"We Who Are Not the Same" in Times that Are/Not the Same

It is now some two decades since Adrienne Rich delivered "Notes toward a Politics of Location" (1984), to a Conference on Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s, at the First Summer School of Critical Semiotics (Utrech). Her "Notes" remain, for me, an eloquent, moving, and useful confession of the limits of white liberal feminism as well as an honest and astute call to continued and differentiated action for a global good. I take seriously her admonishment, to herself at the time but with continued relevance for her readers today, that "[t]his is the end of these notes, but it is not an ending" (231). It cannot be an "ending" insofar as the interlocking systems of opportunity for some, oppression for others—interlocking systems that go by the name of modernity—continue to be foundational to identity- and subject-formation, for both "the individual" and "the institution" in all their mutual constitutiveness. It should come as no surprise, then, that not only has a dominant form of feminism failed to change the terms of "progress," it could never be expected to change those terms on its own nor when it spoke for only one constituency, and only a part of that constituency, too. The "simultaneity of oppressions" (218) from which Rich is partially freed by her white, middle-class location, a "simultaneity of oppressions" about which she was learning from feminists of colour and from international environmental, anti-nuclear, and anti-imperialist activists, is also a "simultaneity of oppressions" that in its variedness, tenacity, and resilience requires a flexible and vigilant ensemble of tools for analysis and action. To Rich's still invaluable essay, I would add Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1991) as key documents in identifying how feminist work still needs to be done.

Learning more recently from Dionne Brand to be wary of stories about (white middle-class) women's and Canadian literary and colonial "survival" when my own class mobility has been made possible by my ready access to the "grant" of "whiteness" (Brand 175) and by my concomitant inheritances from and participation in "cognitive imperialism" against First Nations peoples, as indigenous students Carole Leclair and Christine Lenze first taught me and as Marie Battiste reminds me (193), I try to teach Canadian literary studies rather like (I hope) Rich taught herself to extend, refine, rethink, and reconfigure her projects as a feminist; that is, from "the geography closest in" (212). By this phrase, Rich meant most immediately her "body," but she also knowingly and explicitly spoke from a place of geopolitical power, too, behind "that raised boot" of the U.S.A. (220). So located, she found herself unable to say, after an earlier feminist, "as a woman I have no country" (Virginia Woolf, quoted in Rich 211). The Famous Five who won the vote for white propertied women in Canada knew a different sense of the geography closest in, and they knew it very differently from women (and men) whose racial and economic circumstances were not their own. Himani Bannerji, Linda Carty, Hiromi Goto, Sherene Razack, and many others know this geography differently yet again, at the intersection of their bodies, racist pasts and presents, and the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the Canadian nation-state.

The simultaneity of oppressions for feminists to unpack includes, then, in/accessibility to citizenship, to national, civic, and legal identities as much as to gendered freedoms. These take particular forms and have particular histories in Canada as an invader-settler colony, fueled by and fueling nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century imperialisms, but they also have particularities in more recent histories and practices of globalization for the sake of the unfettered movement of capital into fewer and fewer hands. "Canada," given that it is a creation of modernity, is no more immune to neo-imperialist pressures and practices than to any other of modernity's manifestations of "progress." As a result, the discourse of...