Questions about difference are at the heart of many debates within contemporary feminism in the United States. In Transcultural Feminist Philosophy: Rethinking Difference and Solidarity Through Chinese-American Encounters, Yuanfang Dai critically assesses various approaches to the feminist difference critique, arguing that the fact that women experience gender oppression in different forms due to different social and cultural locations does not lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to generalize women's experiences. She thus proposes that we can construct a category of women that captures and respects differences among women and the possibility and the dynamics of what women can be in the future. To challenge the troubling ideology of multiculturalism and its institutionalization, Dai advances the claims of multicultural feminism and the postcolonial feminist critique by arguing that we need to reconceptualize not only culture, but also need to rethink multiculturalism as a framework. Examining Chinese feminist scholarship in transcultural settings, she then proposes a shift to transculturalism and argues that a transcultural approach is mediates assumed tensions between cultural diversity and gender equality. The transcultural approach promises to be a very useful framework by which feminists can explore the conditions of women's collective struggles.
Contents Introduction Part One The "Difference Critique" and the Feminist Identity Politics Chapter 1 Women's Oppression in Different Forms: Against "Inessential 'Womanness'" Chapter 2 Theory of Intersectionality Chapter 3 Unwanted Feminist Identity Politics: Postmodernist Category Skepticism Chapter 4 Women's Identity and the Necessity of Differences Part Two From Multiculturalism to Transculturalism Chapter 5 Reconceptualizing "Culture": Examining Tensions between Multiculturalism and Feminism Chapter 6 Challenging "Multiculturalism": Feminist Multiculturalism and the Ideology of Multiculturalism Chapter 7 Displacing Multiculturalism with an Alternative Framework: A Way to Advance the Postcolonial Feminist Critique of Multiculturalism Chapter 8 The Transcultural Perspective as the Alternative to the Multicultural Approach Part Three Transcultural Feminist Solidarity, Chinese Feminist Experiences, and Transcultural Feminist Philosophy Chapter 9 Transcultural Feminist Solidarity Chapter 10 Looking to the East: Chinese Confucian Philosophy and Feminism Chapter 11 Looking to the West: A Brief History of Theory Development in Contemporary Chinese Feminism Chapter 12 Commentary on Debates and Prospects in Contemporary Chinese Feminist Thinking Conclusion Bibliography About the Author
