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38 | ‘Under Western eyes’ revisited: feminist solidarity through anti-capitalist struggles

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

I write this essay at the urging of a number of friends and with some trepidation, revisiting the themes and arguments of an essay written some sixteen years ago. This is a difficult essay to write, and I undertake it hesitantly and with humility. It is time to revisit ‘Under Western eyes,’ to clarify ideas that remained implicit and unstated in 1986 and to further develop and historicize the theoretical framework I outlined then.

What are the challenges facing transnational feminist practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What are the urgent intellectual and political questions for feminist scholarship and organizing at this time in history?

First, let me say that the terms Western and Third World retain a political and explanatory value in a world that appropriates and assimilates multiculturalism and ‘difference’ through

commodification and consumption. Western and Third World explain much less than the categorizations North/South or One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds. North/South is used to distinguish

between affluent, privileged nations and communities. As a political designation that attempts to distinguish between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ it does have a certain political value.

I find the language of One-Third World versus Two-Thirds World as elaborated by Gustavo particularly useful, especially in conjunction withEsteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (1998) Third

World/South and First World/North. These terms represent what Esteva and Prakash call social minorities and social majorities – categories based on the quality of life led by peoples and

communities in both the North and the South.1 The advantage of One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds is that they move away from misleading geographical and ideological binarisms.

Under and (inside) Western eyes: at the turn of the century There have been a number of shifts in the political and economic landscapes of nations and

communities of people in the last two decades. Feminist theory and feminist movements across national borders have matured substantially since the early 1980s, and there is now a greater visibility of transnational women’s struggles and movements, brought on in part by the United Nations world conferences on women held over the last two decades. The rise of religious fundamentalisms with their deeply masculinist and often racist rhetoric poses a huge challenge for feminist struggles around the world.

My own present-day analytic framework remains very similar to my earliest critique of Eurocentrism. However, I now see the politics and economics of capitalism as a far more urgent locus of struggle. It is attentive to the micropolitics of everyday life as well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political processes. The link between political economy and culture remains crucial to any form of feminist theorizing – as it does for my work. Global economic and political processes have become more brutal, exacerbating economic, racial, and gender inequalities, and thus they need to be demystified, re-examined, and theorized.

‘Under Western eyes’ sought to make the operations of discursive power visible, to draw attention to what was left out of feminist theorizing, namely, the material complexity, reality, and agency of Third World women’s bodies and lives. This is in fact exactly the analytic strategy I now use to draw attention to what is unseen, under-theorized, and left out in the production of knowledge about globalization. While globalization has always been a part of capitalism, and capitalism is not a new phenomenon, at this time I believe the theory, critique, and activism around anti-globalization has to be a key focus for feminists.

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Feminist methodologies: new directions What kinds of feminist methodology and analytic strategy are useful in making power (and

women’s lives) visible in overtly nongendered, nonracialized discourses? I believe that [an] experiential and analytic anchor in the lives of marginalized communities of women provides the most inclusive paradigm for thinking about social justice. If we pay attention to and think from the space of some of the most disenfranchised communities of women in the world, we are most likely to envision a just and democratic society capable of treating all its citizens fairly. Beginning from the lives and interests of marginalized communities of women, I am able to access and make the workings of power visible – to read up the ladder of privilege. It is more necessary to look upward – colonized peoples must know themselves and the colonizer. My view is thus a materialist and ‘realist’ one and is antithetical to that of postmodernist relativism. Methodologically, this analytic perspective is grounded in historical materialism.

Feminist scientist Vandana Shiva, one of the most visible leaders of the anti-globalization movement, provides a similar and illuminating critique of the patents and intellectual property rights agreements sanctioned by the World Trade Organization since 1995.2 Along with others in the environmental and indigenous rights movements, she argues that the WTO sanctions biopiracy and engages in intellectual piracy by privileging the claims of corporate commercial interests, based on Western systems of knowledge in agriculture and medicine, to products and innovations derived from indigenous knowledge traditions. Thus, through the definition of Western scientific epistemologies as the only legitimate scientific system, the WTO is able to underwrite corporate patents to indigenous knowledge (as to the Neem tree in India) as their own intellectual property, protected through intellectual property rights agreements. As a result, the patenting of drugs derived from indigenous medicinal systems has now reached massive proportions.

The contrast between Western scientific systems and indigenous epistemologies and systems of medicine is not the only issue here. It is the colonialist and corporate power to define Western science, and the reliance on capitalist values of private property and profit, as the only normative system that results in the exercise of immense power. All innovations that happen to be collective, to have occurred over time in forests and farms, are appropriated or excluded. The idea of an intellectual commons where knowledge is collectively gathered and passed on for the benefit of all, not owned privately, is the very opposite of the notion of private property and ownership that is the basis for the WTO property rights agreements.

Shiva’s analysis of intellectual property rights, biopiracy, and globalization is made possible by its very location in the experiences and epistemologies of peasant and tribal women in India. Beginning from the practices and knowledges of indigenous women, she ‘reads up’ the power structure, all the way to the policies and practices sanctioned by the WTO. This is a very clear example, then, of a transnational, anti-capitalist feminist politics.

It is especially on the bodies and lives of women and girls from the Third World/South – the Two-Thirds World – that global capitalism writes its script, and it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of these communities of women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision anti-capitalist resistance.

Since women are central to the life of neighborhoods and communities they assume leadership positions in these struggles. This is evident in the example of women of color in struggles against environmental racism in the United States, as well as in Shiva’s example of tribal women in the struggle against deforestation and for an intellectual commons.

If these particular gendered, classed, and racialized realities of globalization are unseen and under-theorized, even the most radical critiques of globalization effectively render Third World/South women and girls as absent. Perhaps it is no longer simply an issue of Western eyes, but rather how the West is inside and continually reconfigures globally, racially, and in terms of gender. Without this recognition, a necessary link between feminist scholarship/analytic frames and organizing/activist projects is impossible. Faulty and inadequate analytic frames engender ineffective political action and strategizing for social transformation.

Globalization colonizes women’s as well as men’s lives around the world, and we need an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and contextualized feminist project to expose and make visible theCo

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various, overlapping forms of subjugation of women’s lives. Activists and scholars must also identify and re-envision forms of collective resistance that women, especially, in their different communities enact in their everyday lives. It is their particular exploitation at this time, their potential epistemic privilege, as well as their particular forms of solidarity, which can be the basis for reimagining a liberatory politics for the start of this century.

Anti-globalization struggles Although the context for writing ‘Under Western eyes’ in the mid-1980s was a visible and

activist women’s movement, this radical movement no longer exists as such. Instead, I draw inspiration from a more distant, but significant, anti-globalization movement in the United States and around the world. Activists in these movements are often women, although the movement is not gender-focused. What does it mean to make anti-globalization a key factor for feminist theorizing and struggle? The site of anti-globalization scholarship I focus on is the emerging, notably ungendered and deracialized discourse on activism against globalization.

Anti-globalization scholarship and movements

Women’s and girls’ bodies determine democracy: free from violence and sexual abuse, free from malnutrition and environmental degradation, free to plan their families, free to not have families, free to choose their sexual lives and preferences. ( )Eisenstein 1998: 161 3

There is now an increasing and useful feminist scholarship critical of the practices and effects of globalization. I want to draw attention to some of the most useful kinds of issues it raises. I return to an earlier question: What are the concrete effects of global restructuring on the ‘real’ raced, classed, national, sexual bodies of women in the academy, in workplaces, streets, households, cyberspaces, neighborhoods, prisons, and in social movements? And how do we recognize these gendered effects in movements against globalization? Some of the most complex analyses of the centrality of gender in understanding economic globalization attempt to link questions of subjectivity, agency, and identity with those of political economy and the state. This scholarship argues persuasively for the need to rethink patriarchies and hegemonic masculinities in relation to present-day globalization and nationalisms, and it also attempts to retheorize the gendered aspects of the refigured relations of the state, the market, and civil society by focusing on unexpected and unpredictable sites of resistance to the often devastating effects of global restructuring on women.4

Women workers of particular caste/class, race, and economic status are necessary to the operation of the capitalist global economy. Particular kinds of women – poor, Third and Two-Thirds World, working-class, and immigrant/migrant women – are the preferred workers in these global, ‘flexible’ temporary job markets. The documented increase in the migration of poor, One-Third/Two-Thirds World women in search of labor across national borders has led to a rise in the international ‘maid trade’ ( ) and in international sex trafficking and tourism.Parreñas 2001 5 Many global cities now require and completely depend on the service and domestic labor of immigrant and migrant women. The proliferation of structural adjustment policies around the world has reprivatized women’s labor by shifting the responsibility for social welfare from the state to the household and to women located there. The rise of religious fundamentalisms in conjunction with conservative nationalisms, which are also in part reactions to global capital and its cultural demands, has led to the policing of women’s bodies in the streets and in the workplaces.

Global capital also reaffirms the color line in its newly articulated class structure evident in the prisons in the One-Third World. Just as the factories and workplaces of global corporations seek and discipline the labor of poor, Third World/South, immigrant/migrant women, the prisons of Europe and the United States incarcerate disproportionately large numbers of women of color, immigrants, and noncitizens of African, Asian, and Latin American descent.

Making gender and power visible in the processes of global restructuring demands looking at, naming, and seeing the particular raced and classed communities of women from poor countries as they are constituted as workers in sexual, domestic, and service industries; as prisoners; and asCop yr ig ht @ 2 01 1. Z ed B oo ks .

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household managers and nurturers. Marianne discuss the gendered metaphors and symbolism inMarchand and Anne Runyan (2000)

the language of globalization whereby particular actors and sectors are privileged over others: market over state, global over local, finance capital over manufacturing, finance ministries over social welfare, and consumers over citizens. They argue that the latter are feminized and the former masculinized and that this gendering naturalizes the hierarchies required for globalization to succeed.

In spite of the occasional exception, I think that much of present-day scholarship tends to reproduce particular ‘globalized’ representations of women. Just as there is an Anglo-American masculinity produced in and by discourses of globalization,6 it is important to ask what the corresponding femininities being produced are. Clearly there is the ubiquitous global teenage girl factory worker, the domestic worker, and the sex worker. There is also the migrant/immigrant service worker, the refugee, the victim of war crimes, the woman-of-color prisoner who happens to be a mother and drug user, the consumer-housewife, and so on. There is also the mother-of-the-nation/religious bearer of traditional culture and morality.

Although these representations of women correspond to real people, they also often stand in for the contradictions and complexities of women’s lives and roles. Certain images, such as that of the factory or sex worker, are often geographically located in the Third World/South, but many of the representations identified above are dispersed throughout the globe. The point I am making here is that women are workers, mothers, or consumers in the global economy, but we are also all those things simultaneously. Singular and monolithic categorizations of women in discourses of globalization circumscribe ideas about experience, agency, and struggle. There is a divide between false, overstated images of victimized and empowered womanhood, and they negate each other. We need to further explore how this divide plays itself out in terms of a social majority/minority, One-Third/Two-Thirds World characterization. The concern here is with whose agency is being colonized and who is privileged in these pedagogies and scholarship.

Because social movements are crucial sites for the construction of knowledge, communities, and identities, it is very important for feminists to direct themselves toward them. The anti-globalization movements of the last five years have proved that one does not have to be a multinational corporation, controller of financial capital, or transnational governing institution to cross national borders. These movements form an important site for examining the construction of transborder democratic citizenship. Anti-globalization movements have numerous spatial and social origins. These include anti-corporate environmental movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan in central India and movements against environmental racism in the US Southwest, as well as the anti-agribusiness small-farmer movements around the world.

While women are present as leaders and participants in most of these anti-globalization movements, a feminist agenda emerges only in the post-Beijing ‘women’s rights as human rights’ movement and in some peace and environmental justice movements. In other words, while girls and women are central to the labor of global capital, anti-globalization work does not seem to draw on feminist analysis or strategies. Thus, while I have argued that feminists need to be anti-capitalists, I would now argue that anti-globalization activists and theorists also need to be feminists. Gender is ignored as a category of analysis and a basis for organizing in most of the anti-globalization movements, and anti-globalization (and anti-capitalist critique) does not appear to be central to feminist organizing projects, especially in the First World/North. In terms of women’s movements, the earlier ‘sisterhood is global’ form of internationalization of the women’s movement has now shifted into the ‘human rights’ arena. This shift in language from ‘feminism’ to ‘women’s rights’ can be called the mainstreaming of the feminist movement – a (successful) attempt to raise the issue of violence against women onto the world stage.

If we look carefully at the focus of the anti-globalization movements, it is the bodies and labor of women and girls which constitute the heart of these struggles. Women have been in leadership roles in some of the cross-border alliances against corporate injustice. Thus, making gender, and women’s bodies and labor, visible and theorizing this visibility as a process of articulating a more inclusive politics are crucial aspects of feminist anti-capitalist critique. Beginning from the social location ofCo

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poor women of color of the Two-Thirds World is an important, even crucial, place for feminist analysis; it is precisely the potential epistemic privilege of these communities of women which opens up the space for demystifying capitalism and for envisioning transborder social and economic justice.

A transnational feminist practice depends on building feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, belief, and so on. In these very fragmented times it is both very difficult to build these alliances and also never more important to do so.

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39 | Challenges in transnational feminist mobilization Aili Mari Tripp

The expansion and diversification of the international women’s movement over the past three decades are a healthy development. But one of the biggest constraints on transnational feminism today comes from problems in the manner in which issues are treated and discussed, how to best

achieve agreed upon goals, and how international support should be rendered. This chapter explores some of the continuing constraints on building and maintaining transnational ties that arise not only from the different agendas, strategies and priorities of women in different parts of the globe, but also from a lack of appreciation of the goals and strategies of others working in different contexts.

There have been many important initiatives from the global North that have exhibited strong transnational cooperation, for example, the ‘34 Million Friends’ campaign started by Lois Abraham and Jane Roberts in 2002 and the Help Afghan Women campaign of the Feminist Majority. However, when international support is extended, it is not always offered in ways that reflect an understanding of other women’s movements, their local contexts, and their needs.

describe what they call the boomerang effect, in whichKeck and Sikkink (1998) non-governmental organizations bypass their own state and seek out transnational advocacy networks, such as those around human rights, indigenous rights, the environment and women’s rights, in order to pressure their state from the outside to resolve a conflict. Such transnational networks provide local actors with access, leverage, information and resources that they otherwise would not have. The boomerang model assumes that local actors are the ones seeking support from the outside to strengthen their cause vis-à-vis their own state. Yet often transnational movements engage with local issues from the outside while remaining detached from the domestic movements mobilized around these and related causes.

Hubris in transnational assistance Sometimes outsiders believe they are providing an unquestioned ‘good’ in taking action on behalf

of another group of people, [… or] believe they know better than those on the ground what strategy should be adopted and thus wilfully ignore requests by local activists to desist in their activities. One such case was the transnational response to the introduction of Islamic sharia law in northern Nigeria in the last few years. These laws have especially serious negative repercussions for women, but international attempts to put pressure on the courts in northern Nigeria have often backfired.

In March 2002 a sharia court in Bakori, Katsina State, sentenced Amina Lawal Kurami to death by stoning, finding her guilty of adultery after she had given birth to a baby out of wedlock. In the Lawal case, thousands of petitions were launched to save her from stoning and about 33,800 websites mentioned her case. When she was finally acquitted, the news media outlets and petition websites gave almost full credit to international pressures. They failed to comprehend the reasons for her release or the potential damage their campaigns may have caused.

Nigerian activists and lawyers with BAOBAB for Women’s Rights (a Nigerian organization which was working most closely with these cases) asked international activists to desist from sending letters of protest about the Lawal case. They were concerned that many of the letters were based on inaccurate information, which resulted in a loss of credibility for them and further setbacks because it was assumed that local activists had provided this inaccurate information to outsiders. BAOBAB pleaded in an email sent to various listserves that outsiders ‘check the accuracy of the information with local activists, before further circulating petitions or responding to them’.

BAOBAB’s work around the Amina Lawal case was also harmed by international activists who presented Islam and Africa as barbaric and savage in their petition campaign. To Nigerian activists these letters and petitions simply perpetuated racism and played into the hands of the IslamicCo

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