Other and Rule: On the Peculiar Interweaving of Racism, Sexism and Feminism Today

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 Villas 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 learn to value difference, sabotaging all attempts to enlist difference 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