Attacking hierarchy-producing binaries actually magnified the differences they sought to erase.

Evidence

In postmodernity, again, differentiation becomes the locus of oppositional politics. The radical feminist attack on the binary hoped to produce a utopia of equals premised on the elimination of politically meaningful differentiations of subjective positioning, believing those differentiations to be the basis of all oppression. What the critique of the binary actually produced was the emphasis on those differentiations, not just as primary structure but also as locus of progressive political possibility. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 832

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive claim that the feminist project of erasing differentiation for a utopia of equals achieved the opposite—elevating difference as primary political structure—is dense and worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s complicitous critique and the theme that liberatory gestures produce recontained or opposite outcomes, threaded throughout earlier chapters. — connects to: Anti-binary theories can align misogynists with radical feminists — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 629; Firestone located sexual difference as the deepest, invisible source of all oppression — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 872; Political equality made society secretly more hierarchical than before — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269

Broader Connections

• Political equality made society secretly more hierarchical than before #corroborates (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269