Skillnadens doxa

Abstract

In this article, Rita Felski explores the philosophical inconsistencies as well as the political problems of trying to ground feminism in difference. 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. Felski looks at two influential currents in feminist theory: psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference in feminist philosophy and analyses of the cultural and material differences between women in postcolonial studies. These two fields want, though in dissimilar ways, to radicalize and complicate the notion of difference. Looking at these two areas of inquiry thus provides a good starting point from which to explore the ramifications of alterity, heterogeneity, difference, and the like in feminist thought. One of the aims of the article is to rethink alterity as the supreme goal of feminist theory and politics. Felski does not seek to do away with difference but simply to question the belief that it is the ultimate explanation of how things really are. She offers a description of equality and difference that is pragmatic rather than ontological, that asks what work these concepts can do rather than whether they are true. The common opposition in feminist thought between equality and difference is in fact a false antithesis. The concepts are philosophically interdependent. The pursuit of difference thus returns us inexorably to seemingly obsolete issues of equality and commonality.