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The real woman, the pure being-in-itself, is always the other woman.
Sometimes it seems that the more the blurring of national and ethnic boundaries delivers us into a racial and cultural collage, the more sealed up we become in ethnically specific perceptions of reality, so that multicultural living resembles more a collision of soliloquies, to borrow Clifford Geertz's phrase (120), than it does a fruitful dialogue across ethnic and cultural lines. My object here is to explore some problematics of communication between academic women of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, not by addressing the historical context of power relations in which our present-day relations are inevitably embedded and the racially skewed economic and political structures in which we live, but by rethinking the psychological processes of identification and idealization that apparently impede communication between women of different racial and cultural backgrounds. While these historical and material conditions no doubt pose more formidable obstacles to trust and understanding than the psychological processes I will be exploring, the exchanges that I cite between some white academic feminists and the scholars of color whom they idealize show that unconscious processes of identification and idealization can also lead to misunderstanding. In discussing the way that white feminists Elizabeth Abel, Jane Gallop, Tania Modleski, and Jane Stembridge appear to be idealizing African American women, I am continuing a process that they themselves have initiated. For in writing about their projections of a liberated power and authority onto African American women, these white women are both describing one of the obstacles to genuine dialogue—an idealizing vision of the other woman that does not take into account her complexity as a subject—and contributing to an analysis of the white middle-class female position. That contribution is especially valuable because it adds