ABSTRACT

One significant challenge faced by second-wave feminists to the integrity of their social justice agenda has come from women outside the dominant cultures of Europe and America: women of colour, women from non-English-speaking backgrounds, women from the developing world, women from racial and cultural minorities, diasporic women, and indigenous women. For these critics, feminism is critically unaware of its own racial and ethnic biases. Its arguments concerning the universality of patriarchal oppression and the centrality of sex and gender based inequality have either ignored or failed fully to recognise the place of cultural and racial difference alongside gender as determinants of the lives of many women. In addition, Euro-American feminism was seen to bypass the difficult question of the role that women in dominant racial/cultural groups play in the oppression of women from non-dominant racial/cultural backgrounds, and to lack a theoretical framework sufficient to analyse and resist the intersecting oppressions of gender, race, and ethnic difference. The last fifteen years has seen feminism transformed by perspectives of feminists outside dominant Euro-American cultural and ethnic groups, as well as the development of theorisations of difference that are inclusive of issues of race and ethnicity.