Introduction

Have white Western feminists become any better at maths since Donna Haraway set us the sum quoted above almost a decade ago? Thinking about the differences between women while developing alternative theoretical models of the self, self-other relations, identity and agency, has proved one of feminism’s greatest challenges. How do we maintain the focus on ‘women’ that is feminism’s theoretical and political project, while keeping open the borders we necessarily draw around that category? In particular, can feminists keep open a space in which to consider the intersections of sex, gender, race, nation and the ‘embarrassed et cetera’in constituting identities (Butler 1990:143),

while holding on to a category ‘women’ that is sufficiently coherent to form the basis of effective theory and politics? Recognising that these intersections exist and need to be taken into account is not a particularly new insight for white Western feminist theory. It is almost twenty years since the growing critiques of theory offered by black and non-Western feminists meant that ‘white women […] discovered (that is were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category “woman”’ (Haraway 1991:157). When de Lauretis evokes feminist theory ‘in a postcolonial mode’ in the passage quoted above, she is arguing for feminist theory that acknowledges that non-innocence of the categories ‘woman’ and ‘women’ in two ways. First, in recognising that there is no pure site of identity organised around a single axis of gender or sexual difference, feminist theory needs to problematise the apparent coherence of the category of ‘women’ by considering the multiplicity of positionings with which women contend. Second, in recognising that there are no pure power-free sites from which to speak and act, feminists need to be attentive to the workings of power differentials between particular groups of women, within their own theorisation and politics (de Lauretis 1990:131).