ABSTRACT
This chapter ponders what might constitute justice, especially in connection with feminism, and it considers one attempt to define feminism as shaped by its (paradoxical) need for a universalist model of justice. There is also consideration of the transnational context: would such a sweeping universalist conception or theory of justice do justice to those who fall outside the circle of people or culture from which it arises and to which it best applies – namely, the West? It then argues against such a characterization by considering a deconstructive account of justice that enables a shift in analysis to the relations of force in authorization, as well as to the openness and instability of global feminism itself as a political discourse. However, such a shift, it is argued, requires something more than a deconstructive vision of justice. This is explored through an analysis of Gayatri Spivak's account of the ethical relation of the translator to the subaltern woman as somewhere between an impossible global justice and the gift of a secret encounter.
