This document summarizes Chandra Mohanty's critique of Western feminist scholarship on women in the third world. Mohanty argues that Western feminism constructs a homogeneous "Third World Woman" through discursive practices that generalize the experiences of women in diverse societies. This leads to an assumption that all third world women are similarly oppressed and defined primarily by their gender and status as third world. Mohanty asserts that feminist scholarship should avoid making universalizing claims and should locate gender relations within specific historical contexts to avoid reproducing colonial power dynamics.
This document summarizes Chandra Mohanty's critique of Western feminist scholarship on women in the third world. Mohanty argues that Western feminism constructs a homogeneous "Third World Woman" through discursive practices that generalize the experiences of women in diverse societies. This leads to an assumption that all third world women are similarly oppressed and defined primarily by their gender and status as third world. Mohanty asserts that feminist scholarship should avoid making universalizing claims and should locate gender relations within specific historical contexts to avoid reproducing colonial power dynamics.
This document summarizes Chandra Mohanty's critique of Western feminist scholarship on women in the third world. Mohanty argues that Western feminism constructs a homogeneous "Third World Woman" through discursive practices that generalize the experiences of women in diverse societies. This leads to an assumption that all third world women are similarly oppressed and defined primarily by their gender and status as third world. Mohanty asserts that feminist scholarship should avoid making universalizing claims and should locate gender relations within specific historical contexts to avoid reproducing colonial power dynamics.
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.