Dialogue And Difference

Contemporary feminists face the labor of moving beyond the dominant paradigms of knowledge and communication that drive corporate globalization. Dialogue and Difference, a new collection edited by Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, provides students with groundbreaking essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists who stress the need to put different approaches to reality and to scholarship into relation in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South, East/West divides. Modeling ways to weave these connections, the authors take difference, rather than isomorphic similarity, to be the basis for effective anti-imperial feminist theory and practice. These dialogues among women's movements bridge profound differences in historical, economic, and political circumstance, language, culture, and fundamental "cosmovision." Such differences are welcomed by contributors as practical resources, rather than as obstacles, in feminist challenges to corporate globalization. Dialogue and Difference is an essential collection for professors and students interested in globalization, development, gender studies, and activism.

Feminist scholars and activists present diverse conceptual frameworks of transnational/transcultural forms of feminism. Waller (women's studies and comparative literature, U. of California, Riverside) and Marcos, a Mexican author/activist, introduce nine discourses treating efforts (e.g., international conferences, Courts of Women) to transcend First to Third World differences in addressing such global issues as violence against women and sex tourism. Several photos personalize the struggles. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Marguerite Waller is Professor of Women's Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside. Sylvia Marcos is Visiting Professor, Drew University, and Director of the Center for Psychoethnological Research, Cuernavaca, Mexico.