The Pedagogy of Difference: Co-producing Feminist Consciousness across Borders

Abstract

How has a movement built on the consciousness of sisterhood become so fragmented between the end of the 20th and into the second decade of the 21st century? As different political tendencies, widely varying economic conditions and cultural dissimilarities emerged in global struggles to achieve diverse visions of women's and gender equality, the current feminist movement appears to be characterized by chasms between the east, west, north and south rather than viewed as a movement whose basic tenets are parallel across racial, geographic and social barriers. By looking at lived examples of confrontations, and through a deliberate process of self-reflexive questioning, this paper looks at what elements might sustain the global nature of the feminist movement into the future. Through a re-examination of key authors who have identified differences wrought by geography and culture, among them Chandra Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes", and in conversation with two feminist scholars from North America and India, the author interrogates the concept of difference and argues that confronting and accepting difference might teach us more about our "sameness under the skin" and about the continued building of consciousness across borders.