Thursday, March 31, 2011

3) Maynard, Mary.2001. “Race, Gender and the Concept of ‘Difference’ in Feminist Thought.” Feminism and Race, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 121-33

The stigma of difference may be recreated both by ignoring and by focusing on it. Difference grows from ways in which this society assigns individuals to categories and, on that basis, determines whom to include in and whom to exclude from political, social and economic activities. Both the social and legal constructions of difference have the effect of hiding the view the relationship among people, relationships marked by power and hierarchy. Yet, by sorting people and problems into categories, we each cede power to social definitions that we individually no longer control. Maynard argues that by situating difference at the focal point creates power struggles between various forms of difference, especially in regards to race and ethnicity. She adopts five different understandings of how race as difference can be described and reiterated. The first explanation is in the way language is used, she argues that notions of difference like race are not biological or essential rather they are socially constructed and acted upon as an assumed fixed category. The second explanation is how to comprehend race and gender, she argues that when two constructs of difference in this context gender and race come into contact, race is primarily understood as a construct that augments the level of discrimination and coercion, when in reality race doesn’t make a woman’s life more subordinate compared to others. The third explanation is through the notion of difference; she argues that western feminist scholars are adopting the term difference when referencing the disparities among groups of women, rather than in comparison to the opposite gender. Difference can be adopted in two ways, either understood as the multiplicity between experiences or through a postmodernist perspective regarding the diversity of meanings and uses behind the term. Both these adaptations to comprehending difference tend to focus on oppositions between gender and race. The fourth explanation is how the use of difference can be dangerous, and how the use of ‘us and them’ presents precarious connotations.  The danger of difference is found in how people adopt the term difference to emphasize the experience differentiation between women rather than uniting shared experience.

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