Global Feminism and undecidabilities

Beijing’ 95 and beyond

Abstract

This paper engages with the philosophical underpinnings of the Beijing Conference on women’s rights that took place in 1995. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of undecidability – which becomes here both a method of analysis and a political strategy – it critiques the universalising aspects of Beijing’ 95’s. In so doing, it aims to provide a remodelled strategy for a feminist global politics, one that be able to maintain feminism on the undecidable terrain of the binaries ‘Woman/Man’, and ‘Woman/women’. This strategy, it is argued, allows the project to be at once open to difference/particularism and always prepared to universalise its aims, offering women the possibility of fighting as ‘humans or women’, and as a ‘universal woman or particular women’. Bearing this in mind, I try to show how Beijing’ 95 de-politicises the binaries I have referred to by ‘closing’ their undecidabilities, rendering any attempt to politically engage with them impossible a priori.