Class Minutes Feb 17th

I. Business

II. Black Feminism

    “Third World Woman” Feminism

     Women of Color Feminism

III. Post Colonial Feminism

     Theory: Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes”

Description

- Ethnocentric universalism of western feminist text and thoughts
- Rescue narratives

Analysis

1) Construction of women as ahistorical, universal, unified thing based on subordination (pg. 21). Mohanty is critical of exactly this.

2) The uncritical way “proof” of universality is provided

- “average third world woman” (the one who needs to be saved)

- she is poor, uneducated, oppressed, victimized, powerless, exploited, ect..

3) “The colonialist move” (pg. 38-39) locking into binary structures.

- Critiquing previous scholarship for assuming women as a category of analysis (pg.22)  - In constituting 3rd world women as the victims, western fems then become the    “agents”. 

Vision

- Very last sentence of the chapter (pg.42)

- She is advocating a form of humility and a much more complex mode of self understanding. 

Strategies

- She is advocating for a particular way of doing research/scholarship (lace workers pg. 31-32) that gets away from the pitfalls of ethnocentric universalism. It should be historically, contextually, temporally specific research.
- Comparative feminist studies. A bottom up approach. This will let you say something valid about the position of women in that particular place. 

How does the language of human rights further complicate this critique?

Is the better question to ask when it comes to helping others “what can I do for you”?