Otherness is the process of casting a group, an individual or an object into the role of the "other" and establishing one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this Other. The ease with which the adjective "other" generated the verb "to other" in the last twenty years or so is indicative of the usefulness, power and currency of a term that now occupies an important position in feminist, postcolonial, civil rights and sexual minority discourses.

The asymmetry in power relationships is central to the construction of Otherness. Only the
dominant group is in a position to impose the value of its particularity (its identity) and to devalue the particularity of others (their otherness) while imposing corresponding discriminatory measures.

References:
Other/otherness.
Jean-François Staszak,
published inInternational Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2008, Elsevier
http://www.yiannisgabriel.com/

OTHERNESS is the first online exhibition of HERSTORYMUSEUM showing special visions from the past centuries of representations of women from colonized, groups created by female artists from dominant groups, where –without discarding the contradictions– the presence of the Otherness is not so evident, perhaps because they have been conceived by women. As Simone de Beauvoir argued: The Other of Man is Woman (1952).