Reply to comment

well, i'd push you a bit on this...to me it seems to be about category-making. do you know Diane Fuss's fine piece, "Inside/Out." Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 233-240? it's always seemed to me a contemporary feminist/activist version of Hegel's Lordship and Bondage: how to organize around the fact that naming any "inside"/identity/category, is going inevitably to create an "outside," an other? one answer is the one you give above--that "it is not the responsibility of an oppressed group to expend effort making sure the privileged group feels equally welcome." another answer--that of the political theorist--might be to think some more about, and wrestle some more with, the problematics of identity-formation. along these lines, see (oh, just for starters!),

Lennard Davis. “The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 2006. 231-242.

Annamarie Jagose. Chapter 6: "Limits of Identity," Chapter 7: "Queer," Chapter 9: "Afterward. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York University, 1996.

June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas." Politics in the Woman's Movement, ed. Barbara Ryna. New York University, 1982.

L. A. Kauffman, "The Anti-Politics of Identity," Socialist Review 20, 1 (January–March 1990), 67–80.

Linda Kauffman, "The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony; or, An Infant Grifter Grows Up." 1992; rpted American Feminist Thought @ Century's End. Ed. Linda S. Kauffman. Blackwell, 1993.

Gayatri Spivak. [on "strategic essentialism".] In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Taylor and Francis, 1987.

Iris Marion Young. "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference." Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990. 300-324.