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but rather are the framework that guides all of our actions. To achieve this, we need to remind ourselves of the dual politics of possibilities in our individual and collective lives.

NOTES 1. I defi ne both as plural processes, the former refl ecting

the diversity of gendered realities around the world and the latter in terms of economic, political, and cultural processes. While both the multiple feminisms and globalizations are mutually constitutive, they are also distinct.

2. In addition to serving global capital through eco- nomic means, Eisenstein (2005) argues that the U.S. administration has used feminism for its imperial policies via the war on terror.

3. Cross-border traders are those who buy food and other consumer items in one country and sell it another. In some regions, women take goods from their home country to another and return with goods from the foreign country to their own. Such cross-border trade by women has been facilitated by the economic globalization that has opened borders between countries that previously did not allow such easy fl ow of people and goods across borders.

REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 2006. Class questions feminist answers. The

gender lens. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld.

Beneria, Lourdes. 2003. Gender, development and global- ization: Economics as if all people mattered. New York: Routledge.

Desai, Manisha. 2007. The global women’s rights movement and its discontents. President’s Message: SWS Network News 24 (1): 2.

———. 2009a. From a uniform civil code to legal pluralism: The continuing debates in India. In Gender, family, and law in the Middle East and South Asia, edited by Ken Cuno and Manisha Desai. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

———. 2009b. Rethinking globalization: Gender and the politics of possibilities. Lanhan, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld.

Eisenstein, Hester. 2005. A dangerous liaison? Feminism and corporate globalization. Science & Society 69 (3): 487–518.

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. 2004. Globalization and culture: A cultural melange. Lagham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld.

Pearson, Ruth. 2003. Feminist responses to economic glo- balization. In Women reinventing globalization, edited by Joanne Kerr and Caroline Sweetman. Oxford, UK: Oxfam.

Simon-Kumar, Rachel. 2004. Negotiating emancipation: Public sphere, Gender, and critiques of neo-liberalism. International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (3): 485–506.

R E A D I N G 4 Under Western Eyes Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984)

What I wish to analyze is specifi cally the production of the “third world woman” as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts.

If one of the tasks of formulating and under- standing the locus of “third world feminisms” is delineating the way in which it resists and works against what I am referring to as “Western feminist discourse,” an analysis of the discursive construction of “third world women” in Western feminism is an important fi rst step.

Clearly Western feminist discourse and political practice are neither singular nor homogeneous in their goals, interests or analyses. However, it is pos- sible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of “the West” (in all its com- plexities and contradictions) as the primary refer- ent in theory and praxis. My reference to “Western feminism” is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith. Rather, I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual

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strategies used by writers which codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western. It is in this sense that I use that term West- ern feminist.

My critique is directed at three basic analytic principles which are present in (Western) feminist discourse on women in the third world.

The fi rst analytic presupposition I focus on is involved in the strategic location of the cat- egory “women” vis-à-vis the context of analysis. The assumption of women as an already consti- tuted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial loca- tion, or contradictions, implies a notion of gen- der or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-cultur- ally. (The context of analysis can be anything from kinship structures and the organization of labour or media representations.) The sec- ond analytical presupposition is evident on the methodological level, in the uncritical way “proof” of universality and cross-cultural validity are pro- vided. The third is a more specifi cally political presupposition underlying the methodologies and the analytic strategies, i.e., the model of power and struggle they imply and suggest. I argue that as a result of the two modes—or, rather, frames—of analysis described above, a homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an “average third world woman.” This woman leads an essen- tially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradi- tion-bound, domestic, family- oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self- representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions.

“WOMEN” AS CATEGORY OF ANALYSIS, OR: WE ARE ALL SISTERS IN STRUGGLE

By women as a category of analysis, I am refer- ring to the crucial assumption that all of us of the

same gender, across classes and cultures, are some- how socially constituted as a homogeneous group identifi ed prior to the process of analysis. This is an assumption which characterizes much feminist discourse. The homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological essentials but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and anthropological universals. Thus, for instance, in any given piece of feminist analysis, women are charac- terized as a singular group on the basis of a shared oppression. What binds women together is a socio- logical notion of the “sameness” of their oppression. It is at this point that an elision takes place between “women” as a discursively constructed group and “women” as material subjects of their own history.1 Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of “women” as a group is mistaken for the historically specifi c material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always already constituted group, one which has been labeled “powerless,” “exploited,” “sexually harassed,” etc., by feminist scientifi c, economic, legal and soci- ological discourses. (Notice that this is quite similar to sexist discourse labeling women weak, emotional, having math anxiety, etc.) This focus is not on uncovering the material and ideological specifi ci- ties that constitute a particular group of women as “powerless” in a particular context. It is, rather, on fi nding a variety of cases of “powerless” groups of women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless.

This mode of defi ning women primarily in terms of their object status (the way in which they are affected or not affected by certain institutions and systems) is what characterizes this particular form of the use of “women” as a category of analysis. In the context of Western women writing/study- ing women in the third world, such objectifi ca- tion (however benevolently motivated) needs to be both named and challenged. As Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar argue quite eloquently, “Feminist theories which examine our cultural practices as ‘feudal residues’ or label us ‘traditional,’ also portray us as politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of Western femi- nism. They need to be continually challenged . . . ” (1984, 7).

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WOMEN AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

The best examples of universalization on the basis of economic reductionism can be found in the liberal “Women in Development” literature. Proponents of this school seek to examine the effect of develop- ment on third world women, sometimes from self- designated feminist perspectives. At the very least, there is an evident interest in and commitment to improv- ing the lives of women in “developing” countries.

For instance, Perdita Huston (1979) states that the purpose of her study is to describe the effect of the development process on the “family unit and its individual members” in Egypt, Kenya, Sudan, Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Mexico. She states that the “problems” and “needs” expressed by rural and urban women in these countries all center around education and training, work and wages, access to health and other services, political participation and legal rights. Huston relates all these “needs” to the lack of sensitive development policies which exclude women as a group or category. For her, the solution is simple: implement improved development policies which emphasize training for women fi eldworkers, use women trainees, and women rural development offi cers, encourage women’s cooperatives, etc. Here again, women are assumed to be a coherent group or category prior to their entry into “the develop- ment process.” Huston assumes that all third world women have similar problems and needs. Thus, they must have similar interests and goals. However, the interests of urban, middle-class, educated Egyp- tian housewives, to take only one instance, could surely not be seen as being the same as those of their uneducated, poor maids? Development policies do not affect both groups of women in the same way. Practices which characterize women’s status and roles vary according to class. Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion and other ideological institu- tions and frameworks. They are not “women”—a coherent group—solely on the basis of a particular economic system or policy. Such reductive cross- cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the specifi cs of daily existence and the complexities of political interests which women of different social classes and cultures represent and mobilize.

Thus, it is revealing that for Perdita Huston, women in the Third World countries she writes about have “needs” and “problems,” but few if any have “choices” or the freedom to act. This is an inter- esting representation of women in the third world, one which is signifi cant in suggesting a latent self- presentation of Western women which bears look- ing at. She writes: “What surprised and moved me most as I listened to women in such very different cultural settings was the striking commonality— whether they were educated or illiterate, urban or rural—of their most basic values: the importance they assign to family, dignity and service to others” (1979: 115). Would Huston consider such values unusual for women in the West?

What is problematical about this kind of use of “women” as a group, as a stable category of analy- sis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity between women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead of analytically demon- strating the production of women as socio-economic political groups within particular local contexts, this analytical move limits the defi nition of the female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic identities. What characterizes women as a group is their gender (sociologically, not necessarily biologically, defi ned) over and above everything else, indicating a monolithic notion of sexual difference. Because women are thus consti- tuted as a coherent group, sexual difference becomes coterminous with female subordination, and power is automatically defi ned in binary terms: people who have it (read: men), and people who do not (read: women). Men exploit, women are exploited. Such simplistic formulations are historically reductive; they are also ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions. All they do is reinforce binary divisions between men and women.

What would an analysis which did not do this look like? Maria Mies’s work illustrates the strength of Western feminist work on women in the third world which does not fall into the traps discussed above, Mies’s study of the lace makers of Narsapur, India (1982), attempts to analyze carefully a sub- stantial household industry in which “housewives” produce lace doilies for consumption in the world market. Through a detailed analysis of the structure

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of the lace industry, production and reproduction relations, the sexual division of labor, profi ts and exploitation, and the overall consequences of defi n- ing women as “non-working housewives” and their work as “leisure-time activity,” Mies demonstrates the levels of exploitation in this industry and the impact of this production system on the work and living conditions of the women involved. In addi- tion, she is able to analyze the “ideology of the housewife,” the notion of a woman sitting in the house, as providing the necessary subjective and sociocultural element for the creation and mainte- nance of a production system that contributes to the increasing pauperization of women, and keeps them totally atomized and disorganized as workers. Mies’s analysis shows the effect of a certain historically and culturally specifi c mode of patriarchal organization, an organization constructed on the basis of the defi - nition of the lace makers as “non-working house- wives” at familial, local, regional, statewide and international levels. The intricacies and the effects of particular power networks are not only emphasized but form the basis of Mies’s analysis of how this par- ticular group of women is situated at the center of a hegemonic, exploitative world market.

This is a good example of what careful, politi- cally focused, local analyses can accomplish. It illus- trates how the category of women is constructed in a variety of political contexts that often exist simul- taneously and are overlaid on top of one another. There is no easy generalization in the direction of “women” in India, or “women in the third world”; nor is there a reduction of the political construction of the exploitation of the lace makers to cultural explanations about the passivity or obedience that might characterize these women and their situation. Finally, this mode of local, political analysis which generates theoretical categories from within the situ- ation and context being analyzed, also suggests cor- responding effective strategies for organizing against the exploitation faced by the lace makers. Narsapur women are not mere victims of the production pro- cess, because they resist, challenge and subvert the process at various junctures. Here is one instance of how Mies delineates the connections between the housewife ideology, the self- consciousness of the lace makers, and their inter-relationships as

contributing to the latent resistances she perceives among the women.

The persistence of the housewife ideology, the self- perception of the lace makers as petty commodity pro- ducers rather than as workers, is not only upheld by the structure of the industry as such but also by the delib- erate propagation and reinforcement of reactionary patriarchal norms and institutions. Thus, most of the lace makers voiced the same opinion about the rules of purdah and seclusion in their communities which were also propagated by the lace exporters. In partic- ular, the Kapu women said that they had never gone out of their houses, that women of their community could not do any work other than housework and lace work etc. but in spite of the fact that most of them still subscribed fully to the patriarchal norms of the gosha women, there were also contradictory elements in their consciousness. Thus, although they looked down with contempt upon women who were able to work outside the house—like untouchable Mala and Madiga women or women of other lower castes—they could not ignore the fact that these women were earning more money precisely because they were not respectable housewives but workers. At one discussion, they even admitted that it would be better if they could also go out and do coolie work. And when they were asked whether they would be ready to come out of their houses and work in one place in some sort of a factory, they said they would do that. This shows that the purdah and house- wife ideology, although still fully internalized, already had some cracks, because it has been confronted with several contradictory realities. (p. 157)

It is only by understanding the contradictions inherent in women’s location within various struc- tures that effective political action and challenges can be devised. Mies’s study goes a long way toward offering such analysis. While there are now an increasing number of Western feminist writings in this tradition,3 there is also, unfortunately, a large block of writing which succumbs to the cultural reductionism discussed earlier.

As discussed earlier, a comparison between West- ern feminist self-presentation and Western feminist re-presentation of women in the third world yields signifi cant results. Universal images of “the third

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world Woman” (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding the “third world difference” to “sexual difference,” are predi- cated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secu- lar, liberated and having control over their own lives. This is not to suggest that Western women are secu- lar, liberated and in control of their own lives. I am referring to a discursive self-presentation, not neces- sarily to material reality. If this were a material real- ity, there would be no need for political movements in the West. Similarly, only from the vantage point of the West is it possible to defi ne the “third world” as underdeveloped and economically dependent. Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged) First World. Without the “third world woman,” the particular self-presentation of Western women mentioned above would be problematical. I am suggesting, then, that the one enables and sus- tains the other.

NOTES Terms such as third and fi rst world are problemati- cal both in suggesting over-simplifi ed similarities between and among countries thus labeled, and in reinforcing implicitly existing economic, cultural and ideological hierarchies which are conjured up using such terminology. I use the term “third world” with full awareness of its problems, only because this is the terminology available to us at the moment.

1. Elsewhere I have discussed this particular point in detail in a critique of Robin Morgan’s construction of “women’s herstory” in her introduction to Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). See my “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,” Copyright 1, “Fin de Siecle 2000,” 30–44, especially 35–7.

2. These views can also be found in differing degrees in collections such as Wellesley Editorial Committee (ed.), Women and National Development: The Complexities of Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and Signs, Special Issue, “Development and the Sexual Division of Labor,” 7, no. 2 (Winter 1981). For an excellent introduction of WID issues, see ISIS, Women in Development: A Resource Guide for Organization and Action (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1984). For a politically focused discussion of feminism and development and the stakes for poor Third World women, see Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).

3. See essays by Vanessa Maher, Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, and Maila Stevens in Kate Young, Carole Walkowitz, and Roslyn McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination in International Perspective (London: CSE Books, 1981); and essays by Vivian Mota and Michelle Mattelart in June Nash and Helen I. Safa (eds), Sex and Class in Latin America: Women’s Perspectives on Politics, Economics and the Family in the Third World (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1980). For examples of excellent, self-conscious work by feminists writing about women in their own historical and geographical locations, see Marnia Lazreg (1988) on Algerian women, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World,” in her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 241–68, and Lata Mani’s essay “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on SATI in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987), 119–56.

REFERENCES Amos, Valerie, and Pratibha Parmar. 1984. “Challenging

Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review 17: 3-19. Huston, Perdita. 1979. Third World Women Speak Out.

New York: Praeger. Mies, Maria. 1982. The Lacemakers of Narsapur: Indian

Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed.

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