Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts

Abstract

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

Deepening, broadening and re-asserting a postcolonial interrogative space in organization studies

“…These negative consequences are even more pronounced when gendered effects are included. However, the broad domain of gender studies and feminist theory, and the particular domain of women in the global economy, has received only limited attention by postcolonial organizational scholars, despite the important work of Third World (Mohanty, 1984(Mohanty, , 2003 and transnational (and other) feminists (Acker, 2004;Mendoza, 2002;Schutte, 1998) within the humanities and in adjacent areas of MOS (Calás and Smircich, 2010;Chandrasekara, 2009;Fernandez-Kelly, 1994). Third World and transnational feminist scholarship has much to offer postcolonial scholars: It entails an anti-capitalist critique and a suspicion of, and resistance to, the corporatization of global life; it offers a critique of Western, First World feminism and its universal categorization of women, whilst also offering support for both general and specific portrayals of women's domination in the global economy and their resistances to it; it pays attention to intersecting experiences of gender, race and class, and the androcentric construction of the postcolonial nation-state.…”

Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

“…Consider Ofelia Schutte's (2000) plea in favour of acknowledging 'incommensurable speaking positions': her insistence on the need to refuse the imperialism, indeed the epistemic violence, involved in superimposing the familiar upon the 'strange' and suppressing the leftovers. She reminds 'us' of how those outmoded, tacitly presumed 'centricities' work, in their imperialistic assumptions of human and circumstantial sameness, to standardize and naturalize ways of knowing, thereby blunting the effectiveness of such public and private (self)-criticism as Baier advocates.…”

Identidades esencializadas/violencias activadas

“…En esos casos, la situación de la mujer blanca, clase media, heterosexual, etc., funciona como la «norma» a emular y -como señala Ofelia Schutte-la implícita aceptación de tales estereotipos hace que entablemos relaciones con un «otro imaginario»; no con quien realmente es. Se trata de una operación que niega e invisibiliza al «otro concreto» con el que en verdad construimos cada día lo cotidiano 49 . 3.…”

“…Es decir que, en tanto comparten experiencias, exclusiones, proyectos, políticamente entendida, la «identidad» es el primer elemento organizativo; en otras palabras, es la base de las «políticas de la identidad». Estos movimientos, en consecuencia, deberían contribuir a socavar las estructuras simbólicas (materiales) que reducen a las mujeres a un lugar de opresión, perpetuándolas en situaciones de hecho o en procesos que reducen sus oportunidades 32 . Cualquier movimiento anti-discriminación actúa directamente sobre tales estructuras, en tanto son éstas las que sostienen el lugar de adscripción diferenciada, inferiorizada y de exclusión que limita fácticamente el ejercicio de los derechos que el universal les garantiza.…”