ABSTRACT
As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, this chapter examines the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs. The concept of the ‘web’ has become a salient metaphor within contemporary critical theory. From Donna Haraway’s ‘webs of connections’ (1990: 191), to Avtar Brah’s ‘complex web of power’ (1996a: 209), to Gilles Deleuze’s web-like proliferation of binary terms (2004/1968), the image of the web has been employed increasingly to indicate the necessity of theorising complex interconnections between various discursive-material entities.1 The web metaphor signifies complexity and multiplicity (rather than linearity, binarism or dialectism) as well as relationality (as opposed to sameness or difference). In this chapter, I explore how, beyond being an evocative metaphor, the idea of a relational web provides a productive analytical framework for teasing out constitutive connections among multiple embodied practices and/or figures in ways that may help us address cultural essentialism without flattening significant historical and social particularities. It also signals the possibility of developing empathetic social connections across cultural and geopolitical contexts. I began this book by acknowledging that feminist rhetorical strategies which
establish cross-cultural similarities between embodied practices (such as ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) can trouble culturally essentialist binaries that pose such practices as fundamentally different and discrete. I argued, however, that cross-cultural continuums and analogues often do not move sufficiently beyond the many problems that culturally essentialist binaries entail. Indeed, I suggested that these cross-cultural strategies risk a range problematic effects which are central, rather than peripheral, to ongoing feminist efforts to work through cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. In their emphasis on commonality or equivalence, the analogue and continuum
approaches often either efface crucial embodied, historical and political particularities or end up reifying culturally essentialist differences. To the extent that comparisons over-privilege cross-cultural commonality and/or invest in it as an analytical end point, they risk redirecting critical attention away from the relationships of power and social antagonism which function to constitute bodies, groups and practices as ‘different’. Comparative strategies can therefore set restrictive limits on the ways in which can ‘know’ and engage with particular embodied practices. They can also defer or close off in-depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism and racism are perpetuated with respect to embodied practices and may in fact reify, rather than disrupt, the racialised hierarchies that anti-essentialist theorists set out to address. In this final chapter, I extend ideas that I have been developing in the book,
as well those that have been percolating in the critical literatures from which my project arises, to propose an alternative relational approach to theorising cultural difference and embodied practice. Using the example of the ubiquitous Euro-American ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery binary, the first part of the chapter seeks to illustrate the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. Drawing on a range of critical feminist, postcolonial and queer literatures, I argue that, rather than seeking to establish how practices of FGC and cosmetic surgery are fundamentally similar, we might more fruitfully unpack some of the discursive social and political processes through which they have been (re)produced in and through one another. The relational web approach I develop focuses on teasing out the constitutive connections that link fetishised figures such as ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ (among other imagined subjects) within a wider relational economy. Unlike commonality, the concept of constitutive connection does not imply the ‘sameness’ or ‘equivalence’ of particular practices/figures, but rather points to the ways in which such discursive-material entities are entangled and interdependent. In this way, a relational approach may enable theorising of social, historical and cultural links, along with disjunctures, without reifying essentialist distinctions or disavowing the possibility of common ground. As I suggest in the second part of the chapter, a web framework may also offer feminist thinkers a valuable pedagogical tool for interrogating and mutually engaging with some of the enduring social investments, assumptions and relations of power that underscore essentialist constructions of cultural difference. The chapter also situates the relational web approach with respect to contemporary ‘new humanist’ and ‘anti-humanist’ discourses, emphasising how its focus on constitutive links avoids assertions of fundamental (human) commonality and points instead to the relational and fragmented constitution of embodied identities, subjectivities and practices. Crucially, while I argue that a relational web approach provides a process
through which the production of salient gendered embodied practices and
figures can be traced with an emphasis on intersectional, historical and contextual relations of power, my objective in this chapter is not to call forth relationality itself as an ‘answer’ to the complex problems of cultural essentialism and comparativism, or an ‘end point’ to anti-cultural essentialist analysis. Rather, my focus is on examining what potentially different and productive questions, concerns and forms of analysis a relational web approach may enable or open up with respect to issues of embodiment, essentialism and cultural difference.
