Displacement, not reversal, prevents strategic hierarchies from freezing into dogma

Evidence

The shifting limit that prevents this feminist reversal of the public-private hierarchy from freezing into a dogma or, indeed, from succeeding fully is the displacement of the opposition itself. For if the fabric of the so-called public sector is woven of the so-called private, the definition of the private is marked by a public potential, since it is the weave, or texture, of public activity. The opposition is thus not merely reversed; it is displaced. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 282

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is Spivak’s clearest statement of how a strategic reversal avoids ossifying: the mechanism is displacement of the opposition itself, not mere reversal — the same mechanism that must keep strategic essentialism from collapsing into belief.
• XREF: Directly bears on the core research question: the mechanism preventing ironic essentialism from becoming genuine essentialism is the displacement of identity-as-opposition, matching Spivak’s later ‘deconstructive’ reading of essentialism.