Women and Political Representation in Canada

Chapter 11: Problematizing Ethnicity and "Race" in Feminist Scholarship on Women and Politics

11 Problematizing Ethnicityand "Race" in Feminist Scholarshipon Womenand Politics1 SUSAN JUDITH SHIP, Carleton University Introduction The impetus for this paper came out of my first experience teaching Women and Politics and the difficulties in locating distinctively Canadian literature on women and politics that adequately reflects Canada's ethnocultural diversity.2 The experiences of ethnic minority women (non-Aboriginal, non-British, and non-French ancestry and their descendants) and racialized minority women (ethnic minority women whose cultural heritages originate in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America), have gone largely unexplored in key areas of the Canadian feminist scholarship on women and politics (what Trimble found to be true with respect to Alberta politics; see her text in this volume).3 What little literature there exists on ethnic activism and the relationship of minorities to the political system in Canada, particularly with respect to electoralpolitics, rarely, if ever, treats gender as central in its focus.4 Moreover, a growing body of feminist scholarship by women of African and Asian descents in Canada (see Bristow 1994; Carty 1993; Bannerji 1991,1993; Ng 1989; Brand 1984) points to the importanceof ethnic and racial designations in shaping women's identities, social locations, and access to power. Although the recognition of difference and diversity is the hallmark of feminist theorizing and politics in the 1990s (see, notably, Rankin and Vickers's chapter in this book), muchof Canadian feminist scholarship on women and politics has as yet to fully explore how social divisions based on "race" and ethnicity differentiate women's social situations and their accessto power.5 Since the study of women and politics has, in part, grown out of a critical engagement with mainstream, malestream political science research and analysis, I took a more critical look at the treatment of ethnicity and "race" and minorities in the discipline of political science as a whole. If Canadian feminist scholarship on women and politics has 322 WOMEN AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN CANADA largely ignored the impact of the social and political construction of ethnicity and "race" in shaping the various forms of underrepresentation of women of colour6 and white ethnic minority women in electoral politics and in decision making, they remain underexplored and undertheorized dimensions of political science in general.Political studies on ethnicity, "race," and minorities in Canada are relatively recent and few in number, often reflecting the perspectives of the majority groups (Berry and Laponce 1994), while studies on racism and ethnic discrimination have elicited more interest from sociologists. Despite the myriad ways that issues of "race" and ethnicity shape notions of political identity and belonging, formal and substantive citizenship, and representation in electoral politics and decision making, I am always struck by the narrow strictures within which much of political science discourse treats these phenomena. As a secondgeneration white ethnic minority woman, born in Quebec, I am all too aware of the political distinctions between national communities and ethnic communities in Quebec, as in the rest of Canada, that, in part, define who we are and how we are inserted into political, economic, and social structures. This paper then, in part, comes out of my reflectionson the silences and distortions in these varied bodies of literature and, in part, as a consequence of my own sociallocation. Insofar as "Canada now has an impending rendez-vous with its polyethnic nature—the extent to which the extraordinary ethnic variety of recent flows of immigration, has altered, and will continue to alter, the old playing field on which the comfortable conceptions of the 'two founding groups' could play itself out, and indeed complacently overlook the real founding peoples conveniently sidelined on reserves" (Wilson 1993,649)—Canadian political science has been slow to take up this challenge. If the taken-for-grantednessof the dominant ethnic and racial power relations in Canada is an entrenched and enduring feature of an essentially "monochromatic Canadian political science," to quote Stasiulis and Abu-Laban (1990,582), the Canadian feminist literature on women and politics exhibits much of the same tendencies. If feminist scholarship on women and politics in Canada is to speak from the experiences of ethnic and racialized minority women to their needs and interests, then it must more thoroughly interrogate the conceptual categories of "race" and ethnicity, as well as examine not only the commonalities that women share as a gender classbut also the differences between women as a result of racism and ethnic differentiation.7 Problematizing ethnicity and "race," and exploring how these social divisions...