Differences in Common. Gender, Vulnerability and Community

Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on "community" focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogenity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. 

Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Iveković —included in this volume are essays by all three— have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the "expropriation" of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject's vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a "wound" (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. 

The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism's naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women's bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others.

Impossible Communities? On Gender, Vulnerability and Community, Joana Sabadell-Nieto and Marta Segarra   7

I. GENDER AND TRANS-NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP

1. The Reason(s) of National and Gender, Rada Iveković  21

2. Nationalism and the Imagination, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak  31

3. The Hostage of the Womb by the Motherland, Belén Martín-Lucas  57

4. Women and Citizenship: Poetry of Power, Time and Space, Margaret Persin  75

II. VULNERABILITY AND POLITICS

5. Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics, Judith Butler  99

6. More than Vulnerable: Rethinking Community, Àngela Lorena Fuster  121

7. Passionately Losing Oneself, Joana Sabadell-Nieto  143

8. Opaque Encounters, Impossible Vicinities, Rodrigo Andrés  161 

III. (FICTIONAL) IDENTITIES AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

9. Community and the Politics of Memory, Marta Segarra  177

10. Fiction Traces. The Ideal Community and Historical Sabotage, Eloi Grasset  191

11. What does Difference Have to do with Community? Derrida's Diacritic Difference, Joana Masó  203

12. Community as Transit and Stammering in Collaborative Writing, Helena González Fernández  217

13. Blood Ties: Interpretive Communities and Popular (Gendered) Genres, Isabel Clúa Ginés  233