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Article Excerpt
Abstract: This essay calls for a redefinition of unity in feminism. Recognizing that feminisms are many and diverse, while also identifying the common goal across feminisms of strengthening women's agency, the author draws from Bakhtin to introduce feminism as polyphonic. Whether our different feminist voices are concordant or discordant, they feed one another, inform one another, and help shape one another. If we are to embody a commitment to global multi-voiced feminism, then we must actively examine strategies for coping with the friction emerging from our own and others' feminist voices and .from the interactions between them. The problem of masculinist monopolies on truth is not solved by replacing them with feminist versions of the same, but rather with a polyphony of truths rising .from multiple feminist voices. The dialectical tensions that result will produce a complex but vibrant body of ideas that we can each inform and critique and emulate.
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Feminist living is an ongoing, even relentless negotiation. It is ever evolving, always involving, occasionally resolving, seldom absolving. It is complex and complicated, an "incessant achievement," to borrow Rawlins' (1992) terms. This is so even within the seemingly manageable confines of our own minute worlds--our own living rooms, villages, classrooms, urban centers, bedrooms, margins, collectives, identities. It is even more relentless and incessant when we move beyond these confines to make more room in our thinking for ever broadening articulations of feminism that can speak to increasing audiences across the globe. And further, those audiences speak back and challenge what we thought were already expansive feminist vocabularies. As feminists, we are being charged with finding ways to hear multiple, divergent and even discordant voices with clarity and resonance. We can only do so if we can retrain ourselves to hear the cacophony in new ways, sometimes to allow for a little discord, other times to focus on underlying rhythms.
Although differences and ironies and clashes have always been part of feminist thought, so also has been the desire, at some level and sometimes many levels, to minimize them and the threat they seem to pose to our sense of unity. We have not always been committed to amplifying feminism's polyphony, or multivocal intonations. We are afraid of not feeling unified. We are afraid of not appearing unified. We see the risks of division as simply too great. Feminism has proven to be a global shapeshifter and though we acknowledge and perhaps even celebrate its perpetual evolution, we are simultaneously threatened by it. We can easily recite catchy phrases like "unity in diversity," but many feminists are truly struggling to feel unified with so many others who embody feminisms so different from their own. It is time to reconceptualize unity and solidarity, and begin to see "the unity of utterly heterogeneous and incompatible materials--and the plurality of consciousness-centers which are not reduced to a common denominator" (Bakhtin, 1973, p. 13) and by so doing amplify and resonate with feminism as polyphonic. It is wholly unnecessary to construct feminism as a single voice in order for it to function as resounding. In fact "the essence of polyphony," as Bakhtin (1973) explains, lies "precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony," (p. 17) or monologue (p. 5). I submit that a significant step toward understanding how feminism can be multi-voiced and still a powerful global force begins by grappling with its immediate, relational, and dialectical dimensions. We can get to a place where we can embrace a "unity of oppositional processes" in feminism, to use Brown, Wemer, & Altman's (1998) phrase, if we are willing to consider that sometimes contradictions need to be reconciled, and sometimes we need to reconcile ourselves to the contradictions. The harsh reality of our time is that, as DeFrancisco, LaWare, and Palczewski (this issue) argue, "Seeing women as fully human continues to be a radical concept" (p. 100). Perhaps our common goal as feminists across the globe is to normalize this concept. The strategies each of us uses in our own realms, from our own standpoints, to accomplish our different feminist goals, function in the same way as those used by Women in Black in Berkowitz's study: they both connect and separate us. Feminists are uneasily positioned between the universality of a call like "sisterhood is global" (Morgan, 1984) and the cautionary recognition, as Lotz (this issue) articulates, that erasure of difference has racist, classist, heterosexist, and other implications for our lives. Our understandable "fear of constructing false universals," can make "collective action seem impossible" (DeFrancisco et al., p. 105). Yet without attending to the very real differences between various modes of feminist living, and perhaps especially the "material living conditions of non-Western women" (Diaz, this issue, p. 10) we can use neither what brings us together nor what sets us apart to clarify the full humanity of women because we will not have honored it ourselves.
Feminist Living As Relationship
This special issue represents an effort to construct polyphonic feminism. Authors speak in broad and abstract terms like gender mainstreaming public policy, the implications of standing in solidarity with...
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