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The ‘Space Between’ or Why Does the Gap between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ Look Like an Unbridgeable Chasm?

Abstract This paper is a reflection on my experiences in teaching ‘Gender in a Postcolonial World,’ based on my book Reorienting Western Feminisms. In this article, I explore how difficult it is to discuss the differences between women without falling into a dualistic contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ I discuss several approaches, including Isabelle Gunning's notion of world traveling and Gayatri Spivak's idea of strategic essentialism. The article concludes that a major way of avoiding dualism is to address issues of difference in specific contexts and by participants being aware (if the political implications of their learning and speech. Is difference good or bad, biological, social, or historical? Is it a weakness or a strength? Should we forfeit a notion of sexual difference on the grounds that all people, men and women, are not essentially different from each other, but merely culturally constructed as different? Can these constructions of masculinity and femininity be undone? (Holub, 1994: 235) …there is no question that the ability to deal with difference is at the centre of feminism's survival as a movement for social change (Gunew and Yeatman, 1993: xxiv). The opposite of equality is not difference, but, rather, inequality (Rita Felski, 1997: 15).