ABSTRACT
Cultural diversity has become a much-discussed topic. I would like to emphasize that cultural diversity is cultural, that it is a consequence of actions and assumptions which are socially—rather than naturally, genetically—instituted and reinforced. The inequities the recent attention to cultural diversity is meant to redress are in part the outcome of confounding the social with the genetic; so we need to make it clear that when we speak of otherness we are not positing static, intrinsic attributes or characteristics. We need instead to highlight the dynamics of agency and attribution by way of which otherness is brought about and maintained, the fact that other is something people do, more importantly a verb than an adjective or a noun. Thus, I would like to look at some instances of and ways of thinking about othering—primarily othering within artistic media, but also othering within the medium of society, touching upon relationships between the two. Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a norm against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.
