There's No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics

Abstract

Fifteen or so women crowded the tiny front room of the women's crisis centre. We sat in a circle, as far as that was possible, propped against cushions on the floor, perched precariously on the rickety sofa or swaddled in the effluent of overstuffed chairs. A facilitator had been imported for the occasion; she started the meeting with a simple exercise that quickly evolved to a type of ritual. The climate in the room became intense, it was an atmosphere the group of us would attempt to recreate in the months that followed. Five years later I can still recall the feelings of that time - a certain tone easily invokes the dynamics we set in motion that evening. As the 'exercise' progressed, each women spoke in turn: 'I am a white, working-class, heterosexual woman'; 'I am a white, middle-class, lesbian Jew'; 'I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual woman and a mother'. The more politically astute would add further categories -'I am a white, middle-class, ablebodied, Anglophone lesbian' - and the facilitator would nod her approval at each innovation. We were meant to be learning about the complex matrix of oppression and privilege and about our individual relationships to it. We were in fact learning a brand of identity politics though none of us would have used that term at the time. The idea was that an understanding of various oppressions and how we were affected by them or colluded with them would make us better counsellors and advocates to the women who sought our services. To some extent this was probably true, but for the most part we manipulated this knowledge within the collective itself. Together we ascribed a moral significance to our individual litanies of oppression and privilege, and though this process was never made explicit, the consequences of it were. A hierarchy of oppression was established internal to the group and the focus of our political work turned inward to address the inequalities among us. Our priorities did not reflect