Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.sahcua>
Abstract
`titrebMulticulturalism, antiessentialism, and radical democracy`/titrebThis essay reconstructs the history of feminist debates about “difference” from the late 1960s to the present in order to diagnose current impasses and to point the way beyond them. I chart the shift from a first phase of debate focused on “equality versus difference” to a second phase focused on “differences among women” to a third phase, now underway, focused on “multiple intersecting differences” such as gender, “race”, class, and sexuality. I argue that the current difference debate is at an impasse. Neither of the two most advanced positions, antiessentialism and multiculturalism, can provide a basis for distinguishing democratic from anti-democratic identity claims, just from unjust differences. Neither, as a result, can sustain a viable feminist politics. Both fail to connect a cultural politics of identity and difference to a social politics of justice and equality. I conclude by proposing a new phase of debate about difference aimed at connecting the politics of cultural difference with the politics of social equality.