How to communicate with "the other" who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations. This paper builds on existential-phenomenological and poststructuralist concepts of alterity and difference to strengthen the position of Latina and other subaltern speakers in North-South dialogue. It defends a postcolonial approuch to feminist theory us a basis for negotiating culturally differentiated feminist positions in this age of accelerated globalization, migrution, and displacement. This essay will address the issue of understanding cultural differences in the context of cross-cultural communication and dialogue, particularly those cases in which such communication or attempted communication takes place between members of a dominant culture and a subaltern culture. From an examination of these issues we can perhaps draw some ideas that will permit us to reach a fuller understanding of cross-cultural feminist exchanges and dialogues. The reason for focusing on the topic of cross-cultural communication is that recently, I have become increasingly aware of the levels of prejudice affecting the basic processes of communication between Anglo-American and Latina speakers, as well as the difficulties experienced by many Latin American immigrants to the United States. It seems to me that in these times of massive prejudices against immigrants and of extraordinary displacements of people from their communities of origin, the question of how to communicate with "the other" who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations and interaction. If the question before us is how to frame the conditions for the possibility of a global feminist ethics-or whether such an ethics is indeed possible-I see no better place to Hypatia vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998) 0 by Ofelia Schutte I will take into account recent methodological developments regarding the concept of cultural difference as represented in postcolonial feminist theory. Working against the background of the West's history of colonial enterprises and its exploitation of other societies and cultures, postcolonial theory, in its various manifestations, pays special attention to issues of language, class, racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender differences, and to the justification of narratives about the nation-state.* Postcolonial feminist theory, in turn, directs its attention to the lives of women and to the tensions affecting women whose voices appear in national narratives and accounts of diasporic migrations. At stake in these "post" theories is a certain loss of innocence with regard to narratives of identity because of a more critical awareness of the regulative power such narratives have in defining who we are, who we aren't, and who others are and aren't.' The regulative power of narratives of identity is something with respect to which we are, to some extent, complicit, but we are also

How to communicate with "the other" who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations. This paper builds on existential-phenomenological and poststructuralist concepts of alterity and difference to strengthen the position of Latina and other subaltern speakers in North-South dialogue. It defends a postcolonial approuch to feminist theory us a basis for negotiating culturally differentiated feminist positions in this age of accelerated globalization, migrution, and displacement. This essay will address the issue of understanding cultural differences in the context of cross-cultural communication and dialogue, particularly those cases in which such communication or attempted communication takes place between members of a dominant culture and a subaltern culture. From an examination of these issues we can perhaps draw some ideas that will permit us to reach a fuller understanding of cross-cultural feminist exchanges and dialogues. The reason for focusing on the topic of cross-cultural communication is that recently, I have become increasingly aware of the levels of prejudice affecting the basic processes of communication between Anglo-American and Latina speakers, as well as the difficulties experienced by many Latin American immigrants to the United States. It seems to me that in these times of massive prejudices against immigrants and of extraordinary displacements of people from their communities of origin, the question of how to communicate with "the other" who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations and interaction. If the question before us is how to frame the conditions for the possibility of a global feminist ethics-or whether such an ethics is indeed possible-I see no better place to Hypatia vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998) 0 by Ofelia Schutte

The distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality does not allow for sufficient attention to be given to the question of non‐normative heterosexualities. This paper develops a feminist critique of normative sexuality, focusing on alternative readings of sex and/or gender offered by Beauvoir and Irigaray. Despite their differences, both accounts contribute significantly to dismantling the lure of normative sexuality in heterosexual relations—a dismantling necessary to the construction of a feminist social and political order.

No abstract

No abstract