In 1989, differences was born of the collision between continental theories of difference on the one hand and US politics of diversity on the other. Today, this collision remains crucial to the struggle against the effects of pervasive capitalist logics on critical thinking. In exploring the relationship between difference, as the structural fracturing of the modern subject, and differences, as a multiplicity of socio-political identities, the journal aims in all critical registers—from the aesthetic to the overtly political—to test the limits of legibility, whether that thinking is inside or outside the academy.

Among the most-read and most-cited contributors are Étienne Balibar, Lauren Berlant, Mary Ann Doane, Elizabeth Freeman, Elizabeth Grosz, Andrea Long Chu, Kevin Quashie, Hortense J. Spillers, and Robyn Wiegman.

In December 2023, differences launched an online forum that features short critical prose, including essays, commentaries, provocations, reviews, works-in-progress, dialogues, and other experiments.

Supported by and located within the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, the journal is published three times a year.