In Western feminist discourses, women from Africa and other parts of the socalled "third world" are often represented as objects against whom some writers affirm
their own supposedly liberated status as Western feminists. Rather than interrogating the
social, historical and economic conditions that oppress or disadvantage specific groups of
women, many feminist writers have constructed a singular, ahistorical image of the
oppressed, powerless 'Third World Woman'.
In her article "Under Western Eyes:
Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses", Chandra Mohanty deconstructs this
stereotype and asserts the need to historicize all analyses of women's oppression. In so
doing, she hopes to identify alternative axes upon which international women's alliances
and solidarity can be based. Her analysis thus provides a powerful critique of the pseudouniversalizing tendencies of hegemonic Western feminist discourse, and suggests new
approaches for cross-border understanding of women's lives. However, her critique
undermines the previously held notion of international feminist practice, and though she
hints at new ways forward, Mohanty does not use this essay to interrogate the possibility
for reconstructing a new universal womanhood.
One of the key features of colonial discourse has been its misrepresentation or
denial of the diversity of non-Western people. In order to survey and control their
subjects, colonial administrators developed elaborate classificatory schemes under which
all peoples could be subsumed. Rather than viewing them as agents within a specific
social and political environment, colonial theorists reduced Africans to objects of their
own interpretative gaze.
Thus, stereotypical ideas of African subjectivity came to
dominate Western discourses on Africa in general. As Mohanty points out, feminist
discourse picked up on this trend in its "production of the 'third world woman' as a
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singular monolithic subject." (51) In such a representation, "third world women" are
portrayed as "sexually constrained… ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound,
domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc." (56)
Mohanty argues that the stereotypical image of non-Western women is a reflexive
exercise intended to affirm the identity of supposedly more liberated Western feminists.
She notes that the image of degraded third world women "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." (56)
Thus, such representations of African women by Western feminists are less concerned
with the reality of African women's lives than with validating the supremacy of Western
feminist discourse. Mohanty argues that the resulting imagery is that of "'Woman' - a
cultural and ideological composite Other" whose connection with the material reality of
"women as historical subjects [… is] arbitrary" and often unconnected. (53)
Western feminism's preoccupation with non-Western women's oppression and
lack agency is premised on the idea that 'men' and 'women' are preconstituted social
groups and the notion that non-Western women fall outside of history. As Mohanty
notes, the first supposition is based on the rejection of class, ethnicity and other factors in
the shaping of one's primary subjectivity. It assumes that "men" and "women" enter
social relations as preconstituted powerful (male) or powerless (female) subjects. (58)
This substitutes "the sociological […] for the biological […] in order to create […] a
[false] unity of women." (59) By portraying African women as 'victims of culture'
without agency, Western feminists argue that these women "exist, as it were, outside of
history." (62) Thus deprived of their capacity for socio-cultural production and historical
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agency, these subjects exist solely as oppressed women in the eyes of Western feminists.
In turn, these feminists assert the incompatibility between African femininity (defined in
terms of oppression) and women's liberation.
Mohanty argues that the premises of universalistic Western feminism are
ethnocentric and fundamentally flawed. Rather than reducing all women (and men) to a
Western historicity, she contends that analysts should investigate women as social agents
within their own social, historical, cultural and class backgrounds and contexts. No
culture is static or unitary, and any culture is constantly open to contestation and
renegotiation by all those who are engaged in it. Rather than objects that are acted upon,
Mohanty argues that women are agents whose multi-faceted identities are too often
obscured by some strands of feminist discourse.
In addition to identifying the
ethnocentric bias of Western feminism and its ideals of women's liberation, Mohanty
attacks the notion that one's subjectivity is predetermined by one's gender or sex, a
conflation of the sociological and biological. (59) Like men, women from all parts of the
world are multi-faceted social actors who do not owe primarily allegiance or identity to
an ill-defined international womanhood.
By challenging the notion of an inherent universal womanhood that exists outside
of social relations, Mohanty disrupts the premise on which international feminism is
based. She asserts that there is no universal patriarchal structure that conspires against all
women universally as a group. (54) Rather, economic, cultural, religious and political
factors can intersect in various historically specific moments to create situations in which
women are oppressed. Women do not enter into social relations as oppressed people;
they may become oppressed due to a variety of factors, which in some instances may
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include gender.
She also stresses that seemingly identical practices may be either
oppressive or liberating (or anything else in between) depending on their socio-historical
and political contexts. (68) As a result, Western feminist critiques of other societies
based on Eurocentric gender norms are rendered irrelevant.
Mohanty's challenge to the international women's movement exposes its
fundamental flaws and reorients feminist approaches to gender relations in general.
While eliminating its problematic aspects, she does not attempt to rebuild a universal
feminist theory. She asserts that contextualized local studies should form the basis for
cross-border understanding of women's oppression. "Sisterhood cannot be assumed on
the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and
analysis." (58)
Thus, she appears to have given up any prospect of an imagined
international community of women responding to global male hegemony. While perhaps
producing more effective understandings of women's oppression, Mohanty's approach
emphasizes differences over commonalities, and as such, risks further marginalizing nonWestern women from Western feminist discourse. In addition to her assertion that
seemingly similar practices may have different meanings depending on their respective
contexts, one could add that seemingly different practices may in fact be quite similar and
thus represent axes for cross-border solidarity.
However, as a critique of pseudo-
universalistic Western feminism, Mohanty's work is a powerful reorientation of feminist
approaches to women's oppression.
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