Category: Week 4

Imperialist feminism

‘[…] Colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression-often violent-of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. ‘ – Chandra Mohanty

Western feminist discourse, in Mohanty’s article serves to do two things – ahistoricize and homogenize the non-Western woman; and through that, construct the Western woman in opposition to this conceptual creation.

Sound familiar?

Just as the construction of the civilized Occident rested on the negation of the backwards and barbarous Orient, so does the construction of the educated, sexually liberated and agent-of-her own will first world woman rest on the negation of the oppressed, domestic and sexually repressed ‘third world woman’ as a homogeneous category.

Just as in the construction of an Other that could be barbarous or semi-barbarous, or almost-educated involved a hierarchy that automatically and implicitly perched the European self at the top and allowed all others to scramble among each other in trying to achieve an almost-equal status through trying to be European, through speaking their language, adopting their dress and learning their knowledge – for your language was sub-language more ‘dialect’, your dress was un-civilised, indecent, your knowledge illegitimate – so in the dialectic of Western feminism, there is one way to be ‘liberated’ – theirs. They are the ideal, and all others must strive to achieve it.

And finally, just as the ‘native’ became subject to study – his ‘traditions’, ‘superstitions’ – in short, his ‘backwardness’ was an object of study, so third world women, in their ‘victim-hood’ are frozen for study, like butterflies in glass – the subjects of traditional anthropological works such as ‘the Peoples of India’. They are then a homogeneous identity, understandable through abstract categorical understandings of power relations in an absolute sense; their dress is thus, their customs are thus their traditions are thus – their dress is thus; their oppression is thus; their economic dependence is thus.

One of the implications in this representational discourse the simplification and ahistoricization of complex cultural heterogeneity. In either case, where customs are ‘understood’ and ‘studied’ through the analytical ‘legitimate’ lens of the outsider, history is ignored and parallels are drawn between widely disparate communities on basis of a supposed commonality. In the colonial context this commonality was racial – in this case is the supposed commonality of women.

As such, the concept, thus, is that the experiences of one group of women, as understood through particular study, are then applicable to other women ‘in the same boat’ – or otherwise categorization as the objects of study, third world women, or women under Islam, or women in ‘developing countries’. They have issues and problems to be diagnosed and cured by the benevolent, overarching paternalism of, ironically, western feminism, but no agency, no internal shades of grey – of complex internal power dynamics that define and represent different meanings and choices within the simple categorization of woman.

The issue here is the power of representation. The right to make authoritative statements of a technically inferior Other, one for whom the only way to achieve the right to make their own statements is through achievement on the same skewed power hierarchy that confers this right.

And it’s through exercising this right that not only the third world woman is defined, but that in defining this oppressed third world woman, the implicit liberated first world woman emerges as well. Just as civilization meant westernization, women liberation must thus be conceived in western terms as well. Thus any attempt to create a narrative of alternate empowerment cannot read as empowerment except through the already existent signals of empowerment – inherently western that they are. In short, a liberated woman is a first world woman.

There’s an assumption of temporal inequality implicit within this discourse, a temporality not unfamiliar to the colonial discourse. Again the march to ‘progress’ is a singular and linear path, again the West is so much further along on the march towards an ideal humanity, again all others must tread in the West’s footsteps to better themselves. The third world will get there, of course – they simply haven’t evolved to the extent of the first yet.

The new orient is created within imaginations of women ‘the veiled woman’, ‘the abused women’, ‘the silenced women’ (which, come to think of it, is not that different from the original orient), oppressed by fundamentalist, traditionalist power structures in society, discourses that, in creating a newly morally superior occident, perpetuate an understanding of difference, an otherization that perpetuates, maintains and legitimizes power imbalances and abuses, both through the production of knowledge, or simply through the actual ‘benevolent’ policing of this Other.

While I wouldn’t go quite as far as to call western feminism classic fire-and-sword imperialism, I would consider it the modern-day, neo-colonial equivalent to the rhetoric of the Civilizing Mission, in that within the rhetoric is an established value judgement of an ideal, ethnocentric humanism wrapped up within benevolent packaging, justifying not so benevolent actions. It ends up serving a larger episteme of power imbalance, that, in turn, is the basis for imperialism, both neo and classically coercive.

The ‘Other’ Woman

‘‘It is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the center.’’ Chandra Mohanty, ‘‘Under Western Eyes’’

The West’s worldview seems to be predicated upon binaries, at least in terms of description. Where there is an ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, ‘White’ and ‘Non-White’, ‘Civilized’ and ‘Primitive’, among others. These juxtapositions leads to an understanding of the world in opposites where certain roles are ascribed for each to perform. In analyzing the publication in the Zed Press on the Third World Woman, Chandra Mohanty is able to show Western women’s ideas surrounding women from the underdeveloped world in her essay ‘Under Western Eyes’. Two ideas are prominent in this analyses which give ground to the argument that first world feminism is a form of imperialism, it is the White Feminists’ Burden.

The first is that a certain kind of third world woman is created which validate the role western feminism as a guardian. Homi Bhabha, in his essay “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’’, speaks of the relationship of the colonizer’s Self to the colonial subject, and his identification with that subject in terms of the fetish and anxiety with regards to them. The concept of the relation of this Self with the colonized is important because in Mohanty’s analysis she shows this similarity. She says: “[O]nly in so far as “Woman/Women” and “the East” are defined as Others, or as peripheral, that (Western) Man/Humanism can represent him/itself as the center” (353). Therefore, a certain distinction is drawn by creating a certain being, a woman who is different, upon whom certain ideas and stereotypes are repeatedly imposed to be able to justify the first world feminism’s own humanism. It justifies their existence, and while it might, as Mohanty also maintains, genuinely aim to reach some substantial gains, its ideals are propagated on a paternalism quite similar to the white man’s civilizing mission. It is these white women who are in a position to lend their hands to all women of the third world who are necessarily all oppressed, equally and without a nuanced context. As Mohanty argues, by looking at numbers they are able to make greater assumptions about the kinds of lives these women live that always exist in opposition to something else. And thus, their role and intervention becomes necessary and their humanism becomes justified.

Another way how first world feminism becomes imperialistic is through the focus on the woman and its relation to temporality. Mohanty shows that the third world woman categorized as a homogenous group are all argued to be “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!”)”. This lens through which the third world woman is viewed is a lens of time in which the former is always behind. Words like “not progressive”, “traditional”, “still not conscious’’, ‘‘illiterate’’, ‘‘ignorant’’, ‘‘backward’’, all denote that the woman has not caught up and needs to be pushed and saved because she is in a historical time. This is a similar lens that the colonialist applied to justify its intervention around the world because it thought it its duty to save those who had not caught up. Thus, the burden. And this idea again shows how first world feminism is imperialistic.

Therefore, Mohanty’s analysis of the articles in the Zed Press shows the paternalism prominent in the first world feminists’ ideals very similar to the colonialist mission of civilization. In essence, the third world woman creates a space for first world feminism to exist.