ABSTRACT
As a social movement tendency in the 1980s, the politics of difference has involved the claims of feminist, anti-racist, and gay liberation activists that the structural inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality were not well perceived or combated by the dominant paradigm of equality and inclusion. In this dominant paradigm, the promotion of justice and equality requires non-discrimination: the application of the same principles of evaluation and distribution to all persons regardless of their particular social positions or backgrounds. In this ideal, which many understood as the liberal paradigm, social justice meant ignoring gender, racial or sexual differences among people. Social movements asserting a politics of difference, and the theorists following them, argued that this difference-blind ideal was part of the problem. Identifying equality with equal treatment ignored deep material differences in social position, division of labor, socialized capacities, normalized standards and ways of living that continued to disadvantage members of historically excluded groups. Commitment to substantial equality thus required attending to, rather than ignoring, such differences.
