct the limits of its own field of political
intervention. While a politics of inclusion is driven by the ambition for universal
representation (of all women’s interests), a politics of partiality does away with that
ambition and accepts the principle that feminism can never ever be an encompassing
political home for all women, not just because different groups of women have
different and sometimes conflicting interests, but, more radically, because for many
groups of ‘other’ women other interests, other identifications are sometimes more
important and more politically pressing than, or even incompatible with, those
related to their being women.
Yeatman (1993: 228) acknowledges the necessary partiality of the feminist
project when she points to the incommensurability of its insistence on the primacy
of gender oppression with the political foci of movements against other forms
of social subordination. It is this structural incommensurability that feminists need
to come to terms with and accept as drawing the unavoidable limits of feminism
as a political project. In short, because all female persons ‘do not inhabit the same
sociohistorical spaces’ (Chow 1991: 93), (white/Western) feminism’s assumption
of a ‘“master discourse” position’ (ibid.: 98) can only be interpreted as an act of
symbolic violence which disguises the fundamental structural divisions created
by historical processes such as colonialism, imperialism and nationalism. As Butler
(1990: 4) puts it, ‘the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism,
understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals
to accept the category’. It compels us to say, ‘I’m a feminist, but . . .’, in the same
way that I could ever only say, ‘I am Australian but . . .’

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