On metaphors of suffering: mapping the feminist political imagination

Abstract

This article suggest that the contemporary feminist imagination is informed by the ways in which feminist argumentation has drawn upon notions of race, blackness and slavery as approximations of the condition of womanhood. The moral weight that islent by such analyses might be rendered as inaccurate, opportunistic or even racist. However, rathe than a rejection of such arguments as simply 'wrong' (which would involve some mode of evaluation) it is also possible to suggest that, at the same time, one might reread the decisions involved in making such arguments as metaphors; and if metaphors are, as Ricocur suggests, imaginative moves that operate not in spite of but through difference, then these arguments can be regarded as making and marking a rhetorical space that has requently been threatened by the erasure of the very argument it sets out to achieve. Such a reading pulls apart the purity of gendered suffering and exposes the decisions to argue in this mode as moments in the creation of a political community of community, the process of becoming historic, that requires monitoring for its problematic incorporations.