UNDER WESTERN EYES: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses
It ought to be of some political significance at least that the term 'colonization' has come to denote a variety of phenomena in recent feminist and left writings in general. From its analytic value as a category of exploitative economic exchange in both traditional and contemporary Marxis...
- Autores:
-
Mohanty, Chandra
- Tipo de recurso:
- Article of journal
- Fecha de publicación:
- 1988
- Institución:
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia
- Repositorio:
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia
- Idioma:
- eng
- OAI Identifier:
- oai:repositorio.unal.edu.co:unal/80573
- Palabra clave:
- 300 - Ciencias sociales::301 - Sociología y antropología
Academia feminista
Discursos coloniales
Occidente
- Rights
- openAccess
- License
- Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional
| Summary: | It ought to be of some political significance at least that the term 'colonization' has come to denote a variety of phenomena in recent feminist and left writings in general. From its analytic value as a category of exploitative economic exchange in both traditional and contemporary Marxisms (cf. particularly such contemporary scholars as Baran, Amin and Gunder-Frank) to its use by feminist women of colour in the US, to describe the appropriation of their experiences and struggles by hegemonic white women's movements,' the term 'colonization' has been used to characterize everything from the most evident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the 'Third World.'2 However sophisticated or problematical its use as an explanatory construct, colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a discursive or political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. What I wish to analyse here specifically is the production of the 'Third World Woman' as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (western) feminist texts. The definition of colonization I invoke is a predominantly discursive one, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of 'scholarship' and 'knowledge' about women in the third world by particular analytic categories employed in writings on the subject which take as their primary point of reference feminist interests as they have been articulated in the US and western Europe. |
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