1st Edition

Against Purity Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms

By Irene Gedalof Copyright 1999

    Against Purity confronts the difficulties that white Western feminism has in balancing issues of gender with other forms of difference, such as race, ethnicity and nation. This pioneering study places recent feminist theory from India in critical conversation with the work of key Western thinkers such as Butler, haraway and Irigaray and argues that, through such postcolonial encounters, contemporary feminist thought can begin to work 'against purity' in order to develop more complex models of power, identity and the self, ultimately to redefine 'women' as the subject of feminism.
    Theoretically grounded yet written in an accessible style, this is a unique contribution to ongoing feminist debates about identity, power and difference.

    Introduction PART I Indian complications 1 Women and community identities in Indian Feminisms 2 Agency, the self and the collective in Indian Feminisms PART II White Western feminisms and identity 3 Luce/loose connections: Luce Irigaray, sexual difference, race and nation 4 Female trouble: Judith Butler and the destabilisation of sex/gender 5 ‘All that counts is the going’: Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject 6 Donna Haraway’s promising monsters PART III Against purity 7 Power, identity and impure spaces 8 Theorising ‘women’ in a postcolonial mode

    Biography

    Irene Gedalof is Lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of North London, and an Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick.