House Of Difference Research Articles

Feminism for the 99% or Solidarity in the House of Difference? Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Theory

Intersectionality is often understood to exist primarily as a corrective to other emancipatory theories rather than as a theory in its own right. Social reproduction theory (SRT), a strain of Marxist feminism exemplified in this article by contributors to the volume Social Reproduction Theory – Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression published in 2017, is characterized by a self-understanding that involves incorporating intersectional insights as a reaction to Black feminist interventions. In this narrative, intersectionality itself becomes obsolete, serving first and foremost as a step on SRT’s dialectical journey to becoming a better theory. Allegedly undertheorized intersectional frameworks constitute an ever-present foil for SRT’s self-image as an emancipatory theory of the capitalist social whole. This narrative is problematized on multiple levels in this article. SRT and its depiction of intersectionality are summarized in the first part of the paper. The second part demonstrates, on the one hand, that a historicization of intersectionality as ‘intervening’ into Marxist feminist theories, adding an intersectional perspective to feminist analysis of capitalism, ignores the formative role of analyses of Black women’s position as working subjects within overarching capitalist structures in intersectional thought. On the other hand, SRT's narrative occludes practical and theoretical implications of a framework that explicitly theorizes resistance from the margins. Building on this critique of SRT’s understanding of intersectionality, the third part develops an intersectional notion of solidarity, thus showing that the ostensibly seamless integration of intersectional insights into SRT obfuscates a potentially fruitful tension between the two frameworks pertaining to their respective understandings of solidarity and social transformation.

Ethos of Diffraction: New Paradigms for a (Post)humanist Ethics

…the very house of difference rather [than]the security of any one particular difference.Audre Lorde Zami.1How tolive a world of difference(s), a world in/as ongoing differentiation, in such ways t...

Racial Camouflage: Thinking Race Apart From Sexuality: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article uses Adrienne Harris's (this issue) “The House of Difference, or White Silence” as a jumping-off point to think about the overlap between a queer of color critique and the poststructuralist methodology of relational psychoanalysis that Harris proposes. Although queer of color critiques have not tended to draw on psychoanalysis, they do provide ways to understand the epistemological construction of race. As such, reading Harris in conjunction with Chandan Reddy (2011), this article attempts to find a method for understanding race according to an epistemology that is separate from sexuality. Drawing on Harris's discussion of the unconscious and Reddy's analysis of amendments, this article attempts to make legible some of the nonoverlapping space between race and sexuality.

Why Not?—Or How to Home in on the Sound of White Silence: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

As Adrienne Harris (this issue) highlights in this rich, intersectional analysis of the psychosocial harms sanctioned and perpetuated by “white silence,” a negative speech act shaped by the surgical and subliminal power of white racial consciousness, we, especially today, of “postracial” globality, cannot ignore its “tragic limit,” its pretextual self-verbalization: how white bleaches white actively, preemptively, blocking the liminal voice of acknowledgment. My response further highlights and contextualizes the discursive noise of white silence by linking it to the white “epistemology of ignorance” among others. This way, we can also see, quite vividly, how relational psychoanalytic thinking and postmodern theorizing translate each other. Such is how the inside-outside dyadic and dynamic, common to both strands of thinking, begins to shift its gears in the able hands of Harris, whose microaural attention to primarily visual experiences such as racial encounters remains instructive.

Troubling Whiteness: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article focuses on Harris's (this issue) understanding of racialized subjectivity as a socially constructed phenomenon where fantasies about race are transmitted intergenerationally. I was raised as a “white” South African and I had two vivid associations to Harris's proposal that a “psychose blanche,” an invisible repository of unsignified, racially inflected thoughts, feelings, and selves exists at the heart of “whiteness.” In both cases I recalled a scene from my youth where I was taught that whites in apartheid South Africa deserved punishment and would receive this “come the revolution.” These lessons were crucial building blocks in the formation of my racialized subjectivity, and I describe and interrogate them in an attempt to add further variety and color to the landscape that Harris so deftly draws as she resignifies her “whiteness.”

The House of Difference, or White Silence

In this article I track three ways of confronting the question of whiteness and its attendant problematic of racism. I look at two personal episodes one involving inheritances from white explorer forebearers and the place of racism in fetishized objects and second in the institutional difficulties within psychoanalysis in finding ways to speak about race and the dilemma of being a beneficiary of racism. Finally I look at the hidden racism in a much lauded psychoanalytic article, Joan Riviere's (1929) “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” and in the light of these three problems speculate on “whiteness.” I argue that the intergenerational transmissions of guilt and disavowal together leave a blank psychic space that makes an authentic expression of racial consciousness and genuine reparation currently difficult and certainly, even if well intentioned, partially compromised.

‘New living the old in a new way’: home and queer migrations in Audre Lorde's Zami

This essay looks back to an older queer of colour text, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that rethinks narrow formulations of the relation of queer and diasporic subjects to the space of ‘home’ before these debates emerged in queer diasporic criticism. Drawing on critics who have suggested that queer migrations entail remaking rather than leaving home, most notably Anne-Marie Fortier and Gayatri Gopinath, I argue that Zami challenges idealized conceptions of home and belonging without abandoning these concepts altogether. My analysis starts by showing how Lorde, departing from the Anglo-American tradition of the lesbian Bildungsroman, queers the ancestral homeland and the childhood home through a kind of translation that demonstrates the dynamic relationship between ethnicity and sexuality in female queer diasporic narratives. It then turns to the lesbian community as theoretical home and traces the process of ‘making home’ exemplified in Zami. Rather than being a straightforward project, this requires continuously attaching home to, and detaching it from, relationships, communities, and places or, in Lorde's words, living in the ‘house of difference’. In reading Lorde's biomythography through the theoretical lens of queer diaspora, my essay seeks to keep open the text's capacity to speak beyond its historical moment: Zami which has been typically read as a work that serves the ‘convenient’ function of ‘making vivid a Black lesbian's position in the world’ looks forward to theorizations of queer diasporas and offers important insights to questions of home and un/belonging.

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

Book reviewed in this article:LESLIE IRVINE, Codependent Forevermore: The Invention of a Self in a Twelve Step GroupHOWARD KIMELDORF, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union MovementKATHLEEN A. LAHEY, Are We “Persons” Yet? Law and Sexuality in CanadaMIRIAM SMITH, Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality‐Seeking, 1971–1995WINNIE LEM, Cultivating Dissent: Work, Identity, and Praxis in Rural LanguedocEVA MACKEY, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in CanadaJULIAN V ROBERTS AND DAVID E COLE (eds.), Making Sense of SentencingPETER SCHWEITZER, Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness

The house of difference: cultural politics and national identity in Canada

The house of difference: cultural politics and national identity in Canada

"The very house of difference": Zami, Audre Lorde's lesbian-centered text.

Locating the feminist subject at the intersection of shifting social groups, or "homes," allows me to explore the connections between concepts of home and identity in Audre Lorde's "biomythography," Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. While Lorde's writing attends to the complex intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as the prologue to the text makes apparent, it also testifies to the "naturalness" of lesbianism as the ground of writing, thinking, and acting. In Lorde's text, the lesbian body figures neither as an essential or fixed identity nor as the site for a unified conception of community or home, but rather, as a paradigm for a new kind of writing--one which inhabits the very house of difference.

"The Very House of Difference": Race, Gender and the Politics of South African Women's Narrative in Poppie Nongena

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and