Chandra Mohanty’s main critique of Western feminist writings on third world women is how third world women are described as a monolithic, homogeneous entity divorced from their specific historical and local context. She argues that women are constructed within the realm of social relations, not beyond them and to understand the struggles of these women, their specific social context needs to be examined so it can be determined what the power dynamics of such a social setting are and how womanhood is constructed within that setting.

Reducing third world women to victims and men to oppressors creates a binary which refuses to acknowledge the ways in which women, time and time again attempt to assert their subjecthood, and their humanity against all odds. This mode of analysis then seems like an attempt at homogenizing the experiences of third world women to the realm of “oppression” and yet claiming it is for their “liberation.” However, the irony is that this sort of approach reinstates the status of these women as objects who need to be “educated” along the lines of western feminism.

Reading this critique reminded me of an incredible woman I met a couple of years ago while researching on the Orange Line with a friend. Shabbana Baji was a resident at Mahraja Building in Anarkali. A building that was to be demolished so that the metro station could be built in its place and the residents of the building who had been living there for decades were being offered a measly 100,000 in return for offering their homes up to the state.

Shabbana Baji had moved to the city at a very young age and had toiled endlessly to make ends meet. She had literally built her two-room apartment brick by brick and naturally refused to give it up. She had never gotten married and lived in her apartment alone while supporting her mother and sisters who lived in Mansehra.

The residents of the entire building had accepted her as their unanimous leader and she was meeting lawyers, activists, speaking to whatever media would agree to come there and fighting government officials on a daily basis. To the extent that many government officials and even some of the rowdy men in the building began to fear her; the woman didn’t take crap from anyone.

Baba Mauj Darya, a Sufi saint’s shrine is adjacent to Mahraja Building and Shabbana Baji was a very firm devotee. When we interviewed her, she told us, while sobbing, that Baba Ji had been watching over her ever since she had come to the city and that she had labored day and night to build her home from scratch. She had done everything single-handedly from getting the cement to the bricks to the bamboo sticks and that too in a space where she was constantly told off, harassed and exploited. She told us that Baba Ji had given her the strength through it all and she was particularly proud of the fact that she shared a wall with Baba Ji’s shrine and kept on reiterating, come what may she would let no harm come to her home or Baba Ji’s shrine. A part of Baba Mauj Darya’s shrine was also to be destroyed in construction of the Orange Line Metro Train and a lot of experts believed that the remaining foundations of the shrine won’t be able to hold once the train starts operating.

The Supreme Court has given a go ahead for the Orange Line and the work is ongoing. I am unsure about the status of Mahraja Building at this point, and maybe it would be fair to say that Shabbana Baji was fighting a losing battle, but I have yet to come across a woman as resilient and as fierce as her. And the idea of some academics reducing her to this hijab/chadar clad “oppressed third world woman” who is “religious (read: not progressive) and illiterate (read: ignorant),” waiting for the miracle of “liberation” to come her way, is absolutely, tragically ridiculous and horrifyingly farcical because as much as these analyses claim to be grounded in reality, they are absolutely divorced from real people and how they see themselves and their reality.

And as surprising as it may be, no, no one is looking towards whiteness or the West to teach them how to be a woman who fights for her rights. If these academics really wish to show solidarity to “third world women” and want to show their sincerity, then they best follow Mohanty’s advice: “It is time to move beyond Marx who found it possible to say: They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” The analysis of the material reality of these women and how they resist and how that resistance can be expanded within the context of their particular social setting can be the only way forward for the idea of a global feminist movement which has to acknowledge the differences between women in terms of class, race, ethnicity and history and not homogenize all experiences on the basis of shared gender.

And since this is for Shabbana Baji, whenever I think of resistance and strength as a woman, I always think of her and no jargonized, prejudiced, racist and plain ridiculous academic rhetoric can ever take that away from me for such is the strength of third world women.

 

Is first-world feminism imperialist?

Chandra Mohanty would say yes. Mohanty’s article draws on the similarities between the representation of the colonised populations by the colonisers and the ways women of the developing world are represented by Western scholars to illustrate the imperialist tendencies of first world feminism. Representation of third world women is a critical issue because of the effects such representation goes on to have. Scholarship on women is deeply intertwined with feminist practices and discourse. The ways of knowing third world women have remarkable consequences for the way of being and doing in third world contexts.  Much like colonisers, Western feminists too end up homogenising the experiences of women in third world. Third world women are never seen in their own right but always in comparison to their Western counterparts. Just like the Western man defines himself in opposition to his colonised subject, the Western scholar ends up defining herself against her characterisation of the third world women. The Western woman is educated, has bodily autonomy and has control over decisions that concern her while the women in the global South are illiterate, sexually repressed and subject to violence by the men in their lives, their families and their religion. The Western woman hence comes to see her counterparts in the third world as “ourselves undressed”. The category of “third world woman” that is constituted is denied any socio-historical context- what oppresses her is static, absolute and has no room for variation within it. Her oppression is taken as a given; she is powerless and her life is reduced to her being affected by or not being affected by one of the following: Islam, the Arab family, a formerly colonised nation and the economy of a dependent nation.  People in the third world are divided according to a very uncomplicated understanding of how patriarchy works- men are oppressors and the women their victims. With these characterisations, first world feminists often end up sounding a lot like the misogynists they rally against who too draw on biological differences to paint women as weak and feeble-minded.

But what does representation have to with imperialism? The way women of the global South are represented leads to a very paternalistic (perhaps maternalistic might be a better word here) attitude towards third world women. Since they are defined as the lack of everything that makes the Western woman “empowered”, they cannot be expected to improve their lot on their own. They think it is falls on white men and white women to show them how they should be empowered. This is where first world feminism fails in making meaningful connections with third world movements. These movements rarely reflect on their privilege and display a blatant ignorance of how it is not just religion or family that hinders women but also the exploitative economic systems that tie them to the West. This is how they end up reinforcing existing structures of power with their practices. Ignorance like this is exemplified by the “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts that were sported by celebrities who identified as feminists. The producers of these T-shirts, women who laboured in Mauritian sweatshops, received only a paltry wage of 62 pence for each shirt. 

Laura Bush’s radio speech on the tribulations of Afghan women and children under Taliban rule was a means of gathering support for the War on Terror her husband had began. The cause of women and feminism here was co-opted by warmongers to justify their actions. Many feminists too ended up lending support to a war that was never about the Afghan women and had little concern for them.  American presence in Afghanistan had inconclusive results and now as American troops withdraw from there, the question of Afghan women remains unanswered.

“Because of our recent military gains, in much of Afghanistan women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet, the terrorists who helped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries, and they must be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

However, for Mohanty, it is not only first world women who are guilty of painting the women of third world countries as passive subjects. Women who belong to the third world and reside in first world countries or women who belong to and live in the third world can be equally guilty of presenting women of third world countries as ahistorical subjects. First world feminism is not limited by geographical boundaries; it is a set of attitudes that deny third world women agency and ends up inadvertently lending support to the existing domination of formerly colonised nations by the West.

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Historically women’s bodies have been used as battlegrounds for men to fight their battles on. Women’s bodies have largely been the target of violence and this is true across time and culture. A woman’s body is an object shackled to the patriarchy, however, all women are not united in their oppression. There are intricacies of race, class, and history at play which cannot be glossed over by a banner of mutual oppression.

The White woman’s emancipation is not the colored women’s emancipation. The White woman lovingly nicknames the colored woman ‘Third World Woman,’ and attempts to engage in discourse for her emancipation without giving her a seat at the table. She lumps all colored women together irrespective of the intricacies of circumstance and develops a vested interest in their liberation. The ‘Third World Woman’ is considered a victim to circumstance, an ‘immature’ woman who can not think for herself. The colored woman is silenced and her own narrative is ignored.

The ‘Third World Woman’ carries chains the White Woman does not. She shoulders the weight of a colonial past where her body has been the grounds upon which conquest has taken place. She has been sexualized, exoticized and symbols from within her context have been turned over to fit the colonizers narrative. The French campaign to colonize Algeria translated into postcards that depicted Algerian women as easy and flirtatious. Colonialism took the symbol of their veil and viewed it through a lens that turned it into an invitation to their accessible bodies surrounded by mystique. Colonialism wrote the colored woman’s story.

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The White Woman is a crusader disguised as a savior. She holds banners of ‘We are all Sisters in Struggle’ and she aims to free the ‘Third World Woman,’ from the culture, religion, and men that oppress her. Much like Rostow and his theory on economic growth as a universal, linear process, the White Woman proposes a universal, linear path for achieving emancipation. She wishes to impose her script of emancipation on the colored woman. Much like the work of the colonizer, western feminism attempts to write the narrative of this ‘Third World Woman’

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The White Woman sees the colored woman’s veil as a symbol of oppression, she does not care for what context it is grounded within. Mohanty discusses the lens through which the white woman looks at the Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Egypt. Western feminism sees they all wear some form of veil and the White Woman equates it to ‘sexual control.’ The coloured women are reduced to a ‘descriptive generalization’. The White woman turns the veil into a symbol of something it may not be, just as the French colonizers did with the Algerian woman’s veil.

First world feminism does not care for the meaning behind instances of observing the veil and how the meaning differs across time and area. It does not care that while there may be physical similarities behind observing a veil, the Iranian middle-class woman observing it in 1979 to show solidarity with working-class women and the woman forced to observe the veil under mandatory Islamic law in contemporary Iran are different. It does not understand why diaspora women in the West are increasingly putting on the hijabs as a means of resistance while women in Iran are taking it off despite the reality of being jailed for it. First world feminism assumes ‘universal applicability’ and its failure to be context specific is a disservice to the struggle for women’s rights.

In conclusion, first world feminism fails to give the pen to the colored woman it so problematically calls the ‘Third World Woman.’ Intersectionality is necessary for a movement aimed at the emancipation of woman and the colored woman must write her own narrative. Western feminism’s crusade-like attempt to define the colored woman’s symbols rings close to the work of colonialism before it. The crusade is a form of neo-colonialism, an attempt to rule through control of ‘hearts and minds’ rather than ‘fire and sword.’

For the purpose of this piece, and to make things simpler, I will make the assumption that purdah is mandatory for a Muslim woman. Although a hotly debated topic in itself, the intention is not to debate whether or not Holy scripture demands a woman’s ‘modesty’; it is the political implications of that same purdah that must be addressed in a world that is seemingly wrought between tradition and modernity.

Mohanty argues, throughout her piece, that women must not, cannot, be homogenized to ‘make things easier’ to understand. To facilitate a ‘deeper’ understanding of the life of the Third World Woman (without learning of her lived reality). Woman and not woman, because a figure presented as part of a paradigm and a woman as a living, historically situated being, are two very different things. 

Mohanty briefly talks about “women and religious ideologies”; her brief albeit very powerful description of infantilization is what this piece will seek to address, through two competing political ideologies: theology and Western feminism. 

The debate presides over the question of what is modern and what is tradition and whether the two are compatible in a (supposedly) modern world. This debate, rather this apparent attack on tradition, on culture, manifests itself in and implicates, by extension, the body of a woman. Not a woman as an individual, as a human being, but the bodyof a woman as the ground on which religious fundamentalist Mullahs and left leaning White People compete for intellectual domination, for the right to point fingers and say that they won. The argument itself, as one will realize, has nothing to do with women themselves. 

A Muslim women, as a hegemonic entity, is apparently considered the ideal candidate for such politically motivated discourse because, for all intents and purposes, her faith manifests itself (or is supposed to manifest itself) physically. The argument, in other words, revolves around the purdah, or the hijab, or the niqab- or all of those mentioned; the kind of purdah she is in is arbitrary as long as it distinguishes her as a Muslim. 

This purdah, in all its varieties, is reduced to a single word, to make things easier, to make the argument accessible without wasting too much time and energy on what are apparently minor details. The kind of purdah a woman dons is of no importance, but the fact that she covers herself is the only objective taken into account. Why are both sides so quick to dismiss exactly what it is she wears? Does that say nothing about her identity? For the sake of the argument, again, we gloss over the details and present a Woman in purdah as the object of discourse.

The argument presented by theologians maintains that purdah is for a woman’s protection, for modesty, for her own good. Did anyone ever bother to ask a woman whether she felt protected in purdah? That question is apparently irrelevant, so long as Men can vouch for Women. Questions of honour, of safety, of modesty are all answered by men. If something is endorsed in the word of God, what does it matter who conveys the message; the information after all, is the same. Or so we are made to assume. 

The Western feminist will argue, as per the redundant scheme, that the purdah is an overt expression of patriarchal oppression. It prevents women from navigating the world as ordinary people.To unveil a Muslim woman then becomes a symbol of emancipation; the piece of cloth once removed, allows her to navigate life on her own terms as a free (new) woman. There is no denying the fact that to remove the veil, might indeed be a liberating experience, given that the woman in question chooses to remove the veil herself. What can, instead, be said for the woman who chooses to keep it on? 

Herein lies the contention among both sides that claim to have Women’s interests at heart. They neglect, deliberately or perhaps intentionally, the women who are motivated to make educated decisions based on their personal experiences. But when they do not conform to the paradigm that is perpetuated by either side, their narrative is left unaccounted. One might ask: does putting on a veil, after personal deliberation, not qualify as empowerment? Why is this the case, when putting one on or taking one off are essentially equally liberating, given that the woman has chosen it for herself. By eliminating deviations from the equation, both sides try to present a picture that is entirely in the favour of their argument without bringing into consideration the actual women implicated in the process. 

Either way, both sides end up reducing a woman’s experience to something they can say either does or does not align with their agenda, undermining and infantilizing women in the process of delivering the truth about Women. Conveniently looking the other way when a brown girl decides to take off what she thought stifled her identity or when a white woman finds comfort in a head scarf. Because at the end of the day, as Mohanty claims, there is no such thing as “apolitical scholarship”. The idea of the Woman is conflated with women whose lived reality is poles apart from the way they are perceived, reduced to one dimensional figures are either “affected or not affected by Islam”.

Western scholarly discourse is often embedded with the idea of the ‘other’. It is premised around and littered time and again with such binaries. In his essay, The Other Question. Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism, Homi Bhabha writes about the otherisation of the colonial subject through colonial writing and media projections. The expression of the ‘other’ takes a mixed form of fetish and anxiety with regard to the self across imperialist discourse. Mohanty provides a very similar analysis with regard to Western feminist discourse.

Western feminism paints the very broad picture of the colonised or the third world woman with the same brush. Through their writing, the discourse creates one homogenous victim in the name of the colonised woman who is similarly and equally oppressed by the men in their societies under the same pretences regardless of the context. Individual differences do not exist. Thousands of these women are deemed ignorant, illiterate and traditional. They are said to be unaware of their rights, which leads to two ways in which Western feminism is imperialist.

The first way is the definition of the other as primitive. Western feminism defines women in the third world as ignorant and unaware of their rights and potential as human beings. This way of writing leads to two things; it defines the self as the greater, more advanced being and puts the burden of saving the ignorant on the white feminist. If there is no ‘other’ the self also loses meaning. This is a significant characteristic of imperialist writing. Describing the third world as savage, primitive or backward automatically defines the self as more advanced and self-aware. This is what Bhabha also talks about, that such a practice creates a centre or norm against which the other is measured or judge, a standard of humanity which the people in the colony do not meet. And because these women in the colonies do not live a fulfilled life in the colonisers’ terms it becomes the duty of the white feminist to rescue them, to elevate their living standards and to provide them with the rights which have been snatched away from them by the patriarchy. The struggle which the Western women went through a couple of years prior to gain the same rights as men must be fought again, but this time on the behalf of the poor, ignorant third world woman. This is just another branch of the white man’s burden which was the struggle to civilise the uncivilised third world people, but one which is narrowly aimed only at saving the women. The attempt to “save” the third world woman is an entirely superficial one, as was the one to “save” colonised man. The process is never undertaken on the terms of the people being saved. Ideas about what their lives should be like are superimposed. The understanding is that the only correct way to exist is in the way the West exists. All other realities or ways of life are primitive, oppressive or unfulfilling. In a sense, this saving is much more for the sake of the Western feminist’s own peace of mind than for the betterment of the colonised woman (as is the case with all forms of imperialism).

The second way is related to the temporality of the colonised woman. By defining them as traditional, religious and backward Western feminism makes them static, bound to be in the past. The colonised subject is eternally fixed in the past as they have failed to reach the same heights of technological advancement and civilisation as the West. Since they have been unable to realise their full potential on their own, it becomes the responsibility of the Western feminist to “save” them. This is the same logic used by imperialists to invade the colonies and disrupt their way of life.

Thus Western feminism discussing the colonised, helpless third world woman is essentially nothing but another form of imperialism through an ideological discourse.

Mohanty’s essay Under Western Eyes explores how some part of the western feminist discourse is used to appropriate fundamental differences that characterize the lives of women around the world and instead create certain realities about the third world woman as a single monolithic subject. These ways of understanding reify assumptions about the average third world woman (“average” implying that their varied experiences can be equated) and yet at the same time help reaffirm the identity of the western woman as secular, liberated and in control of her life. There may not necessarily be a ‘civilizing mission’ behind these ways of thinking, but the very act of attempting to understand brings with it certain assumptions that Mohanty problematizes in her essay. These ideas end up eerily echoing the sort of generalizing notions that were essential to the imperialist agenda and were used to inform colonial policies not too long ago.

We come across the silenced subject of the colonized woman. And in some ways, she is not even recognized as a subject: western discourse on feminism puts the western woman at the center as the subject, while the third world woman is merely the object who does not have agentive power as such and is only acted upon. For instance by referring to women in the global south as “ourselves undressed”, writers like Rosaldo not only equate the struggle of women all over the world (with little attention to the nuances that make them so different) but also imply that these women are lesser or unrefined versions of the more advanced and developed woman in the west. The third world woman is reduced to only being referenced to in relation to her western counterpart and not in and of herself. This casting of the third world woman as the essential other, is what unites western feminists with their (previously colonial) governments.

In referring to the kinds of reductive analysis that are usually employed, Mohanty constantly reiterates how alluding to women as an organic entity based on a shared characteristic completely ignores the multiplicity of factors that constitute their person. The focus shifts from trying to understand the complexities of power relations, to “finding a variety of cases of “powerless” groups of women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless”. This ignores the nuances that produce women in certain contexts and cultures and analyses them as a singular group, effectively rendering their identity universal and at the same time ahistorical. Moreover, reducing the colonized women to victims par excellence assumes them to be an already constituted group that is merely placed within the structures that victimize them. This ignores the effect of these institutions in creating these women as they are.

While maybe not strictly imperialist in its aims, first world feminist writings usually gloss over nuances that are essential in understanding the struggles of women globally. For any meaningful analysis to take place, special care then needs to be taken to understand cultures or contexts in all their complexity and use them to inform discussions.

Mohanty’s article focuses on the universalization of the particular. Besides highlighting the bifurcation of western, and third world women, it also brings forth the notion of a dualistic form of colonization which the latter suffer from. In addition to being colonized, in an economically exploitative and absolutely violent way, the representation of these categories of women is also colonized, by the construction of the Other, in tandem with the construction of the Woman. This crisis of representation is pervasive in western feminist discourse, which corroborates the theory of hegemonic imperialism, which was violent in its control of the dominated both by the sword, and the pen. Mohanty divides her critique of popular western feminist literature into three distinct components, constituting of five specific ways in which the third world woman is categorized in western literature.

The first point of analysis focuses on the context of the women who are described in western discourse, and attempts to locate their identity in the world outside of the purview of the western scholar. The ‘methodological universalism’ employed by western feminists undercuts the particular trajectory of historical events which shapes the lives of these women under study. The categorization of them as “third world women” carries with it a linguistic baggage, which casts off third-world women as just third-world women, who are all involved in the “sameness of their oppression.” This divides the discourse of women into binaries of western woman, and the third world women, in a manner which defines the former as someone the latter is not. The associations attached to such categorizations are reinforced on multiple levels to produce immediate images in the mind of the colonizer which render the colonized subject as “ignorant, poor, uneducated, religious, tradition-bound, etc.” A stereotypical analysis of such intensity and repetitiveness is essentially defining the western woman. These characteristics are used as a frame of comparison for the white woman who is the antithesis of them. The third-world woman becomes a metric against which western woman is defined. In painting the oppression of every and any woman with the same brush, the western discourse on feminism does not take into account differences across class, culture, ethnicity, race, and even gender. These women are then “discursively constructed” and not thought of as subjects which shape their own material identity, and history. Women are placed into preexisting structures, which defines their existence in a way which serves as extracting specific signposts from historical memory to validate a particular perception of them. It is a form of feminism which focuses on tracing antecedents events which are incorporated as substitutes for a deeper level analysis of the lives of these women. In one categorization, women are rendered victims of male violence, and their existence is defined on the terms of the control men exert on their bodies. The instance of female genital mutilation is not explained, but rather described as tool of male dominance enacted on the women to restrict their sexuality. In another text, Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta, the concept of FGM is considered a form of resistance against colonial rule. These variations between perceptions of the same event are not taken into account, and this essentially defines the third world woman as merely a victim, through which both the attack, and the defense against society comes from. Mohanty also emphasizes upon the depiction of women as dependent subjects in western discourse, which situates them on a trajectory of progress which is defined by western standards. The historical specificities of women are ignored, and they are formed into a homogenized group which suffers from the same issues, in an identical way. A woman’s existence is defined “via dependency relationships vis-a-vis men.” Instead of uncovering the value attached to the roles women take on as part of these “dependency” relations, their reality is seen as an irrefutable fact. Even in the context of kinship patterns, the exchange of women in tribal societies is reduced to a ritual which does not have social, political, and economic implications.

The homogenizing of women in this category overlaps their differences, and assumes that the origin of their position in society in the socio-economic context is preceded by just a sexual-political impression of it. With reference to religion, the example of Pirzada women cited by Mohanty substantiates her claim that western discourse focuses on preconceived notions about the third world women. In western discourse, the act of taking on the purdah is justified by Islamic ideology, whereas it is underpinned by an aspect of security, and the male members of society taking over the economic resources. These overarching categories state that the western woman needs the third world woman to define herself, and in this pursuit, the discourse does not allow for debates which reflect upon the specific contexts of these women. In suggesting that development will render the third world societies progressive, aspects of choice on part of the women in developing countries is not taken into account, nor the absence of freedom to act that these women actively suffer from. The problems pertaining to underdevelopments also affects women in different classes in different ways, and this intersectional discrimination faced by women on the basis of their color, race, ethnicity and class are not taken into account in western feminist literature. 

This methodological universalism employed by western feminists does not rest on empirical proof, but instead of reductive binaries which superimposes the perception of the Woman in the eyes of the western observer, onto the category of women as a collective. Women are placed into a self evident category, which creates a “negative relation” between them and the group in power, as emphasized by Michel Foucault. The western woman becomes the subject, whereas the third world woman becomes the object. These structures created by the foreign to locate the other comes laden with moral justifications for a way of life which before being considered inferior, is defined as different. The codification of the third world women which produces stock categories of “veiled woman, powerful mother, chaste virgin” are used interchangeably to define all women in the third world. Politics of lesbians, and women from marginalized religious and ethnic groups are not assessed, and instead of “culture, identity and universalism” being preceded by “differences, temporality, error” — the analysis is inverted, and one entity ends up defining the other.