Cultural Geography

removed from the exigencies of the daily lives of

millions of impoverished people. One response

has been a rejection by some critics of the turn

towards culture, and an objection to the empha-

sis on difference and discourse away from mate-

rial conditions. These objections are based on the

notion that ‘poverty is real’. Cecile Jackson

(1997: 147) is one such scathing critic of

‘postist’ feminist understandings of poverty and

gender, ‘where culture, ideas and symbols are

discursively interesting and constitutive of

power, whilst materiality is of questionable

status, and at least suspect’, and where poverty

becomes ‘largely a state of mind’ rather than a

matter of material struggle for survival. She

argues that real women and the challenges facing

them get lost in the morass of text, image and

representation. The turn towards culture, there-

fore, is in danger of ‘chucking the baby out with

the bathwater’ (Udayagiri, 1995: 164): in dis-

missing the universalist assumptions of political

economy, the material problems of the daily

existences of many women are also erased.

An alternative response is a move by some

critics towards cultural relativism. Proponents of

this approach suggest that the solution to imperi-

alism and universalism is through respect of dif-

ference in a plurality of identity politics. This

respect for cultural difference, however, offers

little assistance in terms of dealing with some of

the complex issues confronting international

feminist movements. By refusing to theorize cul-

tural dominance, relativists implicitly evaluate

all cultural positions as equal. This gives them no

basis for making moral judgements about social

justice in terms of feminist aspirations to deal

with gender inequality and patriarchal power. It

also ignores differences (class, regional, reli-

gious, ethnic) between women within specific

cultural locations. The problems with cultural

relativism crystallize around issues such as

female circumcision. As Susanne Schech and

Jane Haggis argue,

How do cultural relativists distinguish between those

African women who argue female circumcision is an

important culturally specific part of being a woman in

those cultures where it is practised, and those African

women who argue that it is a dangerous and damaging

patriarchal practice? (2000: 110)

In addition, the ‘culture’ that is preserved through

such respect is often a patriarchal one that pre-

serves male privilege at women’s expense. As

Anne Marie Goetz (1991: 146) argues, at the UN

International Conferences, ‘official’ feminisms

(often allied to and representing national govern-

ments and their political agendas) have used

arguments about ‘cultural respect’ to block more

radical, ‘unofficial’ feminisms that pose a greater

threat to the status quo.

The underlying problem is that relativist argu-

ments share a view of cultures and identities as

bounded, coherent and autonomous. Such

notions have been rejected by geographers (see

Crang, 1998; Jess and Massey, 1995; McEwan,

2000b) and by cultural and feminist theorists

(Butler, 1990; Hall, 1995) alike, not least

because this replicates notions of culture inform-

ing conservative fundamentalisms in a variety of

contexts. Moreover, replacing universal same-

ness with cultural difference does not disrupt

colonial power relations between women that

persist into the present; cultural difference can be

used to deny any possibility of ‘different’ (for

example, formerly colonized) women ‘becoming

the same’ (i.e. achieving equality with women in

the north). Women in the south are always

marked by difference, since cultural difference is

also racialized (Frankenberg and Mani, 1993;

Narayan, 1998). Feminist scholarship has

warned against this simple plurality of femi-

nisms organized around some absolute concep-

tion of national and/or cultural difference. As

Rey Chow (1990) argues, ‘it is when the West’s

“other women” are prescribed their “own”

national and ethnic identity in this way that they

are most excluded from having a claim to the

reality of their existence’. The real challenge for

contemporary feminism lies in finding an alter-

native to false universalisms that subsume differ-

ence under hegemonic western understandings,

and to relativism that would abandon any univer-

salist claim in favour of reified and absolute con-

ceptions of difference.

Black and ‘Third World’ feminisms have

made important contributions in theorizing both

power and knowledge and the significance of

discourse, which generates very real interven-

tions with very real effects (Rajan, 1993; Rose,

1987). They demand that we are able to see,

responsibly and respectfully, from another’s

point of view. However, they could perhaps

engage more with material issues of power,

inequality and poverty, and resist focusing on

text, imagery and representation alone. Strate-

gies must be found for an active feminism that

can make a difference. This involves combining

the material with the symbolic and encourages

the building of coalitions across differences. It

demands, firstly, a material analysis ‘to point to

the consequences and inter-relations of different

sites of oppression: class, race, nation and sexua-

lity’ (Goetz, 1991: 151) and, secondly, a recog-

nition of the partial and situated quality of

knowledge claims (Haraway, 1991). Therefore,

western feminisms have to be seen as simply

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