The Trouble with Difference

...But this meant that white feminism did not much examine the role of blacks in making whiteness or the role of whites in making blackness...

...Many white women's groups, for example, tried to compensate for their lack of sufficient diversity with guilt-inducing individual self-examination...

...Difference II seemed to justify autonomous and isolated feminisms for different groups...

...Many feminists of color have been generous and patient in their attempts to work with white feminists even as they labored to educate them, but still, their anger showed...

...The relations that form gender may not be simple, of course: we need not adopt the conservative model that positions male and female as two halves of a whole, each incomplete without the other...

...We believe that the sisterhood of Third World people is an integral part of our national liberation struggles...

...Political pluralism as a concept developed as a way of distinguishing democracy from totalitarianism...

...The identity and social position of, for example, Mexican-American women in the U.S...

...After World War II pluralism became an often smug legitimation of American anticommunism and as a result evoked scathing critique...

...Southwest developed not only from their interactions with whites but also in relation to the social positions of African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese Americans...

...The dualism was, inadvertently, strengthened by an extraordinarily rich outpouring of African-American women's fiction and prose...

...Differences Among Women For people of color, the perception that the dominant ideal of womanhood was white was hardly a revelation...

...The politics of feminism in the last two decades is one such arena of mutual influence...

...Through this logic, some feminists came close to demonizing men and endorsing the conservative stress on women's "natural" domesticity and lack of aggressiveness...

...Although gender need not be a dichotomous concept— queer theorists, for example, point to the variety, instability, and creativity of the ways that human beings "perform" gender—it has in fact been mainly evoked as binary...

...Gender, then, was used both to criticize the "artificial" male-female dichotomy and to valorize the previously devalued female side of the dichotomy...

...often] women falsely identify with 'their' country's dominant male culture...

...As principles for understanding society, "difference" and "diversity" tend to mask power...

...one notorious example was an early exploration of rape that addressed neither the legacy of false accusations and lynchings nor the contemporary rac44 • DISSENT / Spring 1999 isms of the police and criminal "justice" systems...

...Both have offered politically powerful and hope-giving rhetoric in a time when visions of any community larger than family are deeply impoverished...

...The most obnoxious aspect of Difference I talk was the way it tended to homogenize women, even to exclude from womanhood those who could not fit the normative feminine mold...

...Talk of female uniqueness had a crucial and material intersection with the rapid growth of women's studies, women's enterprises, women's writing...

...Their singular, repressive, and arrogant definition of what was truly female rested on particular class, racial, ethnic, even imperialist entitlements...

...Some radical women of color offered another dichotomous division, arguing for political unity among "third-world" peoples...

...Moreover relations among white women—for example, their sense of a shared whiteness and the frequent suppression of their class identity—were constructed in the presence of black women...

...Its roots lay in "radical feminism" in the 1970s, an intensely political critique of male supremacy as the most basic of all forms of domination...

...Academic feminist theory of the 1980s, influenced by post-structuralism, emphasized the fluidity and performative quality of identities...

...Powerful writers brought a distinctive African-American women's culture not only to the academy but to the mainstream media as well...

...the more we focus on women's variety, the more varied they become...

...Once again scholarship stresses the meetings and clashes of differences, but in a manner that does not work toward specifying the nature of the relationships...

...So retreat from the imperatives of specifying relation is a particularly poignant loss...

...And although difference on this view need not be biological, the weight of this kind of talk, whether intended as feminist or as conservaTHE TROUBLE WITH DIFFERENCE tive, nearly always serves to adduce permanence and unchangeability to these gendered human types...

...Representing different sexual preferences and family forms became imperative, not only so as to recognize people in those categories but also so as to challenge the putatively "typical" nuclear family...

...At its worst it suggests that communication is impossible, and may thus make actual communicative experience suspect...

...It may even deter efforts to communicate, which require asking direct questions, risking expressions of ignorance, rejecting the discourse of personal guilt...

...Feminists of this sort worry that certain versions of feminism—those that seek to make women more like men—only worsen the disrespect for the female in culture...

...I see no reason to regret anything about the elaboration of multiple and even contradictory social oppressions and identities...

...its prescriptive message was to recognize and respect diversity, not to challenge inequality or build democracy...

...AS THE boundaries of different racial and ethnic groups were challenged in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by those who consider themselves multiracial individuals, feminist academics began to focus on the cultures of borders and contact zones...

...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 47...

...Indeed, while calling attention to the need to acknowledge that others have different experiences, "difference" has had a chilling effect on the struggle to recognize connection...

...But radical feminism was soon eclipsed by a stream of thought and activity known as cultural feminism, which shifted priorities and emphases: identifying maleness, the characteristics of men, rather than male supremacy, a political system, as the root problem...

...Its advocates claim that the human ideal has been a male ideal, and decry the devalorization of women's "ways of being," thinking, feeling...

...More, they tend to obscure relationships altogether and suggest, rather, a lineup of isolated identities...

...The often repeated charge that 1970s feminism was racist and "classist" is usually uninformed and exaggerated...

...The same context also includes specific relations with white women—as employees, fellow workers, sales clerks, and so on...

...The difference talk I examine here developed in two streams within feminism: Difference I, gender difference, and Difference II, differences (racial/ethnic/religious/class/ sexual) among women, the latter also called diversity...

...American scholars have shared this interest, but in this country, by contrast, colonial and anticolonial frameworks are less developed and the emphasis placed instead on migrations and borders...

...We, the Third World people of Asia, Africa, and the Original Americas . . . victims of racism and ghetto colonies within the United States . . . oppressed because of our color, sex, and class...

...Sometimes white feminists showed appalling ignorance of black history...

...In the depoliticized celebration of femaleness, gender becomes nonrelational...

...allowed many women to come out as lesbians...

...But as Difference I talk gained purchase, that optimism gave way to a dismissal of men: "prideful and vengeful, image-protecting and loving war, jealous and insecure, omnipotent and in so many hidden ways afraid of women," as one feminist theologian wrote...

...spurred women to become doctors, construction workers, and bosses...

...Dualistic comparisons of the male and the female emphasize not only the durability of these forms but extend this design to include many cultural and even political oppositions: the (male) public as against the (female) private, aggressive/peaceful, and competitive/cooperative...

...Second-wave feminism was far more democratic...

...The gender-difference emphasis, which arose to protest the male universal, had produced its own universal that in turn produced a new kind of difference talk: about differences among women...

...But the centrifugal force created by anger against an elite left's universalist claims has had negative consequences as well...

...Feminists have argued that democracy must pervade all sorts of human relationships...

...As Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked in 1890, "What do we know as yet as to what is womanly...

...But there is a cultural feminist version of Difference I talk that makes an alternative mistake, ignoring the formation of gender in a context of male supremacy and conceiving male and female as essential (or at least ahistorical) entities and autonomous of each other...

...the more we honor women's special femininity, the more different men and women become...

...But generally speaking, in both waves of feminism, the androgynous strain dominated in the earlier years and the difference strain came to the fore later...

...But I fear that difference- and diversity-talk are acting as substitutes for more specific and critical concepts such as privilege, contradiction, conflict of interest, even oppression and subordination, as well as obscuring bases for potential cooperation...

...Feminists should be the last to be taken in by the notion 46 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 that scholarship, like society, is an open competitive field, a "free marketplace" of ideas...

...It is a culture that is subordinated and under male culture's colonial, imperialist rule all over the world...

...Gender was a directly transformative idea: through its manipulation not only scholars but also activists and even many women who considered themselves apolitical were able to challenge and change popular thought, daily divisions of labor, power structures, and scholarship too...

...In the early 1970s women's liberation was remarkably optimistic about individual men's ability to support women's aspirations...

...Class "difference" remained the least developed of these forms of diversity, especially inasmuch as these paradigm shifts occurred in an era in which explicitly class-based movements were weak and concepts like working class and upper class, not to mention ruling class, were losing their shared referents...

...That is, the more we treat men and women similarly, the more similar they become...

...The model for representing diversity was additive...

...SINCE THE late 1970s, feminist theorists and scholars have been attacking, subverting, and attempting to dethrone the universalist liberalism of earlier women's-rights advocates who spoke in the name of a unified, homogeneous womankind...

...After about 1975, Difference I became the primary motif, especially in academic women's studies, used to emphasize the many areas in which women have a different voice, a different muse, a different psychology, a different experience of love, work, family, and desire, and argue that recognizing such difference makes the whole human picture different...

...A second feminist tradition, present all along and dominant in the late nineteenth century, celebrates gender—that is, female uniqueness—and downplays the idea of a common human nature...

...Jewish, working-class, and lesbian feminists soon joined the critique...

...As Christina Crosby put it, what was once singular was now plural...

...Because both of these feminist traditions are prescriptive as well as descriptive, prefigurative as well as critical, they can become selfproving, because gender is never given or fixed but always being constructed, revised, recon42• DISSENT /Spring 1999 structed...

...LINDA GORDON is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...

...Elitism was by no means limited to difference feminists, of course, but their tendency to divide the world into male and female spheres and sensibilities created a greater homogenizing pressure within each sphere...

...Both uses of difference have optimistic and THE TROUBLE WITH DIFFERENCE pessimistic, unifying and dividing, meanings...

...There's nothing wrong, of course, with an appreciation of multiple identities and civic associations, but we need to be wary of pluralist fictions about conflict among interest groups who begin from a theoretically equal position on a theoretically level playing field...

...This ideological construct is as distasteful to feminists as to gay rights advocates...

...From that point on, the dominant motif in women's studies and in much multicultural scholarship became "difference," the insistence on a multiplicity of identities and subjectivities among subordinated people...

...Gender contains, feminists might say with Freud, both the triumph and tragedy of humanity, because it inevitably constricts as it reproduces culture...

...Similarly with the two meanings of difference: the more we focus on women's shared experiences, the more they share...

...Such a theory was in fact universally applicable, as all human beings live with several definers of their social place, and this was the socialistfeminist line of thought in the early 1970s...

...This could be called the androgynous strain in feminism because it seeks to reduce gender difference...

...Instead, feminists made lists, trying to specify variation without leaving anyone out...

...These groups have intersected in conflict and in occasional cooperation but always in mutual influence...

...It provided toeholds in women's steep uphill climb to jobs, grants, publications...

...This break with the universalism of an elite feminism following in an Enlightenment tradition represented a considerable advance for feminist theory...

...So the very formation of femininity is inseparable from male supremacy...

...They are opposite meanings in some ways: the more we emphasize differences between men and women, the more we implicitly erase differences among women and among men...

...So from the moment that second-wave feminists began talking about "sisterhood" and generalizing about women, feminists of color criticized this approach...

...In the explosively expanding field of women's studies, scholars began to understand that secondwave feminists sometimes replicated the arrogance of their foremothers in writing sentences that began "Women's domesticity...

...This in turn alienated those women whose social position—for example, as people of color—made it impossible for them not to feel solidarity with their "brothers" and made it easy for the "brothers" to stigmatize feminism as treason...

...So if working-class or Latina or disabled or lesbian women felt uncomfortable, ignored, or insulted in whitedominated feminist discourse, the fault can seem to lie with speakers or organizers who failed to acknowledge diversity...

...It highlights individual attitudes and behaviors...

...Among the relationships avoided by additive thinking are relations among women...

...Yet both, too, impeded the imagining of a larger community without inviting analysis of these social fractures or strategies for how to make them less oppressive...

...The explosion set into orbit an indeterminate number of independent identities traveling in no apparent relation to each other...

...Worse, in both Difference I and Difference II the new multicultural feminism sometimes falls into an uncritical discourse of pluralism, a celebration of diversity...

...And the racism condemned by Difference II often seemed mostly a matter of personal failure to offer that respect, not a matter of social structure...

...The black/white dichotomy sometimes claimed a depth and resonance comparable to the female/male dichotomy...

...This is particularly regrettable in the context of feminism, for one of its main contributions has been to broaden the definition of political power to include many social relations once considered private...

...One constricting effect of the diversity model is that "political correctness" can be taken to require respecting the boundaries of the other categories, not crossing the lines—which hardly promotes a democratic discourse or expands our vision of a good society...

...Just as seriously, difference talk leads us away from specifying the relationships that give rise to gender, racial, class, and many other inequalities and alienations...

...AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay represents my current thinking about some issues I originally addressed in Genders, Spring 1991...

...Statements like that of the Redstockings—"All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy"—may be correct but they seemed pretty naive, at best, to women whose male loved ones were victimized themselves...

...Often identified with Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this tradition protests the gender norms that shrink women's bodies, minds, and spirits by restrictions in law, in the economy, in education, and in culture— restrictions that pigeonhole what women may do and how they should act...

...This conception of "the female" mystifies not only those aspects of gender adapted to male supremacy but also, equally important, those aspects shaped by resistance to male supremacy...

...Many feminist organizations, including academic women's-studies programs, developed antiracist programs that encouraged whites to confess their innermost racist thoughts and feelings—but rarely to study, say, the impact of economic globalization on racial formations...

...Speaking of "gender" got some men to do housework...

...Soon, however, Puerto Rican, Chicana, THE TROUBLE WITH DIFFERENCE Asian-American, and Native-American feminisms challenged the black-white binary...

...yET Difference I talk became, at its extreme, depoliticized...

...One of the weaknesses of "difference" and "diversity" as concepts is that they seem to suggest solutions through mere addition, without looking at patterns of relationship...

...the argument was that interest groups and other civic associations were important to check state power...

...From Frances Beal's early concept of black women's "Double Jeopardy" there arose a black feminist theory that insisted on dual axes of identity, social position, and injustice...

...Nevertheless, in an ironic example of theoreticalpractical miscommunication, the element of "postmodern" theory that translated into common usage was its attack on universalism, and as a result feminist theory seemed to support and even stimulate the development of new identities among groups excluded from both liberal and New Left political theory: racial, ethnic, and religious groups and identities as gays, lesbians, lesbian mothers, queers...

...helped DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 41 THE TROUBLE WITH DIFFERENCE girls play sports and study science...

...Fragmenting universalist assumptions helped reveal previously invisible or even suppressed understandings of inequality and domination...

...The solution was personal re-education rather than structural social change...

...It is not the articulations of many different axes of oppression that is problematic but the way in which these are isolated insights, their authors not attempting to theorize larger historical patterns...

...But many feminists continued to identify this as a uniquely African-American feminist approach...

...Lesbianism was to be conceived as a matter of personal choice and/or innate orientation, and media presentations emphasized how much lesbians were like straights as a means of insisting that they deserved respect and rights...

...I want to argue that the idea or slogan of "difference," and its policy-talk analog, "diversity," serve as inert placemarkers that reduce rather than enlarge analytic power to take in the complexity and trajectory of our world—not the first time that an advance at one historical moment has become limiting at another...

...A single historical "fact" that can be seen as an artifact of difference— say, that a higher proportion of black women than of white women were professionals in the early twentieth century—was created by relationships between black women and men, between black and white women, between white women and men, between white and black class structures...

...Although a dualist model sometimes had the advantage of showing how one set of meanings, attributes, or behaviors helps define the other, specifying relationship among a pluralized collection is more difficult...

...Thus feminists' very passion, ironically, undermined cooperation among women...

...We need to ask for much, much more than merely respecting difference...

...Those who peer at the skies of progressive possibilities sometimes find that no generalizations can any longer characterize what is progressive and democratic and what isn't...

...conceiving of lesbians as merely "different" undercut feminist theoretical understanding of gayness as a challenge to the heterosexual family norm...

...In their anger the newborn feminists not only celebrated women but similarly universalized and essentialized what was male...

...For example, African-American women don't only inherit patterns of work, family, childbearing, and child rearing that are somewhat different from those of white Americans...

...Differences among women, typically racial, reinforce bonds within smaller groups...

...Theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills exposed the ideological functions of the concept: masking power through the fiction of formal equality where there was no substantive equality...

...Gender Difference The most important single theoretical premise developed by second-wave feminism has been the notion of gender...

...Yet the very strength of the first contributed to the development of the second...

...It helped fight discrimination in several ways: it suggested that women's viewpoints were unique and could not be "represented" by men, and that allegedly objective measures of merit could in fact be male in their deep structure...

...the impact was both to confirm to black people their own integrity as a cultural group and also to confirm white feminists' map of American culture as dichotomously white and black...

...The movement was never homogeneous—workingclass, African American, and union women were important among the founders of the National Organization for Women, and black and Latina feminism arose simultaneously with primarily white groups...

...Its primary intellectual sources were civil-rights and New-Left critiques of racism, inequality, the "power structure," and lack of democracy...

...empowered women to alter the terms of their relations with men, to demand equal treatment at work and at school, to win, however partially, greater reproductive rights...

...Diversity talk tends to prescribe respect and recognition as the solution to racism or other ill treatment...

...Difference often implies separation, but these relationships frequently involved proximity...

...The idea of difference contributed to similar multicultural explosions in other corners of progressive and democratic thought and activism...

...In this dualism "black" often meant nonwhite...

...And some solid evidence accrued that some women did indeed have a female style that could enrich and expand institutional possibilities...

...Moreover, the challenge to universalism was not only racial and ethnic...

...or "The womanly ideal of delicacy . . ." or "The family responded to the Depression by . . . ," and in other embarrassing uses of "we" and "the...

...In the last century nothing symbolized this sense of a singular, homogeneous womanhood better than feminists' choice to call their cause the "woman movement" and "woman suffrage," singular...

...many of the same individuals used both (contradictory) arguments...

...The antiracist impulse in Europe and Asia produced postcolonial and subaltern studies, which examine the cultural impact of imperialism, colonial rule, and global commerce as well as of local resistances, and the new cultural forms created by their meetings...

...This had the advantage of making visible women's own agency in the construction of culture and challenging an earlier emphasis in feminist scholarship on women's victimization as the whole story...

...THE NOTION of gender refined two opposed lines of thought within feminism...

...Gender difference called up hopes of community among women—sisterhood...

...Women's-liberation feminists were active participants in civilrights and anti-Vietnam War activism, and developed many projects directed at workingclass women...

...Still, the almost ecstatic enthusiasm elicited by the rediscovery of feminism in the late DISSENT / Spring 1999 • 43 THE TROUBLE WITH DIFFERENCE 1960s and early 1970s gave rise to hyperbolic and overgeneralized analyses...

...other racial minorities were ignored, giving the white-nonwhite distinction a certainty it does not have in the United States...

...In both first-wave (18481920) and second-wave (1960s on) feminism, the two attitudes toward gender can only be separated analytically...

...These were the suffragists who argued for the vote on the grounds that with it women would protect the sanctity of the home and purify society...

...White feminists generalized from their own experience and feminists of color responded by emphatically denying false postulations of sisterhood...

...focusing on building women's culture and women's enterprises rather than challenging male dominance directly...

...This little essay is not intended as another attack on identity politics...

...Discovering shared experiences was the essence of consciousnessraising groups, and it was easy to neglect the experiences of those not present...

...As a well-known early statement of this tendency, the "Fourth World Manifesto," put it: "A female culture exists...

...For several centuries now the feminist project has contained contradictory tendencies: One emphasizes the common humanity of men and women and the relatively unformed "human nature" of infants into whose psyches culture inscribes gender...

...Thus Difference I was an effective tool for combating exclusion, for breaking into male bastions—a political tool...

...Within the New Left, the strong socialist-feminist tendency never argued that male supremacy was primary but always maintained that race and class domination were equally fundamental...

...These patterns arose in the context of relationship to whites, a context that includes exploitation, domination, fear, and exclusion, but also, often, intimacy...

...It is not the numerous foci of identity that are problematic but the solipsism of these identities...

...From this perspective it is a step backward to think about the experiences of white women and women of color, lesbians and straight women, Jews and CathoDISSENT / Spring 1999 • 45 THE TROUBLE WITH DIFFERENCE lies and Protestants, rich and middle class and poor, lawyers and service workers, as merely different...

...Despite recent challenges to the apparently firm distinction between sex (biological) and gender (cultural), showing that even "sex" is an ambiguous category, the widespread understanding of gender as a social construction represented a major development...

...rEMINIST THEORISTS acknowledged these multiple identities and pointed out that binary models were themselves ideological, reflecting and even masking the very belief systems they purported to analyze...

...Furthermore, the replacement of dichotomous difference with "diversity" occurred during a conservative time, when the left was not producing social theories that examined relations of power, respect, distribution, and exploitation...

...At first the Difference II model followed Difference I in adopting another binary: black/ white...