Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

Spivak gestures toward such a notion of difference in her call for a “strategic use of a positive essentialism” (Spivak, In Other Worlds, 205). This strategy reveals internal differences and contradictions while at the same time claiming some kind of shared identity. Trinh Minha also advances this notion of difference. In her article “Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” she explores the relationship between identity and difference in the constitution of subjectivity. She argues that the ideology of dominance, by the dominant sex or culture, has long governed Western notions of identity, notions that rely on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden from one’s consciousness and that requires elimination of all that is considered foreign, that is to say “non-I, other” (77). Minha introduces a new model of identity that allows for the negotiation of similarities and differences. Like Minha, I argue that we cannot make a clear dividing line between “I and not I, he and she, between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal identity, between us here and them over there” (71). According to this notion of difference, self and other are not separate entities; otherness exists within every I and vice versa.

Difference, according to Minha, is not “opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness,” because differences and similarities exist within this concept of difference. In this sense, we can use difference as a tool “of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance” and not as a tool of “segregation, to exert power on the basis of racial and sexual essences” (73). This concept of difference breaks down the dichotomy between self and other, refusing to be restricted to only one right position and opening up spaces between the center and margins. Arab American women are indeed not quite the same as Arab women or the same as American women, nor are they quite the other; they stand in that undetermined threshold place where they constantly drift in and out. The Arab American woman represents “this inappropriate ‘other’ or ‘same’ who moves about with two gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in my difference and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at” (Minha, 418).M