The Future of Difference: Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism

In recent years, opponents of ‘political correctness’ have surged to prominence from both left and right, shaping a discourse in which perpetrators are ‘defiantly’ imagined as Muslim refugees, i.e. outsiders/others, while victims are identified as ‘our women’.

This poisonous and regressive situation grounds Hark and Villa’s theorisation of contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, they argue, the logic of ‘differentiate and rule’ thoroughly permeates the social. Our entire ‘way of life’ is premised on endless subtle hierarchical distinctions, which determine whole populations’ attitudes, feelings and actions.

How can we learn to value difference when it is too often enlisted in the service of domination? Hark and Villa make a compelling case for the urgent necessity for a detoxification of feminism as a matter of urgency, and for an ethical mode of living-with the world, that is, living with alterity.