White women as burden: On playing the role of feminist “experts” in china

This article explores the problems of international, collaborative feminist research by telling the story of two Canadian academics who embarked on a journey to do feminist research with a group of Chinese academics. The literature warns of the difficulties of collaboration and the dangers of power imbalances that are positional, procedural and representational. In this instance, the Canadians, despite their positional advantages, experienced little power in the planning of the research, feeling themselves as a burden rather than a boon at many points during the process. They analyze the reasons for this, and conclude that the content of their conversation mattered less than the form in which it was delivered. Despite a number of difficulties, the project was of value for the collaborators. For the Chinese, it was a chance for women faculty in less privileged universities to work together, with new resources, on a topic that needed validation. For the Canadians, it resulted in an increased appreciation for the specificity of North American feminism, varieties of Chinese feminism and the contextual nature of research methodologies. The article concludes with a discussion of the value and limits of universities' new emphasis on internationalism and its meaning for feminists with an emphasis on the value of such projects, if appropriately conceived and managed.     

living on; not getting better

The contemporary emergence of the concept ‘debility’, which pertains to a broad swathe of humanity whose ordinary lives simply persist without ever getting better, shares a time span with an acute critique of neo-liberal biopolitics. Where capital has historically relied on a population that through its labour necessarily becomes debilitated, the newer model of understanding references the intrinsic profitability of debility itself. The two dimensions overlap and co-exist, but what I shall pursue here are the implications of recognising that, at the most fundamental level, it is in the interests of neo-liberalism to produce and sustain bodies as debilitated and therefore susceptible to a range of market commodities that hold out the promise of therapeutic interventions into the relative failures of physical, cognitive and affective embodiment. In previous work, I have argued strongly for the inherent vulnerability of all bodies, but in considering here a more overtly politicised context, it becomes possible to readdress the questions posed by Jasbir Puar: ‘which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?’ And at the present moment, writing at a time of imposed austerity, I would add, what, if anything, is lost in the deployment of the term debility instead of disability?     

Relative Responsibilities

Although the feminist debate regarding to the supposed problem of relativism has moved on, there is still a nagging anxiety that the embrace of relativism undermines the feminist project. From an initial fear that questioning the notion of a singular truth would paralyse political action, more recent concerns centre on the ethical and, in particular, on responsibility. But for all that contemporary feminism celebrates fluid differences against the singular and fixed, there remains an acceptability gap between, on the one hand, the interpretative approach and, on the other, what can be broadly referred to as deconstruction. For the former, the concession that both material socio-cultural and historical differences, and ideological constructs, affect the way in which individuals understand and reason about the world is not taken to undermine the primacy and truth-value of a supposedly underlying model of reality. The claim is that preceding such differential constructions, there is a stable and ideally recoverable reality that is the guarantor of true knowledge. In contrast to such a hermeneutic reading of appearance as inherently contingent, Shildrick suggests that the metaconcepts of reality, truth and knowledge are in themselves contingent. It is neither relativism nor pluralism that offers escape from the damaging singularities and exclusions of modernity, but rather the move to a post­modernist concept of undecidability.