Feminism: Dead Or Alive? 28

IDENTITY Community, Culture, Difference IDENTITY Community, Culture, Difference edited by Jonathan Rutherford LAWRENCE & WISHART LONDON Lawrence & Wishart Limited 144a Old South Lambeth Road Contents LONDON SW8 1XX First published 1990 © Lawrence & Wishart, 1990 Each essay © the author, 1990 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, 7 re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated Preface without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in Jonathan Rutherford which it is published and without a similar A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of condition including this condition, being 9 imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Difference Andrea Stuart Feminism: Dead or Alive? 28 Kobena Mercer Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmoder Politics 43 Frances Angela Confinement 72 Jeffrey Weeks The Value of Difference 88 Pratibha Parmar Black Feminism: the Politics of Articulation 101 Zarina Bhimji Live for Sharam and die for Izzat 127 Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd Simon Watney Printed and bound in Great Britain by Practices of Freedom: 'Citizenship' and the Politics of Billing & Sons, Worcester Identity in the Age of AIDS 157 Lola Young A Nasty Piece of Work: a Psychoanalytic Study of Sexual and Preface Racial Difference in 'Mona Lisa' 188 Interview with Homi Bhabha The Third Space 207 Stuart Hall Cultural Identity and Diaspora 222 In May 1989 Lawrence & Wishart organised a successful event in Biographical notes 238 London which we called 'Changing Identities'. Its purpose, closely tied to the subsequent production of this book, was to begin to think about a new politics for these times - an epoch marked by the cultural, political and economic transformation of British society, creating a new terrain on which the old political Left has looked increasingly lost. Like the event, this book has been written and edited with a relative optimism and a growing sense of political and intellectual coherence, which are welcome antidotes to the despondent years of the 1980s. Both event and book have been part of a process, located within our current interregnum, in which the old politics and identities have been in decline, but the new have still to emerge. In this sense the book describes a transition, rather than offering a definitive new 'line' or position. Yet we hope that it contains glimpses, through that uncertainty, of a new radical-democratic politics. Finally I would like to acknowledge the conversations I have had with the contributors, in particular with Frances Angela, which have helped me think through some of the problems and contradictions associated with the ideas in this book. Jonathan Rutherford (January 1990) 7 A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference JONATHAN RUTHERFORD The old forms of existence have worn out, so to speak, and the new ones have not yet appeared and people are prospecting as it were in the desert for new forms.1 Saul Bellow When I began thinking about difference I was drawn to that 'boy's own' fantasy of Lawrence of Arabia. It didn't surprise me when it reappeared, to much critical acclaim, on the big screen. It wasn't just my own feelings of masculine nostalgia that were pulled in its direction. The film and the myth engage with a man who was grappling with contradictory emotions, loyalties and identities. The desert confronted Lawrence with his sexuality, his manliness and his English ethnicity. His identification with the Arabs and their culture displaced the centred position of his identity as a white man. The story is a compelling image of a postmodern world that is challenging so many of our own certainties and our cultural, sexual and political identities. To the Western European eye, the desert seems an uncanny space, its borders marking out a margin between the habitable and the inhabitable. Yet despite its strangeness it holds a seductive fascination: 'In my case', wrote Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 'the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me'. Here lies the desert as a cultural metaphor: 9 Identity A Place Called Home in representing the margins of our culture and the knowledge and before the abyss of the Other's subjectivity'.3 In Sartre's masculine values that underpin it, it is also the place of their undoing. For and ambivalent attitude to masochism lies the centre's characteristic Lawrence the desert left him neither Arab nor English: 'I had fear of difference - the racial supremacist's fear of pollution and dropped one form and not taken on another'. In a more swamping, the homophobe's fear of contamination and homosexual contemporary setting Baudrillard has commented, 'in the desert one seduction, the masculine taboo of passivity. The centre invests the loses one's identity'.2 Other with its terrors. It is the threat of the dissolution of self that In the hierarchical language of the West, what is alien represents ignites the irrational hatred and hostility as the centre struggles to otherness, the site of difference and the repository of our fears and assert and secure its boundaries, that construct self from not-self. In anxieties. My fascination with Lawrence was that he experienced political terms, it has been the Right which has always appealed to and expressed the disruptive and unsettling effect of the encounter this frontier of personal anxiety. At the heart of its hegemonic of the marginal with its centre. The desert as a metaphor of politics has always been that mobilising of a mass cathexis onto difference speaks of the otherness of race, sex and class, whose issues of racial, sexual and national politics. The Right (and presence and politics so deeply divide our society. It is within their Thatcherism) always have promised strong defences and well- polarities of white/black, masculine/feminine, hetero/homosexual, policed frontiers against the transgressive threat and displacements where one term is always dominant and the other subordinate, that of difference. Even as it claims the universal nature of its constituent our identities are formed. Difference in this context is always identities, its struggle to maintain the cultural, sexual and racial perceived as the effect of the other. But a cultural politics that can dichotomies of Self and Other make and reproduce social formations address difference offers a way of breaking these hierarchies and of domination and inequality. dismantling this language of polarity and its material structures of Paradoxically, capital has fallen in love with difference: inequality and discrimination. advertising thrives on selling us things that will enhance our We can use the word difference as a motif for that uprooting of uniqueness and individuality. It's no longer about keeping up with certainty. It represents an experience of change, transformation and the Joneses, it's about being different from them. From World hybridity, in vogue because it acts as a focus for all those Music to exotic holidays in Third-World locations, ethnic tv dinners complementary fears, anxieties, confusions and arguments that to Peruvian knitted hats, cultural difference sells. This is the accompany change. But as an approach to cultural politics it can help 'difference' of commodity relations, the particular experience of time us make sense of what is happening: it can be a jumping-off point for and space produced by transnational capital. In the commodification assembling new practices and languages, pulling together a diversity of language and culture, objects and images are torn free of their of theories, politics, cultural experiences and identities into new original referents and their meanings become a spectacle open to alliances and movements. Such a politics wouldn't need to subsume almost infinite translation. Difference ceases to threaten, or to identities into an underlying totality that assumes their ultimately signify power relations. Otherness is sought after for its exchange homogeneous nature. Rather it is a critique of essentialism and value, its exoticism and the pleasures, thrills and adventures it can mono-culturalism, asserting the unfixed and 'overdetermined' offer. The power relation is closer to tourism than imperialism, an character of identities. The cultural politics of difference recognises expropriation of meaning rather than materials. both the interdependent and relational nature of identities, their Alongside this promotion of difference in the marketplace there elements of incommensurablity and their political right of nave been attempts to reassert traditional moral and sexual values autonomy. which de-legitimise plurality and diversity, as Western capital tries 'Masochism', wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, 'is characterised as a species to assert a disciplined and disciplining society that will reproduce of vertigo, vertigo not before the precipice of rock and earth, but the logic of capitalist production. Since the late 1960s and Heath's 10 11 Identity A Place Called Home Selsdon Man policies of the 1970 general election the Right has both in our individual subjectivities and our personal relationships. mobilised the family and nation as central themes of its hegemonic Whoever we are, difference threatens to decentre us. In this respect identity. 'The family

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