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.
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