ABSTRACT
Difference may well be the sign of our times. In the United States, for exam ple, feminist theories seeking to negotiate the problematics of gender, to come to terms with various essentialisms, and to counter real-world discrim ination have placed difference firmly on the critical agenda. Gay and lesbian studies, too, are centrally concerned with the validity of alternative epistemologies, and thus with resisting coarse constructions of difference that may prove sociopolitically disadvantageous to their communities. And, perhaps most notably, race as a category permeates a good deal of American humanis tic discourse, providing innumerable opportunities for a wide range of reflec tion on difference. There are, as is to be expected, many points of divergence, but if we had to isolate an overriding concern, it may well be the attempt, in Gayatri Spivaks words, to undermine “the story of the straight, white, JudeoChristian, heterosexual man of property as the ethical universal.”1
