Multicultural Feminism

The “Introduction” of Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age by Ella Shohat explores the possibility of a feminist reimagining of community affiliations and cultural practices articulated in relation to each other. Challenging traditional disciplinary and cultural boundaries, Shohat proposes moving beyond compartmentalized areas of knowledge and instead placing diverse gendered/sexed histories and geographies in relation and forging connections in terms of tensions and overlappings that happen within and between cultures, ethnicities, nations. (1)

Instead of offering and conceiving a unified feminist subject, multicultural feminism aims at creating a “’world wide web’ where feminist communities derive their identity and difference vis-à-vis multiple ‘others’“.  This notion of a polycentric multiculturalism that entails reconceptualization and restructuring of intercommunal relations moving beyond binarism and false dichotomies reminds me in a way of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome.

 The rhizome is a philosophical concept that apprehends multiplicities, that I personally used in literary texts and see it resembled in Shohat multicultural feminist conception.  The rhizome insists that instead of focusing in a binary “arborescent” and genealogical conception, an a-centered multiplicity that focuses in magnitudes and dimensions that can increase in number without changing in nature is a much useful process of thought.

This concept of the rhizome is useful because it entails the many ways that one can approach a thought, it helps questions hierarchies and binaries and provides a way to see how everything can be multiple and interrelated. This assemblage of connections between certain multiplicities emphasizes not what is or what was but what can become of something.

Multicultural feminist critique, Shohat proposes, “asks for a transnational imaginary that places in synergistic relations diverse narratives offering prospects of critical community affiliations…practicing a political and cultural project which mobilizes the polycentric relationality of a constantly moving world.” (52)