UNDER WESTERN EYES: FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP AND COLONIAL

DISCOURSES - CHANDRA MOHANTY

- Feminist scholarship is not mere production of knowledge about a certain subject but
a mode of intervention into particular hegemonic discourses. They are inscribed in
relations of power - relations which they counter, resist or even perhaps implicitly
support.
- The definition of colonization invoked is predominantly a discursive one. It implies a
relation of structural domination, and a suppression of the heterogeneity of the
subject(s) in question.
- The focus is on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of ‘scholarship’ and
knowledge’ about women in the third world by particular analytic categories
employed in specific writings on the subject which take as their referent feminist
interests as they have been articulated in the US and Western Europe. Western
feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogeneous in its
goals, interests, or analyses. But, it is possible to trace a coherence of effects resulting
from the implicit assumption of ‘the West’ as the primary referent in theory and
praxis. Hence the construction of the (implicitly consensual) priority of issues around
which apparently all women are expected to organize.
- Mohanty’s concern derives from her investment in debates in feminist theory as well
as a perceived political necessity in the age of Reagan to form strategic coalitions
across class, race, and national boundaries.
- The relationship between ‘Woman’ – a cultural and ideological composite Other
constructed through diverse representational discourses – and ‘women’ – real,
material subjects of their collective histories – is one of the central questions that the
practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address. It is an arbitrary relation set up by
particular cultures. Mohanty argues that Western feminist writings and categories
discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women
in the third world, thereby producing/re-presenting a composite, singular "Third
World Woman"-an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless
carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.
- The image of an ‘average third world woman’ – leads an essentially truncated life
based on her feminine gender (sexually constrained) and being ‘third-world’
(ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized
etc.). This is in contrast to the implicit self-representation of Western women as
educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the
freedom to make their own decisions. This distinction is made on the basis of
privileging of a particular group as the norm or referent. Third World women are
considered by Western feminists as ‘ourselves undressed’
- The assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one hand, and
inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the "third
world" in the context of a world system dominated by the West on the other,
characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world.
- An analysis of "sexual difference" in the form of a cross-culturally singular,
monolithic notion of patriarchy or male dominance leads to the construction of a
similarly reductive and homogeneous notion of what Mohanty calls the "Third
World Difference"- that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses
most if not all the women in these countries.
- She wants to draw attention to the explanatory potential of particular analytic
strategies employed by such writing, and to their political effect in the context of the
hegemony of Western scholarship. These analytic strategies or implicit principles
holds for anyone who uses these methods, whether third world women in the West,
or third world women in the third world writing on these issues and publishing in the
West. As a matter of fact, Mohanty maintains that her argument holds for any
discourse that sets up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i.e., the
yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others.
- The first principle she focuses on concerns the strategic location or situation of the
category ‘women’ vis-à-vis the context of analysis. The assumption of women as an
already constituted group with identical interests and desires implies a notion of
gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and
cross-culturally. The 2nd principle consists in the uncritical use of particular
methodologies in providing ‘proof’ of universality and cross cultural validity. The third
is a more specifically political principle underlying methodologies and the analytic
strategies, that is, the model of power and struggle they imply and suggest.
‘Women’ as Category of Analysis, Or: We Are All Sisters In Struggle
- Women are characterized as a singular group not on the basis of biological
essentials, but on the basis of a shared oppression. What binds women together is a
socio- logical notion of the "sameness" of their oppression.
- This results in an assumption of women as an always-already constituted group, one
which has been labelled "powerless," "exploited," "sexually harrassed," etc., by
feminist scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses. (Notice that this is
quite similar to sexist discourse labeling women weak, emotional, having math
anxiety, etc.) The focus of these discourses is not on uncovering the material and
ideological specificities that constitute a particular group of women as "powerless" in
a particular context. It is rather on finding a variety of cases of "powerless" groups of
women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless. This mode
of defining women primarily in terms of their object status (the way in which they
are affected or not affected by certain institutions and systems) is what characterizes
this particular form of the use of "women" as a category of analysis.
- As Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar argue, "Feminist theories which examine our
cultural practices as 'feudal residues' or label us 'traditional,' also portray us as
politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of
Western Feminism. They need to be continually challenged .... "
- Eg:
1) Women As Victims of Male Violence – According to Fran Hosken, the goal of
female genital mutilation (in Africa and the Middle East) is ‘to mutilate the sexual
pleasure and satisfaction of woman’, leading her to claim that women’s sexuality
and reproductive potential is controlled. Here, women are defined consistently
as victims of male control freezing them into ‘objects-who-defend-themselves and
men into ‘subjects-who-perpetuate-violence’. Male violence must be theorized
and interpreted within specific societies and the sisterhood must be forged not on
basis of gender, but in concrete, historical and political practice and analysis.
2) Women As Universal Dependents - Beverly Lindsay's in ‘Comparative Perspectives
of Third World Women: The Impact of Race, Sex and Class’ implies that third world
women constitute an identifiable group purely on the basis of shared
dependencies. This situates them as an apolitical group with no subject status than
as a strategic group. Linsday also states that all African women are politically and
economically dependent and either overtly or covertly, prostitution is still the
main if not the only source of work for African women. Here, Women are taken
as a unified "Powerless" group prior to the analysis in question. Thus, it is then
merely a matter of specifying the context after the fact. But, as Michelle Rosaldo
states: ". . . woman's place in human social life is not in any direct sense a product
of the things she does (or even less, a function of what, biologically, she is) but
the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interactions." The
social systems does not exist outside the relations of women with other women,
and women with men, but women are produced through these very relations as
well as being implicated in forming these relations. Thus, Mohanty stresses that
it is not the descriptive potential of gender difference, but the privileged
positioning and explanatory potential of gender difference as the origin of
oppression that she questions.
3) Women and Religious Ideologies: Patricia Jeffery considers Islamic ideology as a
partial explanation for the status of Pirzada women in that it provides a
justification for the purdah. However, the primary explanation for purdah is
located in the control that Pirzada men have over economic resources, and the
personal security purdah gives to Pirzada women. By taking a specific version of
Islam as the Islam, Jeffrey attributes a singularity and coherence to it. Modares
notes, " 'Islamic Theology' then becomes imposed on a separate and given entity
called 'women.' A further unification is reached: Women (meaning all women),
regardless of their differing positions within societies, come to be affected or not
 affected by Islam. These conceptions provide the right ingredients for an
unproblematic possibility of a cross-cultural study of women."
4) Women and the Development Process - Huston assumes that all third world
women have similar problems and needs. Thus, they must have similar interests
and goals. Cross-cultural comparison between women in different ‘developing
countries’ is made possible and unproblematical by the assumption of women as
a group affected (or unaffected) by economic policies. However, women are
constituted as women through complex interaction between class, culture,
religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks.

What is problematical about this kind of use of "women" as a group, as a stable

category of analysis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity between
women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead of
analytically demonstrating the production of women as socio-economic political
groups within particular local contexts, this move limits the definition of the
female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic
identities.
Methodological Universalisms, Or: Women's Oppression Is a Global Phenomenon
- Proof of universalism is provided through use of an arithmetic method, the more
the number of women who wear the veil the more universal is the sexual
segregation and control of women. Hence, contradictions and potentially
subversive aspects of the institution are totally ruled out. For example, Iranian
middle class women veiled themselves during the 1979 revolution to indicate
solidarity with their veiled working class sisters, while in contemporary Iran it is a
coercive institutional mandate. In both these instances similar reasons might be
offered (opposition to the Shah and Western cultural colonization in the first case,
and the true Islamization of Iran in the second), the concrete meanings attached is
different in the two contexts. Also, the descriptive category that sexual division of
labour is, is taken by its explanatory potential to assume universal applicability.
However it is actually the meaning or value that the content of this sexual division
of labour assumes in different contexts that is important, For instance, the
feminization of poverty also can result in an increase in female-headed households.
- Some writers confuse the use of gender as a superordinate category of organizing
analysis with universalistic proof and instantiation of this category. In other words,
empirical studies of gender differences are confused with analytical organization of
cross-cultural work.
- Feminist work on third world women confuses discourses of representation with
material realities and the distinction between ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ (mentioned
earlier) is lost. This eventually leads to construction of monolithic images of ‘third
 World Women’ as women who can only be defined as material subjects, not through
the relation of their materiality to representations.
- Beyond sisterhood, there is still racism, colonialism and imperialism.
- Strategic coalitions which construct oppositional political identities for themselves are
based on generalization, but the analysis of these group identities cannot be based on
universalistic, ahistorical categories.
The Subject(s) of Power
- Each text assumes ‘women’ have a coherent group identity within the different
cultures discussed, prior to their entry into social relations, as if these groups of
women have some sort of obvious cultural coherence, distinct from men in these
societies. This leads to a structuring of the world in binary, dichotomous terms, where
women are always seen in opposition to men. Both men and women are always
apparently constituted whole populations, and their relations of dominance and
exploitation are also posited in terms of whole peoples – wholes coming into
exploitative relations.
- Power relations are viewed as structured in terms of a source of power and a
cumulative reaction to power. The major problem with such a definition is that it locks
all revolutionary struggles into binary structures – possessing power versus being
powerless. If the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of the move from
powerless to powerful for women as a group, then the new society would be
structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations, constituting
itself as a simple inversion of what exists.
- When the assumption of ‘women as an oppressed group’ is situated in the context
of Western feminist writing about third world women, Western feminists alone
become the true ‘subjects’ of this counter-history. While radical and liberal feminist
assumptions of women as a sex class might elucidate (however inadequately) the
autonomy of particular women’s struggles in the West, the application of the notion
of women as a homogenous category to women in the third world colonizes and
appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women
in social class and ethnic frameworks. While the category of ‘oppressed women’ is
generated through an exclusive focus on gender difference, the ‘oppressed third
world woman’ category has an additional attribute – the third world difference,
which includes a paternalistic attitude towards women in the third world. The
assumption that people in the third world just have not evolved to the extent that
the West has is reinforced. Resistance is defined only as cumulative operative and
not as something inherent in the operation of power.
- The underlying anthropomorphism and ethnocentrism constitutes a hegemonic
humanist problematic that repeatedly confirms and legitimates (Western) Man’s
centrality. But, it is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery
that, in its boundedness determines the center. Without the overdetermined
 discourse that creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged)
first world.
- This is not to say that the signature of Western feminist writings have the same
authority as the project of Western humanism.
- The larger economic and ideological praxis of ‘disinterested’ scientific inquiry and
pluralism are, however, the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural
colonization of the ‘non-Western’ world.