Wollacott (2000) offers an historicized account of postcolonial perspectives through her research into the reasons why large numbers of white Australian women came to live in London in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1911 there were 13,000 Australian-born women living in England and Wales. Standard accounts of colonialism tend to portray colonization as a one-way process through which the imperialist culture is left relatively unchanged. Wollacott points out how the significance of this historical analysis not only enables us to understand the fluidity and diversity of the modern city of the early twentieth century but also how such diasporic movements as those of Australian women bring change and influence to the imperial society.
Wollacott’s analysis draws on the work of feminist geographers, historical sources and fictional accounts. She explores how living in the imperial metropolis enabled White colonial women to appropriate ‘new possibilities for physical and social mobility, including new professional and career opportunities, as women remade their subjectivities, lives, and spaces’ (ibid.: 762). Wollacott’s theoretical framework can broadly be described as postcolonial. Here she draws on two concepts. These are hybridity and flaneuse. By hybridity Wollacott is rejecting the binaried nature of, for example, colonizer and colonized. Rather, she is concerned to explore the ‘complexities and interstitialities of colonial regimes… as a means of capturing the slippages of colonialism, colonized peoples’ subversion of categories imposed by colonial states, and the racial and cultural mixing that colonialism has inescapably instigated’ (ibid.: 763). Her use of the term flaneuse is designed to offer an insight into, particularly middle-class, ‘women’s historic encroachment on
autonomous movement around the city.. . their ability to inhabit public space on their own without harm to either their bodies or their reputations and to feel that they belonged in that space and could possess it in a leisurely fashion’ (ibid.: 765).
Wollacott notes that because of their Whiteness Australian colonial women were not visibly distinctive or seen as racially inferior. She also argues that their status as outsiders gave them greater freedom that was combined with ‘their culturally based self-definition as confident and capable’ (ibid.: 766). Wollacott’s findings therefore illustrate how travelling to London opened new careers and educational possibilities for women in newly emergent fields of social work and state administration and in the theatres, stages, music halls, agents offices, publishing and newspaper houses, art schools and nursing colleges. In this respect Wollacott comments:
Women training and performing as professional musicians, scraping together a living by hawking manuscripts to Fleet Street editors, or combing the streets of outcast London in the name of social work were all claiming the right to work and be seen in the public domain, to have publicly professional careers, and to be both recognized and paid for them while retaining complete respectability. (ibid.: 769)
Overall, Wollacott argues:
The consciousness of another life and other places, combined with their sense of belonging in London as the center of their empire and their inbetween status as white colonials (not quite truly British and at the top of the imperial hierarchy but white and therefore positioned as more privileged than and superior to colonial people of color), all facilitated Australian women’s ability to claim public space in London. (ibid.: 783)
In these ways they were ‘important agents in women’s encroachment on the public domain at the same time that they were part of the modernity and the colonialism transforming the city’ (ibid.: 784).
Summary
This chapter has explored five conceptualizations of difference. These are different-but-equal and identity differences; poststructural and
postmodern difference; sexual difference and postcolonial difference. While these are relatively standard distinctions in the feminist literature, there are considerable overlaps between the positions that individual theorists may take up within each of these distinctions with consequent implications for the application of these labels. The organization and labelling of knowledge fields are political acts that are in consequence highly contestable. In addition, this chapter has demonstrated the tyranny of dualism in that when we seek to discuss difference we are constantly drawn to explore issues of equality.
FURTHER READING
Mongia, P. (ed.) (1997) Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. London: Arnold. An excellent resource, this text contains reprinted articles from key postcolonial theorists.
Weedon, C. (1999) Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Weedon offers a very accessible, comprehensive and up-to-date review of the range of differences within feminism. Her text includes a discussion of class, ‘race’, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age. It also explores the critiques of difference in terms of the politics of feminism.