Western Feminism's construction of the third world subject

Arab World English Journal For Translation and Literary Studies, 2019

The Western representation of others and particularly Third World women is not a recent fabrication but it had been operational and deep-rooted in the West conceptualization ever since the first encounters between Europe and its other. With this in mind, this paper purports to examine the representation/image of the female Other in the Eurocentric feminist narratives as well as to uncover the pitfalls that Western feminist scholars face while attempting-in their so-called mission-to rescue their sisters in the Third world societies. This paper counters the fallacy that has been long held by Western feminists about Third World women as being homogenous and 'uncivilized other'. Drawing on postcolonial feminist thought, this paper presents a critique of Western feminism vis-à-vis Third World feminism and literary contributions namely, Chadra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak' theorizations.

2014

There is a growing consciousness among Muslim scholars of feminist scholars’ tendency to generalize and make unwarranted assumptions regarding the position of women in the Muslim World. Western feminists have not succeeded in their assumed mission to “rescue” Third World women. This article is written in response to Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1988, 1991). The problems that Western scholars face if attempting to promote Third World women’s rights include the failure of some campaigns by Western feminists through analyzing some of the Western feminism limitation in areas such as the geopolitics, especially the history of colonialism, and cultural and religious specificities of these Third World societies. This article analyzes problems that Western scholars face when attempting to participate in calling for Third World women’s rights, following Mohanty identification of three main problematic analytic principles. There is a te...

Asian Social Science

Since the 1980s, feminism and post-colonialism began to exchange and dialogue, forming a new interpretation space, that is, post-colonial feminist cultural theory. There is a very complicated relationship between post-colonialism and feminism, both in practice and theory. It was obvious that they have always been consistent as both cultural theories focus on the marginalization of the "other" that is marginalized by the ruling structure, consciously defending their interests. Post-structuralism is used to deny the common foundation of patriarchy and colonialism—the thinking mode of binary opposition. However, only in the most recent period, Postcolonialism and feminism "Running" is more "near", it is almost like an alliance. (The factor contributing to this alliance is that both parties recognize their limitations.) Furthermore, for quite some time there have been serious conflicts between these two equally famous critical theories. They have been deepl...

1. Postcolonial feminist theory is primarily concerned with the representation of women in once colonized countries and in western locations. While postcolonial theorist struggles against the maiden colonial discourse that aims at misrepresenting him as inferior, the task of a postcolonial feminist is far more complicated. She suffers from "double colonization" as she simultaneously experiences the oppression of colonialism and patriarchy. She has to resist the control of colonial power not only as a colonized subject, but also as a woman. In this oppression, her colonized brother is no longer her accomplice, but her oppressor. In his struggle against the colonizer, he even exploits her by misrepresenting her in the nationalist discourses. Not only that, she also suffers at the hand of Western feminists from the colonizer countries who misrepresent their colonized counterparts by imposing silence on their racial, cultural, social, and political specificities, and in so doing, act as potential oppressors of their "sisters". In this article, I explore these struggles of a postcolonial feminist, for it is in her struggle against the "postcolonial" and "feminist" theorists that she can assert her identity as a "postcolonial feminist."

The conjuncture between postcolonialism and feminism is indeed an emerging scenario in the contemporary critical practice. Chandra Talpade Mohanty observes the function of Western imperialism itself and the feminist regardless enacting the problematic role of the “feminist as imperialist”. In her paradigmatic essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” she locates in the recent Western feminist scholarship a play of discursive colonization linking it to imperialism and its production of the Third World Women as a “singular monolithic subject, an always already constituted group, one that has been labeled as powerless, exploited, sexually harassed and so on” (Mohanty, 26).

Literatures on feminist theory abound: they challenge the dominant traditional modernist worldview that uses the male perspective as the standard by which all social phenomena are measured. Thanks to feminists, theories now span the whole range of the ideological spectrum. However, post-colonial feminism is still on the fringes. Rejecting sweeping generalizations, this paper highlights specific cases from Asia and Africa in order to analyze the different actions and discourses of women from the Third World. By so doing, this research contributes to mainstreaming women’s voices from the Global South as well as promoting post-structural analysis which treats women, not as an indistinct unified blob, but as a heterogeneous group of individuals and groups with discrete identities and dissimilar agenda.

With the imposition of certain notions of agency and marginalization prescribed by first world feminist discourses, global feminism has cumulatively remained mired within a binaristic closure. This closure is based on the idea of an agentive Western feminist center and a passive third world feminism at the margin. This article endeavours to go beyond this closure to initiate debates regarding the operational praxis of a third world woman's marginal placement as articulated in third world feminist discourses. It problematizes the idea of "disempowerment" that stems from a patriarchal model depicting man as the nucleus and a woman as a peripheral and centripetal entity, drawn within the mise en abyme of selfconsolidating representations. Therefore, the argument presented here revisits the notion of the marginalization of third world women by subjecting the theoretical approaches regarding female marginalization and agency-as articulated by Spivak, Irigaray and Kristeva, et al.-to a deconstructive mode of analysis to explore the theoretical reconfiguration of a third world woman's marginal placement. This article reconsiders the margin as discursively "limitrophic" so that the binaries between the margin/center, agency/disempowerment and third world feminism/first world feminism are re-scrutinized. The margin, thus, becomes an agentive plane for a third world woman as she uses it to direct her gaze away from any discursive center. In this way, a third world woman undermines the West-centric centripetal force despite being englobed within what Kristeva calls "supranational sociocultural ensembles" and sees her "self" as independent of any fixed center so that she redefines herself as an autonomous thinking woman able to dismantle the notion of a congealed subalternity. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on gender studies.