from Hypatia Volume 13, Number 2Globalizing Feminist Ethics
ALISON M. JAGGAR
Hypatia vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998) © by Alison M. Jaggar
Permission to CopyYou may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:
Copyright Clearance CenterFor other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923 FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com
The feminist conception of discourse offered below differs from classical discourse ethics. Arguing that inequalities of power are even more conspicuous in global than in local contexts, I note that a global discourse community seems to be emerging among feminists, and I explore the role played by small communities in feminism's attempts to reconcile a commitment to open discussion, on the one hand, with a recognition of the realities of power inequalities, on the other.
Global trade and interaction are not new but their current intensification is unprecedented.1 Local communities have never been completely closed but now their boundaries have become so porous that people speak of community disintegration. Economies have never been entirely self-sufficient but never before has international trade been so crucial to the prosperity and even the survival of local economies. These developments have raised new problems for moral and political philosophy and so for feminist ethics.
Women are located at the center of these contemporary developments. They constitute a large and increasing portion of the labor force in many newly industrializing as well as industrialized countries; they (with their children) constitute 80 percent of the world's refugees; they are trafficked in a world wide prostitution trade; and their bodies are the site of technological interventions designed both to promote and to control fertility. At the same time, women are frequently taken as emblems of cultural integrity, so that defending beleaguered cultures becomes equated with preserving traditional forms of femininity, especially as these are manifest in traditional female dress and practices of marriage and sexuality. Thus, women are situated in the vortex of contending social forces: on the one hand, centripetal tendencies toward increasing globalization and integration and, on the other hand, centrifugal tendencies toward nationalism and fragmentation.
Contemporary moral theory reproduces these tensions, counterposing a universalistic discourse of human rights against approaches such as communitarianism and postmodernism which emphasize the local and so are often construed as relativist. In this context, philosophers' increasing rejection of moral foundationalism makes it difficult to see how conventional and local norms may be subjected to systematic moral critique. My larger project, from which this paper emerges, is to develop an account of practical moral reason that shows how respect for cultural difference may be combined with claims to postconventional moral objectivity. In developing this account, I draw on the dialogical tradition in Western moral theory that stretches from Plato, through Locke and Kant, to Rawls and Habermas, and I take seriously the values that lie at the heart of this tradition, including the values of discursive equality, openness and inclusiveness. In addition to being inspired by this philosophical tradition, my own understanding of practical discourse is also shaped by reflection on the discursive practices of recent feminist grassroots activism in North America.2
As developed by Karl-Otto Apel and Juergen Habermas, classical discourse ethics defines moral justification in terms of universal consensus in conditions of domination-free communication. This definition is often derided as utopian--and so ultimately skeptical--for reasons that include not only practical difficulties of establishing universal discourse but also what appear to be insurmountable difficulties of principle, notably the impossibility of implementing like domination-free communication. Yet even though such problems are even more conspicuous in global than in local contexts, the beginnings of a global discourse community nevertheless seem to be emerging among feminists. These beginnings are most visible in official and semiofficial venues, such as the several UN Conferences on women since 1975 and their accompanying nongovernmental organization (NGO) fora, but they are also evident in a multitude of ongoing interactions among grassroots groups, such as the Network of East/West women and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
One respect in which a feminist conception of practical moral discourse differs from that of classical discourse ethics is that it addresses directly issues of discursive equality and openness in situations inevitably structured by power. This paper begins to explore the role played by small communities in feminism's attempts to reconcile a commitment to open discussion, on the one hand, with a recognition of the realities of power inequalities, on the other.
ILLUSTRATING THE PROBLEM
My own conception of practical moral discourse seeks to reconstruct the norms guiding the discursive practices of many late twentieth-century groups of North American feminist activists. These groups have often limited discursive openness in two related ways. One way is by limiting their agendas: activist groups typically come together around certain moral convictions, such as opposing militarism or violence against women; rather than debating these basic moral commitments, they devote themselves instead to exploring their implications. Unquestioned within the group, such commitments become foundational for groups' moral perspectives. The second way in which groups have often limited discursive openness is by restricting participation in their discussions, excluding individuals who do not share the basic commitments of the group or who do not have ''standing'' because they are outsiders.The exclusion of outsiders or the closure of moral agendas are sometimes de facto but sometimes are matters of explicit and fierce insistence. For example, some prostitutes' groups have emphatically rejected middle-class feminist analyses of them as victims of sexual exploitation; African American women have sometimes asserted that domestic violence and rape by African American men are topics off-limits to European Americans; some lesbian women have sought to exclude heterosexual women from discussing certain lesbian practices; and, outside the West, some North African women have objected to Western feminist criticisms of the practices of clitoridectomy and infibulation. One especially bitter controversy arose around an article co-authored by two Australian women, an anthropologist of European descent and a ''traditional'' Aboriginal woman. This article exposed astronomical rates of violence and rape, including frequent gang-rape, committed by Aboriginal men against Aboriginal women. The truth of the allegations was undisputed, but some Aboriginal women objected that it was inappropriate for this topic to be broached by a white woman, even in collaboration with an Aborigine (Bell and Nelson 1989; Larbalestier 1990; Bell 1990, 1991a, 1991b; Klein 1991; Huggins et al. 1991; Nelson 1991). Closing some debates and excluding some topics from some people's intervention seem to run entirely counter to the ideal of free and open discussion as that has been understood in Western moral philosophy. I shall suggest, however, that a feminist conception of moral discourse may be able to justify such exclusions without denying that ideal and may even do so in its name.
Groups of women who have sought to remove their lives from the critical scrutiny of outsider feminists have offered a number of rationales for their desire. Prostitutes' groups have argued that middle-class feminists are ignorant of the real conditions of prostitute life and some North African women have argued that Western feminists do not understand the role of clitoridectomy and infibulation in African cultures. In both cases, the groups whose practices have been challenged by outsiders allege that the criticism is inadequately informed. Sometimes they also express concern that open discussion of certain issues may have deleterious consequences for their community; for instance, some lesbians worry that drawing attention to controversial lesbian practices may encourage attacks from homophobes and some African American women fear that their community may be divided by discussion of violence inflicted by African American men.
Outsider feminists whose interventions are rejected often remain unconvinced by these arguments.3 Some may respond by asserting their familiarity with the cultures or subcultures in question; others may argue that first-person experience is not authoritative, noting that victims frequently rationalize their abuse, as well as their ''choices'' to remain in abusive situations. The outsiders may also object to what they perceive as misplaced concern for ''the community'' as a whole at the expense of some women within it. They may even argue that ignoring the plight of such women is racist or ethnocentric, insofar as it suggests a moral double standard according to which high levels of abuse and exploitation are regarded as ''culturally acceptable'' for some women but not for others.
In evaluating these difficult and complex issues, it is important to notice that these examples all share some significant features. In each of the foregoing cases, those who seek to protect their lives from scrutiny belong to a group that is socially stigmatized, and/or is a cultural minority, and/or has a history of colonization, while those whom they wish to exclude belong to more powerful or hegemonic groups. Each of the groups whose practices are in question is struggling under external pressure to maintain a sense of self-respect and cultural integrity; and each has been a frequent object of study by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, even criminologists from outside that group. These social scientists have typically assumed that their studies have made them experts on the lives of those studied, whom they have often presented as exotic, as victims, or as pathological.
In this context, some communities' resistance to opening their lives for critical feminist examination from the outside may be interpreted less as an attempt to limit the discursive autonomy of others than as a claim to discursive autonomy for themselves. Women from nonhegemonic groups have good reason to suppose that if their lives were to become the subject of feminist discussion, their own perspectives might be discounted. The views of feminists with professional credentials would likely be taken as authoritative, especially if they were published in scholarly journals, where authors are positioned as experts and those studied become ''informants'' whose opinions are merely data for expert analysis. One critic of the white Australian anthropologist Diane Bell observed that even though Bell's controversial article was officially co-authored with an Aboriginal woman, Topsy Napurrula Nelson, Nelson's words were placed in italics framed by Bell's prose, a device that distinguished Nelson's input from ''the dominant White voice controlling the shape and tone of the academic text'' (Larbalestier 1990, 147).
Objections to the discursive intervention of feminist outsiders do not necessarily depend on any particular hypothesis about the outsiders' motivation. Outsiders may wish to advance their professional reputations by becoming recognized as experts on some group of marginalized women; they may enjoy posing as the rescuers of victimized women; or they may care deeply for the welfare of the women about whose lives they speak. Regardless of the speakers' motivations, the structure and context of their discursive interventions may have the consequence of positioning the subjects of their discourse as less than equal. In these circumstances, discussion of some issues by some feminists may not only mute the voices of other women but even suggest that they are incapable of speaking for themselves. Ironically, it was precisely the recognition of these kinds of oppressive dynamics that led Western women to form the feminist groups in which they developed the sorts of discursive practices that I now call Feminist Practical Dialogue.
Reflection on the previous examples reveals that idealized understandings of practical discourses as politically innocuous exchanges of ideas occurring in some timeless domain are seriously misleading. To address the moral and political issues surrounding empirical discourse, feminists must recognize that practical discussions are historical events with real-life consequences, not all of which may be controlled or foreseen. In addition, we must never forget that empirical discussions are always infused with power, which influences who is able to participate and who is excluded, who speaks and who listens, whose remarks are heard and whose dismissed, which topics are addressed and which are not, what is questioned and what is taken for granted, even whether a discussion takes place at all. These aspects of moral discourse should be considered not only in feminist practice but also in philosophical theory. For instance, philosophers can appeal to them in explaining why inclusive participation and an open agenda may, on some occasions, impede rather than promote unconstrained discussion. Such considerations also help to explain the epistemological indispensability of closed communities of discourse.
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL INDISPENSABILITY OF CLOSED COMMUNITIES
Themes of voice and silencing have been central to twentieth-century Western feminism and by now there exists an extensive feminist literature dissecting women's domination in or exclusion from discourse. One classic discussion is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay, ''Can the Subaltern Speak?,'' in which the author details how ''subaltern'' Third World women have been represented in discourse in ways that have obscured their subjectivity while promoting the interests of the authors of the texts. (Spivak 1988) In Spivak's example, Indian widows immolated on their husbands' funeral pyres in the practice of sati were represented by some British colonizers as victims who must be saved from the slaughter of ''backward practices'' and by some Indian men as heroes loyal to ''Indian'' cultural traditions.4 In both Marxist structuralist and post-structuralist accounts the widows' subjectivities were equally invisible. Meanwhile, Spivak asserts, the subaltern woman remains mute because she herself ''cannot know or speak the text of female exploitation'' (Spivak 1988, 288).Why the subaltern woman cannot speak of her exploitation at first does not appear mysterious; perhaps this is Spivak's rhetorical way of saying that her indigenous language is incomprehensible to intellectuals or that she cannot produce ''texts'' because she is illiterate. But why can't she even know about her exploitation? Even if she is unfamiliar with classic texts of exploitation, such as Marxism, surely she must be aware that there is something wrong with her situation. How can she be content in her oppression? One answer to this puzzle is suggested by Indian feminist Uma Narayan:
Girls (of my grandmother's background) were married off barely past puberty, trained for nothing beyond household tasks and the rearing of children, and passed from economic dependency on their fathers to economic dependency on their husbands to economic dependency on their sons in old age. Their criticisms of their lot were articulated, if at all, in terms that precluded a desire for any radical change. They saw themselves as personally unfortunate, but they did not locate the causes of their misery in larger social arrangements. (Narayan 1989, 267-68)Narayan's words suggest that the subaltern woman's muteness is rooted not in slavish contentment but in her inability to conceptualize the injustice to which she is subjected. Like all diagnoses, this analysis implies the appropriate remedy: what the subaltern woman needs is a conceptual framework, a language capable of articulating her injuries, needs, and aspirations. The existing discourses or texts of exploitation do not provide such a language: even when they promise explicitly to liberate the subaltern, they obscure the distinctive nature of her oppression; indeed, by purporting to speak for her, they position her as mute. In order to articulate her specific exploitation, the subaltern woman must create her own language.
Language is a public construct and its absence is a public, not a private, deficit. Creating a new language is by definition a collective project, not something that can be accomplished by a single individual; if the subaltern woman seeks to enter practical discourse alone, therefore, her experience is likely to remain distorted and repressed. She can overcome her silence only by collaborating with other subaltern women in developing a public language for their shared experiences. She must become part of a group that explicitly recognizes itself as sharing a common condition of oppression--in Marxist terms, a group that constitutes itself as a class for itself as well as in itself. She must claim a collective identity distinct from her identification as the particular daughter, wife, and mother of particular others. Only by creating a collective identity with other women in similar situations, perhaps with other daughters, wives, and mothers, can the subaltern even come to see herself as subaltern and only in this way can she break through the barriers to her speech. Articulating women's distinctive interests requires a language and this, in turn, requires a community. Without either of these, the emergence of counterhegemonic moral perspectives remains impossible.
Small communities, whose members are known personally to each other, have been indispensable to the development of Western feminist moral perspectives. They have enabled Western feminism to offer alternative understandings of social phenomena expressed in a distinct vocabulary that includes expressions like ''sexism,'' ''womanism,'' ''sexual objectification,'' ''date rape,'' ''othermother,'' ''the double day,'' ''sexual harassment,'' ''the male gaze,'' ''mestizaje,'' and ''emotional labor.'' Such communities typically have focused on some specific aspect of what they have taken to be women's subordination and they have taken some beliefs for granted, as given within that group. They may have accepted as given the wrongness of militarism or rape or domestic violence or pornography, or they may have accepted as given the value of lesbianism or peer counseling or woman-produced music or erotica. Assuming some such beliefs as foundational for them, the members of the community then have gone on to explore the implications of these beliefs and to elaborate a distinctive moral perspective. For example, once the moral legitimacy of lesbianism was accepted, lesbians went on to raise questions about why people, especially women, are heterosexual, about the social and political consequences of a norm of heterosexuality, about the ways in which heterosexuality is implicated in Western conceptions of gender, and about prevailing definitions of sexuality and family.
It is not only feminists or even moral thinkers whose systems of ideas have been developed in the context of small personal communities united by adherence to certain beliefs or methods. The history of science is full of accounts of ''invisible colleges'' or groups of scientists working from shared assumptions. David L. Hull calls such groups ''demes,'' by analogy with local populations of organisms sufficiently isolated that they play an important role in biological evolution (Hull 1988, 433-34). The notion of ''schools'' of artists, such as the Bauhaus, is commonplace and philosophers have frequently worked in groups such as the Jena Circle (to which Hegel belonged), the Vienna Circle, the Frankfurt School and the Oxford philosophers. All these small, usually face-to-face communities functioned as intellectual crucibles in which systems of ideas were explored and elaborated.
Helen Longino notes that progress in science would be impossible unless certain questions were closed to debate at least temporarily. She writes:
The knowledge-extending mission of science requires that its critical mission be blocked. Were the critical dimension of science not controlled, inquiry would consist in endless testing; endless new proposals and new ideas would be subjected to critical scrutiny and rejected. (Longino 1990, 223)Developing systems of moral and political ideas also requires that certain premises be held constant. By uniting around certain shared assumptions, moral and political communities provide intellectual space in which members are freed from pressure continually to defend their premises and explain their technical vocabulary. Because they are typically small and the members known personally to each other, communication within such communities is likely to be informal and rapid. Half-formed ideas may be tried out and sometimes may be developed by members literally thinking together.
When the ideas involved are heretical by the standards of the larger society, such communities provide emotional as well as intellectual support for their members. Patricia Hill Collins asserts that a ''realm of relatively safe discourse, however narrow, is a necessary condition for Black women's resistance'' (Collins 1990, 95). A single dissenting individual is likely to be labeled crazy, if not wicked, and, in the absence of support, she may even come to regard herself as wicked or crazy. María Lugones observes, ''unless resistance is a social activity, the resister is doomed to failure in the creation of a new universe of meaning, a new identity, a raza mestiza. Meaning that is not in response to and looking for a response fails as meaning'' (Lugones 1992, 36). When others share the dissenter's views or endorse her methods, the conditions exist for developing an oppositional identity that individuals often find validating, even emancipatory. Sarah Hoagland writes that ''coming out (as a lesbian) was, for me, coming home. I experienced the sensation of landing and centering. It is lesbians who inspire me, lesbian energy which enlivens me....'' (Hoagland 1988, 3) Within the safety of her community, the dissenter may feel that finally she has the freedom to ''be herself.'' She no longer has to be on guard or to dissemble. Finally, she is free to be ''authentic,'' to say--and therefore discover--what she ''really'' thinks. Paradoxically, however, the same features that enable small moral communities to liberate the thinking of their members often simultaneously operate to limit that thinking.
MORAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL HAZARDS OF CLOSED COMMUNITIES
While it is liberating for the members of closed communities to be freed from having to defend their basic assumptions, their thought is also restricted by the constraints on what may be questioned within those communities. In scientific communities, shared assumptions often remain hidden and only idiosyncratic beliefs are challenged (Longino 1990, 233). The same is true in moral and political communities of right, left, and center, all of which appeal to foundational values often thought to be enshrined in documents taken as authoritative, such as the Bible, the Communist Manifesto or the U.S. Constitution. In consequence, intragroup disagreement is typically cast as debate over how to interpret the community's foundational values or texts.Although it would be impossible to develop systems of moral and political ideas unless certain assumptions were temporarily taken for granted, it is equally true that, if those assumptions are never opened to challenge, the system based on them becomes a form of dogmatism. Members of the community find themselves forced to express questions and disagreements obliquely, perhaps even to suppress them entirely, at best to articulate them in the approved language, larded with references to the approved texts. People on the outside may regard the community as a cult, especially if the ideas to which it is committed are heretical or unorthodox.
All communities exert pressure on their members to conform to the prevailing interpretation of their unifying assumptions and values. These pressures are likely to be especially intense in small oppositional communities beleaguered by pressures from the larger society. Fearful of assimilation or defeat, such communities may regard internal conformity as a necessary condition of their survival and, in these circumstances, dissent may appear as betrayal. Community resistance to challenge and change is also likely to be stronger when the members' self-definitions are centrally bound up with the community as constituted, since dissent challenges more orthodox members of the community to modify their cherished beliefs and threatens values integral to their sense of who they are. When members regard their identities as inseparable from the community, they may also fear that change in the values of the community will not only affect the way the community is perceived by outsiders but also reflect on the members personally. If the community has a leader or leaders, they are likely to feel their authority threatened by dissenters, a challenge they are especially likely to resist if their work with the community is central to their life activity.
Most small communities encourage conformity through formal or informal sanctions, even if these are no more than chilliness toward or ridicule of certain ideas. Often, such communities also seek to strengthen group loyalty by developing a sense of superiority in relation to the larger society. Community members are encouraged to view themselves as an enlightened elite, dismissing those who disagree with them as sinful, ignorant, or victims of false consciousness. This perception may be used to justify different standards of behavior towards those within and those outside the community. The sense that the community comprises an in-group enjoying a privileged religious, scientific, political, or moral perspective also strengthens the community's ultimate weapon for enforcing conformity; namely, the threat of expulsion. Not merely excluded from the group, a nonconformist may be defined as unworthy to belong to it. She is labeled a heretic or a pagan, a quack or a charlatan, a traitor, a renegade or a counterrevolutionary, no longer a ''true'' feminist or communist, unprofessional, or un-American.
The threat of expulsion is the ultimate sanction enforcing conformity in most communities. How far the threat is successful in suppressing dissent depends on how much community members fear exclusion and this fear varies according to the type of community in question, its relationship to the larger society, the needs it satisfies for its members, and the dependence members feel on that community. If the members of a religious community believe that excommunication will result in an eternity of hellfire, they have an extremely powerful incentive to conform; so do members of a professional organization for whom expulsion will result in the loss of their occupational licenses. By contrast, the prospect of expulsion from a neighborhood swimming club is likely to be unpleasant but not especially frightening, because club membership does not represent the only way members can fulfil their needs for exercise and social affiliation.
When belonging to a particular community is central to a member's sense of her own identity, the threat of expulsion is likely to loom extraordinarily large. Leaving the community may represent losing connection with the religious, moral, political, or cultural values that have given meaning to her life. It may represent losing her emotional home, her sense of belonging, her colleagues, comrades, friends and lovers. Such fears are especially intense for members of racial/ethnic and oppositional communities, because no comparable alternatives are likely to be available. This is one reason why community loyalty and discipline are often especially strong among ethnic and cultural minorities and on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.
Some communities may seek to forestall challenges to their beliefs or values by limiting diversity among those they admit, excluding people thought likely to hold disruptive opinions or values or even people with an unacceptable image. Ethnic or cultural minorities may refuse to admit ''half-bloods'' or people who have been ''Westernized''; lesbian communities may refuse to admit bisexuals; gay groups may exclude drag or leather queens. Conscious policies of exclusion reinforce the tendencies towards cultural homogeneity that exist in all small communities whose members rely on each other for emotional as well as intellectual support (Young 1990, 235). Policing the boundaries of the community serves to maintain the ''purity'' of its beliefs and values by insulating its members from the challenge of alternative thinking (Phelan 1989).
Endemic to closed communities are a number of closely related epistemological and moral dangers. They include the dangers of repression and denial of autonomy, dogmatism, intellectual dishonesty and self-deception, elitism, and partialism. For these reasons, I contend that, although temporarily closed communities are indispensable for the development of systematic alternatives to hegemonic moral systems, the alternatives they produce eventually must be subjected to wider moral evaluation. In order to increase the degree to which their moral agreements are justified, communities ultimately must open their basic commitments to critical scrutiny from the outside.
GLOBALIZING FEMINIST DISCOURSE
For contemporary Western feminists to open our basic commitments to critical scrutiny requires considering or reconsidering perspectives we have hitherto excluded. This may mean that we reconsider the views of those Western antifeminists who assert that a woman's place is in the home and that date rape and harassment are figments of paranoid feminist imaginations. It may also mean that we take account of Nonwestern perspectives, especially those ignored or demonized by Western media. Most immediately and urgently, however, it requires that Western feminists learn to hear and consider respectfully the views of Nonwestern women from the so-called Third World, including women whose voices are muted, even within their own nations.5 Most especially, we should pursue critical engagement with those members of Nonwestern communities who share some of our own commitments but who may have disagreements or different perspectives on particular issues. Critical dialogue between members of communities that have significant differences but still share some basic concerns is likely to be more immediately useful in promoting reassessments of our own commitments and refinements of our own views than ''dialogue'' with those whose commitments and worldviews are far removed from our own. Dialogue with those who share many of our values and commitments is also practically indispensable for making social change within democratic contexts.Some would challenge the possibility of global feminist dialogue on the grounds that feminism is not a worldwide movement. Such a view has often been held by Western feminists, who have assumed that the lot of Nonwestern women can be improved only through the introduction of Western feminist ideas. Chandra Talpade Mohanty observes that Western feminist images of the ''average third world woman'' have often portrayed her as leading ''an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being 'third world' (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, family-oriented, victimized, etc.).'' Mohanty contrasts this representation of Nonwestern women with the implicit self-representation of Western women ''as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions'' (Mohanty 1991b, 56).
Nonwesterners as well as Westerners have often portrayed feminism as an exclusively Western phenomenon. Kumari Jayawardena observes,
The concept of feminism has... been the cause of much confusion in Third World countries. It has variously been alleged by traditionalists, political conservatives and even certain leftists, that feminism is a product of ''decadent'' Western capitalism; that it is based on a foreign culture of no relevance to women in the Third World; that it is the ideology of women of the local bourgeoisie; and that it alienates or diverts women from their culture, religion and family responsibilities on the one hand, and from the revolutionary struggles for national liberation and socialism on the other. (Jayawardena 1986, 2)The belief that feminism is primarily a Western phenomenon, ironically shared by both Nonwestern antifeminists and many Western feminists, is in fact mistaken. Kumari Jayawardena documents how women in Asia and the Middle East have fought collectively against their subordination from the late nineteenth century on, though Nonwestern women have been less likely than Western women to form autonomous women's organizations and have been more likely to express their feminism in the context of nationalist struggles, working-class agitation and peasant rebellions (Jayawardena 1986). Uma Narayan writes that the pain that motivated her Indian feminism ''was earlier than school and 'Westernization,' a call to rebellion that has a different and more primary root, that was not conceptual or English, but in the mother-tongue'' (Narayan 1997, 7).
Chandra Talpade Mohanty observes that ''No noncontradictory or 'pure' feminism is possible'' (Mohanty 1991a, 20) Today, the world beyond the industrialized West proliferates both small groups and large, government-sponsored organizations dedicated to improving the status of women and, in Nonwestern as in Western contexts, the beliefs of these groups reveal tensions between conservative and radical ideas. For instance, some Nonwestern movements assuming the label ''feminist'' have failed to address forms of domination affecting the lives of poor and peasant women or to challenge the ideology of the middle-class family; meanwhile, other Nonwestern movements concerned with increasing the self-reliance of poor women and enlarging their choices nevertheless refrain from direct challenges to male privilege (Newland 1991, 130) or eschew the label ''feminist'' because they perceive it as a white, middle-class movement narrowly defined as a struggle against gender discrimination (Johnson-Odim 1991, 313). Everywhere in the world, feminism is maligned and contested.
Whether or not they call themselves feminist, innumerable groups outside the West are currently working to promote what Maxine Molyneux calls women's ''gender interests.'' Molyneux defines gender interests as ''those that women (or men for that matter) may develop by virtue of their social positioning through gender attributes'' (Molyneux 1985, 232). She distinguishes practical from strategic gender interests. Women's practical gender interests emerge directly from their concrete life situations and include such immediately perceived necessities as food, shelter, water, income, medical care, and transportation. Molyneux notes that demands for these ''do not generally... challenge the prevailing forms of subordination even though they arise directly out of them'' (1985, 232-3). Indeed, addressing women's practical gender interests may even reinforce the sexual division of labor by reinforcing the assumption that it is women's responsibility to provide for their families. By contrast, women's strategic gender interests are defined as necessary to overcoming women's subordination. According to Molyneux, they may include all or some of the following, depending on the social context:
the abolition of the sexual division of labor; the alleviation of the burden of domestic labor and childcare; the removal of institutionalized forms of discrimination such as rights to own land or property, or access to credit; the establishment of political equality; freedom of choice over childbearing; and the adoption of adequate measures against male violence and control over women. (Molyneux 1985, 233)It is groups working to promote women's strategic gender interests that are most likely to share the basic commitments held by many Western feminists.6
Because of their potentially challenging nature, local grassroots groups dedicated to addressing women's strategic gender needs in the Third World are largely unsupported either by national governments or bilateral aid agencies (Moser 1991, 109-10). They may be seen as communities of resistance comparable in many ways to Western feminist communities. Like some Western feminist groups, which may open women's health centers or run automobile or home maintenance workshops, many Nonwestern groups find that they can develop the skills and motivation necessary for addressing women's strategic gender interests by working immediately on women's practical gender interests. One example is the Forum Against Oppression of Women which, in 1979, began campaigning in Bombay to draw attention to issues such as rape and bride burning but soon shifted its focus to housing, which was an especially acute problem for women deserted or abused by their husbands in a culture where women by tradition had no access to housing in their own right. Organizing around homelessness raised awareness of the male bias in inheritance legislation, as well as in the interpretation of housing rights, and ultimately ensured that women's strategic gender needs related to housing rights were placed on the mainstream political agenda (Moser 1991, 109).
Even if we grant a significant base of similar commitments between Western feminists and Nonwestern women committed to advancing women's strategic gender interests, many obstacles exist to dialogue that is genuinely egalitarian, open, and inclusive.7 Still, these are not insuperable obstacles to the possibility of global feminist discourse.
WHO MAY PARTICIPATE IN GLOBAL FEMINIST DISCOURSE?
If feminism is committed to inclusiveness, one might reasonably infer that everyone concerned about ending the subordination of all women is eligible to participate in global feminist discourse. To draw this inference, however, is to forget our earlier recognition that discourse is not an ahistorical abstraction but rather a series of discrete encounters that occur at specific places and times among specific individuals, who stand to each other in a variety of specific social, including power, relations. Even though I contend that equality, openness, and inclusiveness are central norms of feminist moral discourse, we have seen that they are not incompatible with limiting some people's access to some discussion about some topics on some occasions.In putting the ideals of openness and inclusiveness into practice, it is necessary to remember both the social constitution of moral rationality and the vast power inequalities between the present Western and Nonwestern worlds. The first point entails that it is reasonable to exclude from specific moral discussions people who seem to share no common convictions on the basis of which rational discussion could occur; such people indeed exclude themselves. The second point suggests that it is sometimes reasonable for a beleaguered moral community to exclude members of more powerful communities, especially when the beleaguered community is addressing certain internal or domestic issues, such as the earlier example of Aboriginal violence against women. Members of subordinated groups may not wish to discuss problems affecting their community with members of more powerful communities, especially if the powerful communities already claim cultural superiority. Criticism of one's own cultural practices in the hearing of outsiders may be experienced as a form of betrayal, and the presence of outsiders who are perceived as more powerful may inhibit discussion among insiders. That the ideal of unconstrained discourse may sometimes permit or even require members of dominant groups to be excluded from the discourse of subordinated groups does not entail, of course, that it is equally legitimate for the members of dominant communities to exclude members of subordinated groups from their discussions, especially when the dominant groups are discussing practices that have a significant impact on the subordinated groups.
Even though there may be reasonable grounds for excluding members of dominant groups from specific occasions of discourse, outsiders' concerns about the situation of women in specific cultures are not necessarily illegitimate. When cultural relativism is espoused by the relatively powerless and impoverished, it may be a means of expressing resistance to cultural imperialism; when it is advocated by the wealthier and more powerful, however, cultural relativism is just as likely to express imperial arrogance as an ethnocentric insistence on the absolute superiority of the norms of the wealthier culture. For instance, it is certainly presumptuous for Western feminists to assume that they are already aware of the most important problems faced by women outside the West, or that they are experts on how those problems should be solved, but it does not manifest genuine cultural respect to assume without question that Nonwestern women are content with lives that Western women would find constraining, exhausting, or degrading. Conversely, it is equally legitimate for Nonwestern women to raise questions about the moral permissibility of practices widely accepted by Western feminists, practices that might include sex work or the integration of women into the military. Global feminism requires concern for women in other communities and nations and raising questions about the moral justifiability of foreign practices is very different from peremptorily condemning those practices, let alone intervening unilaterally to change them.
In an interesting discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of insiders and outsiders who engage in social criticism, David Crocker argues that insiders are not exclusively privileged in morally evaluating their own cultures. Insiders enjoy the advantages of understanding the cultural meaning of their own society's practices, of being able to express their evaluations in language accessible to their community, and of possessing undisputed standing for engaging in social criticism; but they also suffer characteristic disadvantages, such as possible ignorance of alternative ways of seeing and doing things and susceptibility to social pressures that may inhibit their freedom to express their criticisms. Outsiders suffer the disadvantages of unfamiliarity with cultural meanings, the perception that they are not entitled to intervene discursively in the affairs of another culture, and the possibility of ethnocentric arrogance or its inverse, romanticization of the culture in question. But they also enjoy the advantages of external perspectives, which may reveal things hidden from insiders, familiarity with novel moral ideas, and relative social freedom to say what needs to be said (Crocker 1991).
Despite the difficulties and dangers of cross-cultural moral discourse, it is not impossible for outsiders to participate in evaluating the internal practices of another culture. Advocates of women's strategic gender interests in both the West and the Third World therefore should not regard questions and criticisms of our own cultural practices by our foreign counterparts as inevitably presumptuous or unwarranted but should view them rather as moral resources. For feminism to become global does not mean that Western feminists should think of themselves as missionaries carrying civilization to primitive and barbarous lands, but neither does it mean that people concerned about the subordination of women in their own culture may dismiss the plight of women in others. At least on the level of morality, global feminism means that feminists in each culture must re-examine our own commitments in light of the perspectives produced by feminists in others, so that we may recognize some of the limits and biases of our own beliefs and assumptions. Of course, the moral evaluations of any cultural practice must always be ''immersed'' rather than ''detached,'' taking account of ''the practices, the perceptions, even the emotions, of the culture'' (Nussbaum and Sen 1989, 308). Elsewhere, I suggest that a feminist conception of discourse, with its emphasis on listening, personal friendship, and responsiveness to emotion, and its concern to address power inequalities, is especially well suited to facilitate such an immersed evaluation.
We have seen already that the more conformist members of any community are likely to challenge dissenters' status as insiders; in a Third World context, attempts have sometimes been made to discredit the voices of African feminists or Western-trained medical personnel when they have been raised in opposition to traditional practices such as female genital surgery, portraying such critics as no longer authentic members of their communities. But community membership is partly, though not entirely, a matter of self-definition and it is rarely clear who is entitled to define others as inside or outside moral communities or by what process. All communities change and there is no reason to identify a community with its most conservative elements or to assume that individuals who dissent from some of their community's moral beliefs thereby renounce their membership in that community.
Recognizing the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of disagreement within as well as among moral communities complicates our hitherto simple model of insiders and outsiders. For instance, if we were to determine that issues that appeared to concern only a single group might be assessed solely by members of that group, so that only prostitutes could evaluate prostitution and only African women could discuss clitoridectomy and infibulation, we would immediately encounter new problems of identity, authorization, and legitimation. Who is entitled to speak for a group as a whole and whence derives her authority?8 Can ex-prostitutes speak for prostitutes who are currently working? Can an African woman who has received a Western education fairly represent other African women? There is no reason to suppose that African women, or prostitutes, or lesbians, or African American women all think alike, and dissenters in these groups may be silenced by women who claim to speak for the whole. It is interesting to notice how the urban Aboriginal women who participated in the Bell controversy delegitimated the voice of Topsy Naparrula Nelson by labeling her ''traditional,'' even though it could well be argued that Nelson was better qualified than her Western-educated challengers to speak for other Aboriginal women precisely by virtue of her traditional identity. Some Aboriginal women who had no opportunity to participate in the published debate might have agreed with Nelson in welcoming the intervention of an outsider whose professional credentials enabled her to be heard while their own voices were ignored.
Most people actually belong to more than one community and as the world becomes increasingly integrated through international trade, population migration, and electronic communication, communities are increasingly likely to overlap and individuals to be multicultural or multilingual. Poet Meena Alexander, born in India, educated in North Africa and Britain, currently living in New York City, describes herself as a ''woman cracked by multiple migrations.''
Everything that comes to me is hyphenated. A woman poet, a woman poet of color, a South Indian woman poet who makes up lines in English, a postcolonial language, as she waits for the red lights to change on Broadway. A Third World woman poet, who takes as her right the inner city of Manhattan, making up poems about the hellhole of the subway line. . . .'' (Nair 1991, 71)In the circumstances of the contemporary world, even women who never physically leave their communities of origin are increasingly likely to evaluate their own lives in light of what they know about the situation of women in other cultures--though it remains true that Nonwestern women are likely to know much more about Western cultures than Westerners about Nonwestern cultures. When external influences operate through a local response to things learned elsewhere, Nussbaum and Sen argue it is still an internal rather than an external evaluation of the practices of a given culture. They contend that ''criticizing the position of women in, say, today's Iran by reference to freedom enjoyed by women elsewhere is no more 'external' than reference to the position of women in Iran's own past'' (Nussbaum and Sen 1989, 321).
Although cultural communities are not fictions, they are set increasingly in a larger global context in which moral traditionalists often bemoan the impossibility of banishing external or foreign influences. Not only do many direct forms of economic and political intervention exist but, when global communications are so rapid and extensive, the sheer existence of alternative ways of life itself becomes a moral intervention. Once again, it must be noted that the external pressure for change is much stronger on Nonwestern than on Western cultures and that Western economies and politics inevitably will undermine some aspects of Nonwestern cultures while reinforcing others. Because nothing seems likely to prevent these eventualities, it is especially important for Western feminists to seek ways of being allies to Nonwestern women who are seeking to affect these developments so that they may promote rather than undermine the strategic gender interests of women in their communities.
WHAT IS ON THE GLOBAL FEMINIST AGENDA?
Western feminists have often assumed that priority in international feminist discourse must be given to what they perceive as horrific Nonwestern practices such as polygamy, the sex-selective abortion of female fetuses, female seclusion, arranged and child marriage, unilateral divorce, brideprice and bride burning, female infanticide and, currently the most popular topic of all, so-called female ''circumcision'' or female genital surgery. The last, in particular, has now become a stock example in Western classroom discussions of moral universalism versus cultural relativism and consideration of this issue has generated an extensive literature on topics such as discursive incommensurability and moral relativism.Nonwestern women naturally resent what they regard as a sensationalized Western focus on non-Western marital and sexual practices.9 Western discussions are typically predicated on the assumption that female genital surgery is morally unjustified, thus framing the issue as one of balancing the threats to the health and welfare of Third World women against the evils of maternalism or cultural imperialism. A related problem is that so much focus on these practices encourages Western feminists to regard themselves as missionaries spreading the civilizing word of feminism, while simultaneously positioning Nonwestern women as backward, barbarous, and victimized. Finally, Western discussions of female genital surgery and similar Nonwestern practices often misleadingly homogenize Nonwestern communities and ignore the existence of indigenous forms of dissent.10
Regardless of the circumstances in which it may become legitimate for outsiders to involve themselves in the domestic affairs of another community or nation, our increasingly integrated contemporary world does not lack issues that affect women more globally. Some cluster around the worldwide phenomenon of gendered violence against women; this phenomenon was explored at a global tribunal of nongovernmental women's organizations that met in Vienna in 1993 in conjunction with the Second World Conference on Human Rights to urge that violence against women be recognized as a violation of human rights, as well as to highlight the connections between the murder, torture and sexual coercion and abuse of women and their economic vulnerability. Many other issues are much less comfortable for Western feminists to address, since discussion may reveal that most Westerners are on the wrong rather than the right side of the moral divide. Central to these uncomfortable questions is the justice of the global system itself, a question that has been addressed directly by few Western feminists, especially feminist philosophers.
There are many ways in which what happens on one side of the world affects women on the other; even if Third World women's oppression cannot be reduced to imperialism, it nevertheless exists in a context of economic domination reinforced by Western military interventions, either directly or by proxy. Matters of international feminist concern therefore include not only explicitly gendered issues, such as efforts by Western agencies to include Third World women in ''development'' or to control their fertility by linking so-called aid with prohibitions on abortion or insistence on contraception; they also include less evidently gendered issues about the nature of development and the forces that currently define it.
Most pressing among these issues may be the debt owed by the Third World to the West. During the late 1960s and 1970s, when interest rates were low, the Third World engaged in massive borrowing to finance economic and social development. By the end of the 1970s, with interest rates rising, the Third World had increasing difficulty paying the interest on its loans and a world debt crisis resulted. Since 1982, severe ''structural adjustment'' policies have been imposed on the Third World by Western-controlled financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, whose primary concerns are to ensure that the debt to Western banks be serviced. These institutions' insistence on export-led development in the Third World and on sharp reductions in the economic and welfare functions of Third World states resulted, as early as 1986, in a net annual outflow from the Third World to the West three times as large as the amount received in aid from all Western sources. This hemorrhage of Third World wealth has inevitably had catastrophic consequences for the living standards of most Third World women, though it has benefitted Third World elites (George1988, 1992).11 Related issues of global feminist concern include plant relocations by multinational corporations from the West to the Third World, multinational extraction of Third World resources and, even more generally, Western conceptions of development and patterns of consumption (Mies 1986; Shiva 1988; Mies et al 1988; Enloe 1990; Mies and Shiva 1993; Scott 1996). These provide a context for discussing issues such as environmental degradation in both the Third World and the West (Shiva 1988); the trade in heroin and cocaine (George 1992); militarism (Enloe 1990); tourism, including sex tourism (Enloe 1990); population control (Hartmann 1987; Jacobson 1990; Dixon-Mueller 1993); and the international traffic in women.
Western and Third World women are not affected equally by recent changes in the world economic order: Third World women are generally affected more adversely than Western women. A tiny minority of Third World women and a much larger proportion of Western women benefit from these changes, at least in some respects; but in both ''worlds'' the poorest women suffer most. In both''worlds,'' moreover, the contemporary structure of the world economic order affects the lives of women differently from--and generally more harshly than the way it affects men's lives. This is why these superficially ungendered matters actually are issues of the most urgent feminist concern.
IS THERE A GLOBAL FEMINIST DISCOURSE COMMUNITY?
Many Western accounts of moral rationality invoke idealized conceptions of moral community.12 Idealizations offer simplified theoretical models that are often illuminating but may also mislead. My own project of developing a feminist conception of practical moral discourse is motivated by the conviction that the idealized communities postulated by many Western moral philosophers obscure several crucial features of empirical moral discourse, including considerations of social power.Some authors have suggested that global feminism should be understood in terms of an ''imagined community'' (Mohanty 1991, 4; Ferguson 1995). This expression gained its contemporary currency from Benedict Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, which describes the myths and practices used by builders of modern nation-states to create a sense of common national identity and patriotism among disparate peoples (Anderson, 1983). Drawing on Anderson's insight that all communities are bound together by a shared conception of their history and traditions, ideals and values, Ann Ferguson suggests that thinking of global feminism in terms of an imagined community might inspire individual feminists to see themselves as part of a global sisterhood. Ferguson emphasizes that such identification must be more than a fantasy, requiring engagement in actual meaning- and value-making rituals with women who are not of one's own national origin (Ferguson 1995, 385). Margaret Walker, however, worries about the hazards of imagining a global feminist community. ''Imagined communities are seductive because they yield real psychic comforts, powerful feelings of belonging and mattering; imagined communities are irrelevant or dangerous because they distract our attention from actual communities'' (Walker 1994, 54).
Frequently overlooked features of actual communities include their fluidity and internal heterogeneity. The boundaries of empirical communities are shifting, permeable, and frequently contested; empirical communities are often riven by dissent and their members often belong simultaneously to other communities. Ignoring these aspects of empirical communities encourages what Uma Narayan calls ''cultural essentialism,'' that is, images of national and cultural contexts as ''sealed rooms, impervious to change, with a homogenous space 'inside' them inhabited by 'authentic Insiders' who all share a uniform and consistent account of theirinstitutions and values'' (Narayan 1997, 33). ''Cultural essentialism'' has often been used to serve colonial purposes but Narayan observes that today it is sometimes adopted uncritically by Western feminists in well-meaning efforts to recognize ''Difference.'' Narayan argues that cultural essentialism is problematic not only because of its empirical inadequacy but because it promotes sharp oppositions which, like all binaries, over value one pole while disparaging the other. Cultural essentialism typically draws contrasts between Western and Nonwestern cultures. One version assigns to the ''West'' a commitment to such values as liberty and equality, despite innumerable examples of Western subjugation and inequality, while portraying such appalling but exceptional practices as sati as central to ''Indian'' culture (Narayan 1997); another version accepts a romanticized picture of Nonwestern cultures as spiritual and harmonious while representing Western culture as exclusively materialist and genocidal. Cultural essentialism reifies selected differences between ''East'' and ''West,'' and in doing so exaggerates the difficulties of discourse between feminists from each ''world.''
Other dangers of imagining a global feminist discourse community include the temptation to imagine some transnational feminist counterpublic, within which varying local interpretations of women's subordination receive final and authoritative adjudication. This could encourage acceptance of a model of moral rationality, according to which local communities generated distinct moral perspectives that would be assessed by ''the'' global community and perhaps finally ratified by a consensus of all feminists. Such a model would be misleadingly simple and mechanistic, relying on a neopositivist distinction between ''discovery'' and ''justification'' while ignoring the inevitably provisional nature of feminist agreements. Finally, the notion of imagined community might distract feminists from recognizing the real and continuing inequalities of power both within and among communities. Walker notes the danger of
responding to an imagined (international or global) community of women or of feminists, while failing to take account of, and so responsibility for, the many ways our actual national and cultural communities make the imagined community simply impossible, and the invocation of it irrelevant, if not insulting. (Walker 1994, 54)Despite the real dangers of imagining communities, I suggest that they be taken not as conclusive objections to any feminist imaginings of community but rather as warnings against inventing romanticized discursive utopias. If all communities are imagined, in the sense that they depend on a shared self-conception, then reinventing and reimagining communities becomes a crucial political task for feminists at the local, national, and global levels (Narayan 1997). In imagining a global feminist discourse community, however, we must avoid generating feminist versions of the naïvely apolitical idealizations produced in mainstream moral theory; for instance, we must avoid premature postulations of a global sisterhood. Instead, we must recognize that global feminist discourse communities are not philosophical or political fantasies but real entities that already have begun to exist. Innumerable feminists are engaged already in discussing issues that cross national borders and they are increasingly cooperating in working to address these issues. ''The'' global feminist discourse community is not singular, because global feminist discourse occurs in multiple and overlapping networks of individuals and communities and with varying and changing agendas. Indeed, it is a community in the making and, in this sense, it is not only both ideal and imagined but continually being reimagined. Feminist imaginings offer ideals toward which to aspire; imagining a global feminist discourse community that seeks constantly to be more inclusive, open, and equal may serve as a heuristic for feminist moral discourse and a basis for feminist political action.
NOTES
1. This paper draws on several sections of my book in progress, Sex, Truth and Power: A Feminist Theory of Moral Reason. I read the first version of this paper at an invited symposium of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in March 1997; the topic of the symposium was ''Cultural Relativism and Global Feminism,'' and I thank its organizer, Dean Chatterjee. I read the second version at SOFPHIA and I thank all those who participated in the discussion, especially my introducer, Bat Ami Bar-On. Many people have offered valuable comments on the ideas presented here but in preparing this version I am grateful for help from Ann Ferguson, Sandra Harding, Jim Maffie, Linda Nicholson, and Margaret Walker. Special thanks go to Uma Narayan, who has discussed these issues with me over several years and who went carefully and sympathetically through an originally rambling draft, providing extremely helpful suggestions for organizing and focusing it.2. For a first account of my conception of feminist practical discourse, see Jaggar 1995.
3. Some insiders also remain unconvinced. A good example of an insider critique of exclusionary views can to be found in Crenshaw 1997.
4. Spivak notes both that the British ''grotesquely mistranscribed'' the names of the women and that sati actually translates as ''good wife'' and is a common name for Indian girls.
5. Terminology is a problem. I am especially interested in the possibility of dialogue between feminists from the wealthy industrialized or postindustrial capitalist nations, located mainly in Western Europe, Australasia, and North America, on the one hand, and, on the other, women from the poor rural or industrializing nations, located mainly in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Some people refer to each side of this divide as North and South respectively, but I avoid this usage here because ''North'' is often taken to include Japan and possibly Central and Eastern Europe and ''South'' to include Australasia. Instead, I choose to contrast Western feminisms--the Eurocentric feminist traditions of North America, Western Europe, and the Antipodes--either with Nonwestern feminisms, even though this usage linguistically privileges the West; or with Third World feminisms, even though the Second World no longer exists.
6. One recent study of global feminist activism is Amrita Basu's Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective (Basu 1995).
7. One question confronting those who seek global feminist dialogue is whether conceptual and moral incommensurability make moral discourse impossible across cultural boundaries. I have no space here to address this question, but I argue elsewhere that incommensurability in moral perspectives does not entail mutual incomprehension sufficient to make moral dialogue impossible. Of course, that people can communicate with each other in principle does not at all guarantee that they understand each other in practice.
8. An excellent discussion of these issues is Alcoff 1991-92.
9. It has sometimes appeared to me that prurience is one factor encouraging this focus. For instance, a recent prize-winning ''news'' photograph portrayed a young woman examining herself after female genital surgery. She surely thought she was unobserved and the angle of the photograph suggested that the photographer was hiding in a tree with a telephoto lens. In my view, the photograph not only objectified and exoticized the young woman but grossly invaded her privacy.
10. In 1994, South Asian women's groups in Canada protested a Canadian doctor's willingness to abort female foetuses for Indian Canadians. The doctor defended himself by saying that he would be guilty of ''cultural arrogance'' if he criticized the practices of another ethnic community but his critics called his attitude racist, saying that sex selection was not inherent in South Asian cultures.
11. The social consequences of these policies may be summed up in a single figure from UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) which estimates that half a million children die every year as a direct result of the debt crisis. The suffering and death of these children, a disproportionate number of whom are girls, obviously affects women's lives much more severely than men's; it is primarily women who struggle to care for these children, who cope with the malnutrition-caused disorders of the children who survive, and who bear more children at the cost of their own health and sometimes their lives.
12. For instance, Kant contends that a necessary condition of moral agency is membership in a community of equals, but he views this not as a specific empirical community but rather an idealization, an imagined transhistorical community comprising all rational beings. John Rawls's community of parties in the original position is also a thought experiment that is explicitly unrealizable. Habermas's communicative ethics is apparently more naturalistic in postulating an empirical discourse community but, because this community is defined in terms of conditions that are inevitably counterfactual, I would argue that it, too, turns out to be an idealized community. At first sight, communitarianism appears to be even more naturalistic than discourse ethics because it posits a variety of historically specific communities that have emerged organically and are characterized by adherence to distinctive moral traditions. I would contend, however, that communitarianism deals also in idealized communities because it works from a romanticized and essentialist vision of community.
REFERENCES
Alcoff, Linda. 1991-92. The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique 20: 5-32.Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: New Left Books.
Basu, Amrita, ed. 1995. The challenge of local feminisms: Women's movements in global perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Bell, Diane. 1990. Reply [to Huggins et al.]. Anthropological Forum 6(2): 158-65.
------. 1991a. Intraracial rape revisited: On forging a feminist future beyond factions and frightening politics. Women's Studies International Forum 14(5): 385-412.
------. 1991b. Letter to the editor. Women's Studies International Forum 14(5): 507-13
Bell, Diane and Topsy Naparrula Nelson. 1989. Speaking about rape is everyone's business. Women's Studies International Forum 12(4): 403-16.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. New York: Unwin Hyman.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1997. Intersectionality and identity politics: Learning from violence against women of color. In Reconstructing political theory: Feminist perspectives, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Crocker, David A. 1991. Insiders and outsiders in international development. Ethics and International Affairs 5: 149-173.
Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. 1993. Population policy and women's rights. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferguson, Ann. 1995. Feminist communities and moral revolution. In Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
George, Susan. 1988. A fate worse than debt. New York: Grove Press.
------. 1992. The debt boomerang: How third world debt harms us all. London: Pluto Press.
Hartmann, Betsy. 1987. Reproductive fights and wrongs: The global politics of population control and contraceptive choice. New York: Harper and Row.
Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. 1988. Lesbian ethics: Toward new value. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies.
Huggins, Jackie et al. 1991. Letter to the editor. Women's Studies International Forum 14(5): 506-7.
Hull, David L. 1988. Science as a process: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jacobson, Jodi L. 1990. The global politics of abortion. Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute.
Jaggar, Alison M. 1995. Toward a feminist conception of moral reasoning. In Morality and social justice: Point/counterpoint, ed. James P. Sterba. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Jayawardena, Kumari, 1986. Feminism and nationalism in the third world. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Johnson-Odim, Cheryl. 1991. Common themes, different contexts: Third world women and feminism. In Third world women and the politics of feminism. See Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991.
Klein, Renate. 1991. Editorial. Women's Studies International Forum 14(5): 505-6.
Larbalestier, Jan. 1990. The politics of representation: Australian aboriginal women and feminism. Anthropological Forum 6(2): 143-157.
Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as social knowledge: values and objectivity in scientific inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lugones, María C. 1992. On borderlands/La frontera: An interpretive essay. Hypatia 7(4): 31-37.
Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour. London: Zed Books.
Mies, Maria, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof. 1988. Women: The last colony. London: Zed Books.
Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres. 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991a. Cartographies of struggle: Third women and the politics of feminism. In Third world women and the politics of feminism. See Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991.
Mohanty. 1991b. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Third world women and the politics of feminism. See Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991
Molyneux, Maxine. 1985. Mobilization without emancipation? Women's interests, the state, and revolution in Nicaragua. Feminist Studies 11(2): 227-54.
Moser, Caroline. O. N. Gender planning in the third world: Meeting practical and strategic needs. In Gender and international relations, ed. Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Nair, Hema N. 1991. Bold type: The poetry of multiple migrations. Ms. January-February.
Narayan, Uma. 1989. The project of feminist epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern feminist. In Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
------. 1997. Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and third world feminism. New York: Routledge.
Nelson, Topsy Napurrula. 1991. Letter to the editor. Women's Studies International Forum 14(5): 507.
Newland, Kathleen. 1991. From transnational relational relationships to international relations: Women in development and the International Decade for women. In Gender and international relations, ed. Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha and Amartya Sen. 1989. Internal criticism and Indian rationalist tradition. In Relativism: Interpretation and confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Phelan, Shane. 1989. Identity politics: Lesbian feminism and the limits of community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Scott, Catherine V. 1996. Gender and development: Rethinking modernization and dependency theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying alive: Women, ecology and development. London: Zed Books.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1994. Global feminism: What's the question? APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 94(1): 53-54.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
IU Press Journals |
More about Hypatia |
Library |
Advance |
Copyright |