Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference

by Davina Cooper

• ISBN13: 9780521831833
• ISBN10: 0521831830
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-07-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

What challenges are presented by the claim that diversity should be celebrated? How should equality politics respond to controversial constituencies, such as smokers and sports hunters, when they position themselves as disadvantaged? Challenging Diversity brings a new and original approach to key issues facing social, political and cultural theory. Critically engaging with feminist, radical democratic and liberal scholarship, the book addresses four major challenges confronting a radical equality politics. Namely, what does equality mean for preferences and choices that appear harmful; are equality's subjects individuals, groups or something else; what power do dominant norms have to undermine equality-oriented reforms; and can radical practices endure when they collide with the mainstream? Taking examples from religion, gender, sexuality, state policy-making and intentional communities, Challenging Diversity maps new ways of understanding equality, explores the politics of its pursuit, and asks what kinds of diversity does a radical version of equality engender.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: mapping the terrain

2. Diversity politics: beyond a pluralism without limits

3. From blokes to smokes: theorising the difference

4. Towards equality of power

5. Normative encounters: the politics of same-sex spousal equality

6. Getting in the way: the social power of nuisance

7. Oppositional routines: the problem of embedding change

8. Safeguarding community pathways: 'possibly the happiest school in the world' and other porous places

9. Diversity through equality.