The problem with difference

Difference feminism, sometimes called "gynocentric feminism," strives to address the inequalities faced by women by asserting that the things women are said to be are, really, perfectly okay. This approach has some obviously sexy qualities: it claims things women have accomplished (raising children, keeping homes, building communities) as just as valuable as the things men have accomplished, for example. Nonetheless, I don't think it's a viable way to think about how to approach gender. Here's why:

Difference feminism is essentialist. To say that women are different from men involves saying two problematic things. The first is that there's a clearly identifiable and relatively unproblematic group, "women." Feminists today challenge this not only on the basis that gender is pretty widely accepted to be culturally constructed, but also because the analytic category "women" ignores the diverse experiences of actual women, who experience varying levels of even the most basic aspects of privilege and oppression based on their race, sexal orientation, class, and other factors.

The second is that women are something. Being a woman means something beyond having the right bits or chromasomes or hormones or what-have-you. It constitutes a way of being in the world that should be considered valuable, according to difference theorists. And that triggers my feminist red flag, because as soon as you say women are anything, you're limiting possibilities.

Difference feminism inscribes the status quo. Leaving aside the basic problems with saying "women are," it is probably something that's possible to say reasonably accurately for smaller, relatively more homogenous groups of women. But in doing so, you limit women to being always what they are now. Given that most feminists accept that one of the things that most women are now is "shaped by systematic discrimination," this seems like a problem. Even if you don't want to say that women are nuturing or intuitive or lovely, it seems like pretty much any common experience or trait of a group of women is going to be a result of cultural construction and shared experiences of life as a marginalized group, and not something anyone can be sure is part of how women "really are," whatever that might mean.

In the end, difference feminism relies on the idea that being a woman conveys something about you besides your likely genitalia: something about personality, culture, or values. And until I find convicing evidence to the contrary, I'd rather think that women can be or do pretty much anything that that they are or do any particular thing.