Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, and Agency

The essays in Feminist Politics contest some of the prevailing conceptualizations of identity and difference, as well as the functions of these concepts in feminist political discourse and praxis. Doing so, they amply demonstrate that issues of identity and difference have a central place in contemporary feminist scholarship. The authors of these essays have worked to develop new ways of understanding and living out differences which will both preserve and celebrate them while also fostering the necessary conditions for opening dialogue and forming new coalitions. The intent of these efforts has been to thereby engender imaginative new strategies for the personal, spiritual, and sociopolitical changes that will enable human growth, wellbeing, and flourishing. While the focus of the work represented here is understandably on women, the issues that are raised are given additional urgency, explicitly in some of the papers and implicitly in others, by the situation of their concerns in the context of the world created by the Bush administration. Because that administration has foregrounded issues of identity and difference in ways that are not only inhumane and often inaccurate but dangerous for all of us, the new ways of thinking and acting that are proposed here have a much broader application. Thus these papers truly invite not only feminists but all people to move in new directions. Taken as a whole, this volume represents cutting-edge thinking from an international perspective in these important and pressing areas for feminist research and praxis.