Gender and Multiculturality

Abstract

The “inequality of gender” is supposed to be a universal phenomenon the evidence of which sustains the universalistic background of the feminist theory. But the strongest paradox of the feminist concern is that it also omits the evidence of the factual diversity among women, divided not just by criteria of ideology, class or race, but mainly through cultural diversity. Diversity is studied by cultural theories which are critically concerned with universality. The goal of this paper is to acknowledge the importance of feminist theory in cultural research, since, as stated by Teresa de Lauretis, “the theories available to us for going from sociability to subjectivity, from symbolic systems to individual perception, or from cultural representations to self-representation — the passage to a so called space of discontinuity—, are either not interested in gender or are unable to conceive a feminine subject”.