New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

66 The New Imperialists
have demonstrated parallels with the male/female and public/
private dichotomies to show how dichotomous thinking functions
to denigrate everything aligned with the female, containing it
within private, controlled social spaces. 6
Thus, the post-structuralist alternative to binary thinking is not to
treat contrasts as “radically separate” but as “points on a continuum,” and
not as “mutually exclusive” but, rather, as continuous and overlapping. In
its popular and, perhaps, dominant form, this approach discards
binarisms such as man/woman or male/female, and questions the usefulness
of crucial concepts such as “patriarchy” or “woman” even if they
do not appear in dichotomous relations with other concepts. According
to Code, for example,
Despite patriarchy’s heuristic value for theorizing hierarchical
social structures, for feminists its usefulness is diminished by its
essentialism, according to which male dominance of women is an
inevitable response to natural differences. Such assumptions
sustain ahistorical conceptions of “woman” and “man” as universal
categories, ignoring racial, class, and other differences. Patriarchy’s
usefulness as a theoretical concept is contested around these
issues. 7
I argue, however, that “patriarchy” cannot be branded as an essentialism
just because some interpreters treat male dominance as “an
inevitable response to natural differences,” as Code states above. Indeed,
there has long been considerable consensus that such interpretations are
not valid for reasons other than essentialism: very simply, there is
nothing natural in gender or human relations. Moreover, just because
some feminists do not account for racial, class, ethnic, national, or
religious differences, the concept “woman” does not turn into an
ahistorical, universal category. This post-structuralist claim is itself
rooted in binary thinking in so far as it treats essentialism and belief in
difference as mutually exclusive. It is an either/or logic, which cannot see
the coexistence of difference and essence in, for instance, the conceptualization
of “woman.” One may, for instance, believe in the diversity –
ethnic, racial, class, language, sexuality, or disability – of women and still
essentialize them as the inferior, evil, fair, or weak gender. While
structuralism is, indeed, able to delve into the dynamics of opposites such