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.