The Unfortunate Eastern Feminist.

Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses is a compelling critique, by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, of western notions of feminism imposed upon the social order of the non-western communities. According to Mohanty, western feminist literature is deeply ingrained in the homogenization of third world women as ‘victims’ of the patriarchal social order. Parallel to Said’s critique of the Otherization of the “Oriental”, Mohanty also states that western feminist scholars overlook the nuances of the experiences of these women by imposing an all-encompassing idea of liberation and secularism which ignores the autonomy of third world women. Intersectionality is a concept that is also often largely ignored by the western writers who champion rights such as equal pay, failing to take into account that the women in these parts of the worlds desire different freedoms. Imposing their own structure of feminism highlights the overarching power structure in play which allows the western feminists to view themselves as saviors for the women in the east.
The imperialist tendencies of western thought is exposed in the view of eastern women as uneducated, unliberated victims who must be freed from the shackles of the patriarchy by the western saviors, much like Kipling’s ideology in the White Man’s Burden. Western feminist scholars create the image of the homogenized third world woman in order to establish a duality which allows them to identify and construct their own identity in opposition to the Other. This creates the concept of an us vs. them world that gives the western feminist positional superiority, inevitably denying any resistance put forward by the ‘third world women’. Negative stereotypes of these foreign cultures are reinforced by the feminist vitriol aimed at patriarchal structures oppressing women, without taking into account the liberty of the females in these communities to adopt certain practices such as taking the veil as an act of resistance such as in the case of Iranian women in post-Revolution times. Through Mohanty’s criticism of Western feminist scholarship, one understands the nuances of knowledge production, where holding the power to generate discourse about the “veiled,” therefore, necessarily oppressed women inherently pits the white, liberated, and superior woman against her subjugated counterpart. This also creates the notion of ‘savior complex’ where the western, liberated woman will sweep in and rescue her oppressed sisters from the yoke of patriarchy. As Mohanty states, “It is in this process of homogenization and systematization of the oppression of women in the third world that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse.”