The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales by Sean Meighoo

Author:Sean Meighoo
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / General, PHI019000, PHILOSOPHY / Political, meig17672, PHI009000
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-05-03T04:30:00+00:00

Mohanty and Western Feminism

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s text “Under Western Eyes” was first published in 1984 in a special issue of the journal boundary 2 titled “On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism,” providing a critical focus that appears to have significantly informed the composition of Mohanty’s text itself. In the opening paragraph of her text, although she does not refer to Foucault, she does invoke the concept of discourse in order to delimit her analysis of colonialism. She explains that what she wants to interrogate in her essay is the discursive production of the Third World as such: “Colonization has been used to characterize everything from the most evident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the ‘Third World.’ . . . The definition of colonization I wish to invoke here is a predominantly discursive one.” She proposes that feminism or what she very tentatively calls “Western feminism” functions as a colonial discourse insofar as it produces the stereotypical figure of the Third World woman: “Colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. What I wish to analyze is specifically the production of the ‘Third World Woman’ as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts.”10

Mohanty goes on in this introductory section of her text to argue that Western feminist discourse generally reduces the complexity of the non-Western female subject by its insistence on the universal import of sexual difference, an insistence that yields in turn the ethnocentric concept of what she terms the “Third World Difference”:

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 I call the “Third World Difference”—that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries. And it is in the production of this “Third World Difference” that Western feminisms appropriate and “colonize” the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries. It is in this process of homogenization and system[a]tization of the oppression of women in the third world that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse. (335)

Mohanty’s argument on the concept of sexual difference thus poses a challenge not only to the feminist theory of gender as a universal category of analysis but also to any poststructuralist theory of difference as a salve against identity, homogeneity, or, indeed, representation itself. In this sense, “Under Western Eyes” certainly provides an important precursor to my own argument on the postcolonial defense of difference in chapter 5.

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