ABSTRACT
Feminism as a political movement and feminist theory as a field of intellectual inquiry are supposed to take ‘women’ as their central focus of attention. Yet women are all different. Can we speak of something like a unified category ‘women’ when this unity is constantly undermined by divisions of race, nation, ethnicity, class, sexuality, etc., and by differences in the category’s social meaning fashioned in specific times and spaces? One of the most common ways of framing this dilemma in contemporary feminist theory is to argue that holding on to some kind of unified category of ‘women’ is a tactical move that effective politics requires, even while recognising that it is dangerous because of the exclusions that this necessarily entails.
