Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (Summary)

 

The term "colonization" has been used to describe various phenomena in recent feminist and left writings, including the appropriation of experiences and struggles by hegemonic white women's movements. This concept has been used to characterize economic and political hierarchies and the production of a cultural discourse about the "Third World." However, colonization often implies structural domination and suppression of the heterogeneity of subjects.

Mohanty analyzes the production of the "Third World Woman" as a singular monolithic subject in some Western feminist texts. The definition of colonization is predominantly discursive, focusing on a mode of appropriation and codification of "scholarship" and "knowledge" about women in the third world by specific analytic categories employed in specific writings on the subject. The author's concern about such writings stems from their investment in contemporary debates in feminist theory and the urgent political necessity of forming strategic coalitions across class, race, and national boundaries.

mohanty emphasizes the importance of connecting feminist scholarship with feminist political practice and organizing. Feminist scholarship is not just the production of knowledge about a certain subject but is a direct political and discursive practice that counters and resists the totalizing imperative of age-old "legitimate" and "scientific" bodies of knowledge. Feminist scholarly practices are inscribed in relations of power relations which they counter, resist, or even implicitly support.

The relationship between "Woman" and women in the third world is a central question in feminist scholarship. This connection is not a direct identity or correspondence, but rather an arbitrary relation set up by particular cultures. Feminist writings discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of women's lives, producing a composite, singular "Third World Woman." This image appears arbitrarily constructed but never carries the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.

Assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on 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 the "Third World Difference," which apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries.

In this process of homogenization and systemitization of the oppression of women in the third world, power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse, and this power needs to be defined and named. In the context of the West's hegemonic position today, Western feminist scholarship on the third world must be seen and examined precisely in terms of its inscription in these particular relations of power and struggle.

Mohanty then explores the use of "women" as a category of analysis in Western feminist discourse on women in the third world. The authors focus on five specific examples, each illustrating the construction of "Third World Women" as a homogeneous, "powerless" group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems. The representation of third-world women in these texts is coherent due to the use of "women" as a homogeneous category of analysis. Women are defined as victims of male violence, colonial processes, Arab familial systems, economic development processes, and the Islamic code. 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.

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Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar argue that 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. Fran Hosken, in her discussion on the relationship between human rights and female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, bases her condemnation of genital mutilation on one privileged premise: the goal of genital mutilation is "to mutilate the sexual pleasure and satisfaction of woman." This definition freezes women into "objects-who-defendthemselves," men into "subjects-who-perpetrate-violence," and society into powerless and powerful groups of people.

Beverly Lindsay argues that dependency relationships based on race, sex, and class are being perpetrated through social, educational, and economic institutions. This implies that third-world women constitute an identifiable group purely on the basis of shared dependencies. However, if shared dependencies were all that was needed to bind us together as a group, third-world women would always be seen as an apolitical group with no subject status. Instead, it is the common context of political struggle against class, race, gender, and imperialist hierarchies that may constitute third-world women as a strategic group at this historical juncture.

Linsday also states that linguistic and cultural differences exist between Vietnamese and Black American women, but both groups are victims of race, sex, and class. Black and Vietnamese women are characterized by their victim status. Similarly, statements like "My analysis will start by stating that all African women are politically and economically dependent." or "Nevertheless, either overtly or covertly, prostitution is still the main if not the only source of work for African women as a group." are illustrative of generalizations sprinkled liberally through a recent Zed Press publication, Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli.

The concept of women as universal dependents is a complex and multifaceted issue that requires careful analysis and understanding. The marriage ritual of the Bemba is a multistage event where a young man becomes incorporated into his wife's family group as he takes up residence with them and gives his services in return for food and maintenance. The sexual relationship varies according to the degree of the girl's physical maturity.

Elizabeth Cowie emphasizes the specifically political nature of kinship structures, which must be analyzed as ideological practices which designate men and women as father, husband, wife, mother, sister, etc. Thus, women as women are not located within the family but rather in the family, as an effect of kinship structures.

The liberal "Women in Development" literature is a prime example of universalization based on economic reductionism. Scholars like Irene Tinker, Ester Boserup, and Perdita Huston have written about the impact of development policies on women in developing countries, assuming that development is synonymous with economic development or progress. This assumption makes cross-cultural comparisons between women in different developing countries possible and unproblematical.

Perdita Huston's study focuses on the effects of development on the family unit and its individual members in Egypt, Kenya, Sudan, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. She states that the "problems" and "needs" expressed by rural and urban women in these countries center around education, training, work, wages, access to health and other services, political participation, and legal rights. Huston relates these needs to the lack of sensitive development policies that exclude women as a group or category. However, she assumes that all third world women have similar problems and needs, which means they must have similar interests and goals.

Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion, and other ideological institutions and frameworks. Such reductive crosscultural comparisons result in the colonization of conflicts and contradictions that characterize women of different social classes and cultures.

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The use of "women" as a group is problematic as 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, bypassing social class and ethnic identities. Sexual difference becomes coterminus with female subordination, and power is automatically defined in binary terms: men and women. Such simplistic formulations are both reductive and ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions, reinforcing binary divisions between men and women.

Maria Mies's study of the lace-makers of Narsapur, India, is an example of Western feminist work that does not fall into traps discussed above. She analyzes the structure of the lace industry, production and reproduction relations, sexual division of labor, profits and exploitation, and the overall consequences of defining women as "non-working housewives" and their work as "leisure-time activity." Mies also analyzes the "ideology of the housewife," the notion of a woman sitting in the house, as providing the necessary subjective and socio-cultural element for the creation and maintenance of a production system that contributes to the increasing pauperization of women and keeps them totally atomized and disorganized as workers.

This mode of local, political analysis generates theoretical categories from within the situation and context being analyzed and suggests corresponding effective strategies for organizing against the exploitations faced by the lace makers. Understanding the contradictions inherent in women's location within various structures is essential for devising effective political action and challenges.

The concept of universalism in feminist theory is often used to justify the sexual segregation and control of women, but this argument must be questioned as the specific meaning attached to the practice varies according to the cultural and ideological context. Concepts like reproduction, the sexual division of labor, the family, marriage, household, patriarchy, etc., are often used without their specification in local cultural and historical contexts.

Beyond sisterhood, there is still racism, colonialism, and imperialism! The concept of universalism in feminist theory is not only descriptive but also theoretically reductive and useless when it comes to political strategizing. It is essential to understand the context-specific differentiation of concepts and their application in order to generate effective political strategies and address the complex issues of gender, sexual segregation, and the role of women in society.

The use of gender as a superordinate category of organizing analysis can lead to the misinterpretation of empirical studies of gender differences with the analytical organization of cross-cultural work. Beverly Brown's review of the book Nature, Culture and Gender highlights that nature:culture and female:male are superordinate categories that organize and locate lesser categories within their logic. These categories are universal in the sense that they organize the universe of a system of representations, independent of the universal substantiation of any particular category.

Feminist work on women in the third world that blurs this distinction (which is present in certain Western feminists' self-representation) eventually ends up constructing monolithic images of "Third World Women" as women who can only be defined as material subjects, not through the relation of their materiality to their representations. The political effects of analytical strategies in the context of Western feminist writing on women in the third world are not against generalization but for careful, historically specific complex generalizations. 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 nine texts in the Zed Press Women in the Third World series focus on common areas in discussing women's "status" within various societies, such as religion, family-kinship structures, the legal system, the sexual division of labor, education, and political resistance. However, almost all the texts assume "women" as a category of analysis in the manner designated above, assuming that women have a coherent group identity within the different cultures discussed before their entry into social relations. This focus on the position of women structures the world in ultimately binary, dichotomous terms, where women are always seen in opposition to men, patriarchy is always male dominance, and religious, legal, economic, and familial systems are implicitly assumed to be constructed by men.

The structure and functioning of power relations in the third world are influenced by the assumption of a "juridico-discursive" model of power, which includes negative relations, an insistence on the rule, a cycle of prohibition, the logic of censorship, and uniformity of the apparatus functioning at different levels. Feminist discourse on the third world assumes a homogeneous category or group called women, which operates through the setting up of originary power divisions.

The role of Western feminist analysis in homogenizing and systematizing the experiences of different groups of women in third world countries is both analytically and strategically problematical, as it limits theoretical analysis and reinforces Western cultural imperialism. In the context of a first-third world balance of power, feminist analyses that perpetuate and sustain the idea of the superiority of the West produce a corresponding set of universal images of the "third world woman," such as the veiled woman, powerful mother, chaste virgin, and obedient wife.

The text suggests a parallel strategy in uncovering a latent ethnocentrism in particular feminist writings on women in the third world. Universal images of "the third world woman" are predicated upon assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives. In the context of the hegemony of the Western scholarly establishment in the production and dissemination of texts, and the legitimating imperative of humanistic and scientific discourse, the definition of "the third world woman" as a monolith might tie into the larger economic and ideological praxis of "disinterested" scientific inquiry and pluralism, which are the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the "non-Western" world.