Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

THE DOXA OF DIFFERENCE

THE DOXA OF DIFFERENCE It is tempting, writes Rodolphe Gasché, to see the philosophical history of difference as revealing the progressive emancipation of difference from identity.1 We are more and more likely to take this view. As Gasché notes, difference reigns supreme in critical thought. By contrast, equality and commonality hardly rate a mention, except as intellectual or political enemies to be vanquished and discarded on the scrapheap of history. Emblazoned on book covers, routinely invoked in intellectual debates, “difference” is an unassailable ideal, a value in itself. Difference has become doxa, a magical word of theory and politics that radiates redemptive meanings. Feminism has its own version of this story of difference’s triumph. The origins of feminism are usually attributed to such figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, 5 who drew on Enlightenment ideals of reason and equality to challenge the subordination of women. Yet such ideals, it soon transpired, were not congenial friends of feminism, but masks for a phallocentric logic that sought to reduce difference to sameness. The universal values of the Enlightenment could recognize the rights and freedoms of others only by assimilating them to male-defined norms. Second-wave feminists sought instead to reclaim the feminine; women’s path to freedom lay in affirming their irreducible differences rather than in pursuing equality with men. This woman-centered vision has now lost much of its charge, thanks to the impact of poststructuralism as well as the stringent criticisms of its blindness to material and cultural differences among women. As a result, the story goes, we now find ourselves in a postmodern condition , where female difference has fragmented into multiple differences and any appeal to universal ideals or norms is politically questionable and theoretically naive. This story has been told often and in different tones of voice. For some it is a narrative of progress, as feminism gradually sheds its attachment to old-fashioned forms of essentialism and universalism and achieves a more sophisticated stage of consciousness. For others it is a narrative of the fall, as feminism is lured from its goal of representing and struggling for all women by internecine squabbles and the prestige of French avant-garde thought. Many feminist scholars are familiar with this story; we may encounter it in scholarly articles, reproduce it in our classes, echo it in our own academic writing. Indeed, it contains a grain of truth, at least as a description of the recent trajectory of mainstream feminist theory in the humanities. I want, however, to qualify the view of feminism’s ascent to the dizzying heights of difference. This unilinear plot does not leave room for thinking about the coexistence and interdependence of different frameworks. Like all grand narratives, moreover, it confuses the internal logic of particular intellectual debates with the condition of the world as a whole. The political interests and needs of women do not always move neatly in step with the various phases of academic feminist theory. Of course, no doxa is endorsed by everyone, and there have been various challenges to difference within contemporary feminism. Already in 1986, in an article ably summarized by its title, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory,” Sandra Harding warned against grounding feminism in a single political-philosophical idea, arguing that Enlightenment ideas, gynocentric politics, and postmodern critiques of identity are all woven into the complex fabric of contemporary feminism. “We should learn how,” writes Harding, “to regard the instabilities themselves as valuable resources.”2 Chela Sandoval has also criticized taxonomies of feminism as a series of developmental stages, T H E D O X A O F D I F F E R E N C E 117 arguing for a “tactical subjectivity” that can deploy different forms of politics according to context.3 In addition, as I show in more detail below, some postcolonial theorists are challenging the current vogue of difference in Western feminism. Not much attention has been paid, however, to thinking through the philosophical inconsistencies as well as political problems of trying to ground feminism in difference. Indeed, for the most part, the conceptual primacy of difference remains uncontested. Feminist scholars may question particular images of difference for objectifying or exoticizing others. However, the force of this critique usually relies on the belief that there are real, genuine differences that are obscured by this false representation. One of the aims of this chapter is to rethink alterity as...