Interview with Margo Okazawa-Rey: Politics of Difference as Politics of Connection

Interview with Margo Okazawa-Rey: Politics of Difference as Politics of Connection

Abstract

Margo Okazawa-Rey, a founding member of the Combahee River Collective and a world-renowned activist and scholar, talks to Andrea Zimmermann about challenges for a transnational feminist politics of difference. Okazawa-Rey reflects on feminist genealogies and intersectionality from the perspective of personal experience and points out the importance of analyzing the complex individual relations between power regimes and difference. As feminist politics of identity have not managed to change power dynamics fundamentally, but rather reworked them along categories of difference, she strongly advocates coalitions of transnational feminism. These coalitions need to take differences and contexts into account. It is in this vein that Okazawa-Rey proposes the reimagination of politics of difference as politics of connection.

In: Binswanger, Christa, and Andrea Zimmermann, eds., 2021. Transitioning to Gender Equality. Basel: MDPI. https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-03897-867-1, p. 17-26.