Chapter 29: Feminist Politics of Location

Kathy Davis

Feminist politics of location The present volume represents the ‘state of the art’ of women's and gender studies. The authors have done a remarkable job of mapping the achievements of Western feminism. The handbook shows how contemporary feminist scholarship has developed new ways of thinking about differences between the sexes - from the old distinction of sex and gender to abolishing the distinction and focusing on the performance of gender ( à la Judith Butler) to Judith Lorber's radical plea for a total ‘degendering’ of the social world. The contributions explore the variegated experiences of women of different class backgrounds, ethnicities, ‘race,’ and sexual orientations, paying special attention to their individual and collective histories of struggle. Taken together, they critically interrogate the dualistic and gendered binaries of our Enlightenment heritage (mind-body, culture-nature, White-Black, the ‘West and the rest’), which provide the justifications for everything from masculinist science to unbridled It ...

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