| Sumario: | The writer considers how the idea or slogan of “difference” and its analog “diversity” act as inert placemarkers in feminist discourse that reduce analytic power to take in the complexity and trajectory of the world rather than enlarge it. She contends that difference- and diversity-talk are serving as substitutes for more particular and critical concepts such as contradiction, privilege, conflict of interest, and even oppression and subordination. She identifies difference talk that developed in two streams within feminism: gender difference, and racial/ethnic/religious/class/sexual differences among women. She points out that these are opposite meanings in some ways, in that the more differences between men and women are emphasized the more differences among women and among men are implicitly erased. She asserts that although both streams have provided hope-giving and politically powerful rhetoric when it has been much needed, both have also impeded the imagining of a larger community without inviting analysis of social fractures or strategies for how to make them less oppressive.
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