When they entered the city of Jerusalem celebrating the superstitious idolatry of the Holy Fire, they reflected on Jesus' lament over the city for killing its prophets and continuing in ignorance and squalor. Thus, they reflected that the New Israel of God's chosen people was needed to breathe new life into the land and its people. For the ancient prom-ises of salvation and light had come full circle, where the citizens of the New Zion had come to rescue the ancient Zion and its people. American cultural and religious perspectives supported the belief that American Christians had a specific role to play in God's story.

er, the presumed equiva- lence of Eastern homosexuality and occidental personal liberation may disguise the specter of colo- nial privilege and exploitation encoded in the hier- archy white man/brown

umph of the imperial gaze, its life is also stamped by sadness. Its exis-tence is cruelly brief. It is devalued, disposable, unimportant, and kitsch. It is frequently indistinguishable from its siblings on the rack. Its pro-ducers prefer not to be associated with its production. It is neither a real gift nor a full letter. It is quick, "abundant, systematic and cheap," and it has a marginal standing within the archive.38

een European and Indian notions of womanhood, which are defined in part through their relation to each other and through their gendered interaction with the patriarchal public sphere.

Beginning from the lives and interests of marginalized communities ofwomen, I am able to access and make the workings of power visible—toread up the ladder of privilege. It is more necessary to look up-ward—colonized peoples must know themselves and the colonizer. Thisparticular marginalized location makes the politics of knowledge and thepower investments that go along with it visible so that we can then engagein work to transform the use and abuse of power.

n other words, this discussion allows me to reemphasizethe way that differences are never just “differences.” In knowing differencesand particularities, we can better see the connections and commonalitiesbecause no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining.The challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain the connectionsand border crossings better and more accurately, how specifying differenceallows us to theorize universal concerns more fully. It is this intellectualmove that allows for my concern for women of different communities andidentities to build coalitions and solidarities across borders.

ch scholarship on Christianity in a global context asserts that women's status in society improves over the course of Christianization; although that may be true in India in a qualified way, I have observed as well a tendency toward a restrictive form of femininity

ow-caste Indian women had long been discouraged or prohibited from adopting the practices that connoted modesty and femininity in the hegemonic gender discourse of the region. Upwardly mobile Indian Christian commu-nities tended to appropriate practices from both elite Indian and Western sources related to marriage, labor, clothing, child rearing, and so forth that privileged women's enclosure over mobility, self-restraint over spontaneity, and self-denial over self-indulgence, producing a form of femininity that, from a present-day feminist outlook, appears more restrictive than liberating.

philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them [ de leur franchissement possible]

Hegel

Alexander Duff