sisterhood

It is insufficient to state that third world women need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of Western Feminism, because it risks the likelihood of solidifying a limiting perception of their experience.  Even the use of the term ‘third world’ woman functions to restrain the possibility of imagining a woman from a post colonial context as anything but. Instead, there remains attached to it a conception of lack, whereby the subject is not evolved enough and so the danger of this association is that it authorizes Western notions of Feminism to voice their experiences.

Mohanty speaks precisely of this overpowering effect of the White voice within the archive of women’s experiences and expresses the danger of clustering women of the ‘third world’ under broadly stereotyped characterizations. She accurately points out that such efforts are reminiscent of imperialist traditions, except in only a more contemporary period. Therefore, now, to blindly attribute such an enfeebling attitude of Western Feminism to a higher mission of empowerment is only to accommodate a new version of imperial conquest, an attempt to control the heart and mind. 

However, it is also crucial to note that these are not isolated instances. Mohanty emphasizes how Western Feminism has developed a very binary understanding of women which is attached to the compartmentalization of the post colonial world into very limited frames of being. It is in fact through a very deliberate act of power and rooted in a unique political context, that this happening. In most cases, women in the post colonial world are seen as extensions of men or religion. That is to say, never as in or of themselves. They are the other and not complete in their own. The effect of this can be traced along a very deep tradition of Sati where Lata Mani talks about how these women were remembered as only either ‘heroines’ or ‘victims’. So as the fate of a Sati is limited to an either/or conception, therefore,  all possibility of recognizing or expressing each woman’s individual experience is foreclosed.

In much the same way, White feminism operates to foreclose any nuanced understanding of the complexity of women in the post colonial world. It functions as a part of the wider power structure that dictates the placement of individuals into groups and groups into nations, all as part of one collective whole with a single identity. As Mohanty explains, “third world women as a group or category are automatically and necessarily defined as: religious (read “not progressive”), family-oriented (read “traditional”), legal minors (read “they-are-still-not-conscious-of their-rights”),illiterate (read “ignorant”), domestic (read “backward”) and sometimes revolutionary (read “their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war-they-must-fight!”).”  What is associated with the the third world woman is a sense of regression, or a state of immobility which is the exact opposite of the White woman. What then conflicts with the supposed aim of White Feminism, to cast all women under the universal umbrella of the female experience of a ‘shared oppression‘, is exactly how divided their experiences are. There is no sisterhood, or at least not an equally accessible one. White Feminism, by its very existence argues against it.

On this premise of sisterhood thus, Mohanty sums up quite clearly the discrepancy in White feminism. First world woman, third world woman; its not so much a matter of both surviving together, fighting against the same oppression. Rather, its more that one enables and sustains the other. They exist on different planes, coming together as a whole ever so rarely; the first world woman thrives on the third world woman, she derives her strength from otherising her. She is doubly marginalized, cast on the outer folds of history and left to fight on her own.