Luce Irigaray classically challenges what she takes to be the masculine foundations of knowledge in Western liberal culture. The present article contends not only that this epistemological challenge implicates a radical feminist politics, but that it is also more helpful in formulating a multicultural feminist theory than is often acknowledged by her readers. This is because her account responds to the false neutrality of liberal feminist approaches to multiculturalism. It does so by supporting, at the socio-political level, transformative genealogical practices (...) that are aimed at fostering women's agency in culturally sensitive ways. However, Irigaray's recent work on multiculturalism does not sustain the necessary continuity between her core epistemological critique and her political claims. In particular, the continuity between her criticism of the West's sexual indifference and the cultural multiplicity of female identity becomes problematic in her recent work. The author finally contends that Irigaray's writings pose difficulties for a multicultural feminism, because they fail to specify the different forms of policy necessary to promote diverse women's equality in the postcolonial contexts on which she recently focuses. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of marginalization in cross-cultural communication from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and postcolonial theory. Specifically, it focuses on European colonialism‘s effect on language and communicative practices in Latin America. I argue colonialism creates a deeply sedimented but unacknowledged background of inherited cultural prejudices against which social and political problems of oppression, violence and marginalization, especially towards women, emerge—but whose roots in colonial and imperial frameworks have lost transparency. This makes it especially difficult for postcolonial subjects (...) to meaningfully express their own experiences of psychic dislocation and fragmentation because the discursive background used to communicate these experiences is made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions. To address this problem, I turn to a strategic use of Nietzsche‘s conceptions of subjectivity and language as metaphor to engage the unique difficulties that arise in giving voice to the subaltern experience. Thus, I argue that while colonialism introduces an added layer of complexity to philosophical discussions of language, the concrete particularities and political emergencies of Latin American history necessitate an account of language that can speak to these concrete particularities. To this end, I develop a conception of, what I call, ―hydric life,‖ a postcolonial feminist hermeneutics that better accommodates these cultural specificities. (shrink)