Feminism and Multiculturalism: The Dialogue Continues (Worlds of Knowing: Global Feminist Epistemologies) (Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, And Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies) (Book Review‪)‬

[Review Essay: Jane Duran, Worlds of Knowing: Global Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 2001), xvi + 304 pp.; and Jorge M. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), xiv + 386 pp.] In the past two decades, post-structuralist and post-colonial theories have significantly influenced debates in Western feminist theory, including "feminist standpoint theory," which is a diverse body of thought that analyzes the relationships between the conditions of women's oppression and women's consciousness of these conditions. One recent criticism of standpoint theory is that it relies on biological essentialist and/or universalist claims. Some critics argue that some standpoint theories are essentialist because they relate women's reproductive capacities to unique forms of female consciousness. The more Marxist-inspired standpoint theories, although not biologically based, have been called universalist because they frequently employ concepts like "sexual division of labor" or "sex/affective production," which overemphasize cross-cultural similarities among women. Against this search for essences, universals, or similarities, the new trend is to recognize women's "intersectional" or "hybrid" identities based on multiple differences.