ABSTRACT

This chapter explores some of the possibilities of insight which arise from an internal politics of emancipation within feminism. In the contemporary era of multiply contested oppressions, feminism has been forced to lose its innocence. Feminism has had to discover its partiality in a context where its insistence on the primacy of gender oppression is incommensurable with the emphases of emancipatory movements oriented to different axes of oppression. Feminism indeed has developed an internal politics of difference, a politics of contestation in respect of dominant and marginalized voices within feminism. An economic approach to politics occludes the universalism of politics as it has been defined by Jacques Ranciere. The contestatory subject is also reconstituted as selves who are participant in the politics of Australian feminism. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of ‘the Bell debate’ as an instance of an emerging politics of difference within Australian feminism.