CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 5
5.2 Defining feminism(s)
5.3.2 Feminist scholarship as colonial discourse
engagement with issues of imperialism and a challenge against racism in these three areas of critical concern. Western women valorized and prioritised their cultural experience, speaking as if it were global (Mirza 1997:10). This led Amos and Parmar to distance themselves from this brand of feminism and declare:
For us there is no choice. We cannot simply prioritize one aspect of our oppression to the exclusion of others, as the realities of our day to day lives make it imperative for us to consider the simultaneous nature of our
oppression and exploitation. Only a synthesis of class, race, gender, sexuality can lead us forward, as these form the matrix of Black women’s lives (Amos and Parmar 1984:18).
Mirza (1997:10-11) argues that white feminists were reluctant to relinquish the authority to name the social reality of the gendered subject, but black feminists continued to resist being
“named” by what they saw as an overarching imperial mission of white feminism. “They invoked their agency by challenging stereotypical images of black women as passive victims through studies and research, and writing that revealed the hidden world of migrant and black British women” (Mirza 1997:11).
Women’s agency that resisted “colonizing discourse” was also a crucial concern for women of the third world. As was discussed in the previous chapter, collaborative projects between white socialist feminists and scholars from the third world were initiated during the late 1980s around gender and development concerns. Undoubtedly, the ground for this collaboration must have been prepared as a result of the dialogue that was taking place between black and white feminists within Britain. The multi-cultural, postcolonial nature of black British feminism raised not only issues of race, but was also vocal in its resistance to being “colonized”. It was these linkages that increasingly forced feminists from the first world to reassess not only the way in which the absence of race and class from their analysis essentialized “women” throughout the world, but also the way in which their discourse contributed to the project of colonialism. It is to this debate that I now turn.
“Beyond sisterhood there is still racism, colonialism and imperialism” (Mohanty 1988:77).
The words of this statement by Chandra Mohanty recorded many years ago, continue to ring throughout the feminist world. Mohanty’s article Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses was first published in 1984, revised for the 1988 edition used in this study, and has since been republished a number of times (in Ashcroft et al 1995; Mohanty et al 1991; Visvanathan et al 1997).
Her work was and remains the seminal critique of feminist scholarship as colonial discourse.
Building on the work of Amos and Parmar (1984) who identified feminism with race and imperialism, Mohanty’s (1988) particular concern is women in the third world and is critical of how they are re-presented by women from the west as a single monolithic subject - “the third world woman”. She argues that colonization in discourse is about applying economic and political hierarchies to the third world (Mohanty 1988:61). When western feminists present the “third world woman” as a composite and singular image, an undifferentiated
“other”, they are creating a construct that does not exist through their exercise of power. This image usually depicts women of the third world as uniformly poor and powerless and is juxtaposed against an image of modern, educated, and sexually liberated western women.
The image of a modern, educated, and sexually liberated women results from employing a monolithic notion of patriarchy or male dominance in analysing “sexual difference” in western feminist scholarship. Mohanty (1988) goes on to argue that this image
leads to the construction of a similarly reductive and homogenous notion of what I shall call “third-world difference” - that stable ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all women in these countries. It is the production of this “third-world difference” that western feminisms appropriate and colonize the constitutive complexities which characterize the lives of women in these countries. It is in this process of discursive homogenization and systemisation of the oppression of women in the third world that power is exercised...this power needs to be defined and named (Mohanty 1988:63).
The process of re-defining and re-naming power relations between myself as activist- intellectual and the women of Vulindlela is at the heart of my work. In redefining our relationship I endeavour to give these women voice and show their agency so that their agenda is recognised in the women’s project and reflected in its discourse (see Chapter 8).
But as Mohanty (1988) warns, my work runs the risk of becoming just another colonial discourse in the South African context. It is a risk I take because of my theological commitment to creating space for the voice of “others” to be heard where they would not otherwise matter. I take the risk fully conscious of the dangers of constructing a discourse that potentially exacerbates power relations and reveals my own limitations as an activist- intellectual working in a multi-cultural context (see sections 5.5.5; 8.5.4).
Mohanty (1988) also addresses the issue of scholars from the third world who write about their own cultures. She warns that they too are in danger of assuming their middle-class culture as the norm and thus end up codifying the peasant and working class communities they work with as “other” (Mohanty 1988:62). This is pertinent to our own context where research by women on women is such contested terrain (see 5.4.1). However, in spite of her critique and caution, Mohanty is not attempting to silence western women from feminist scholarship. Rather, it comes as a challenge for scholarship to be situated and accountable to the wider global and political context (Mohanty 1988:63). She rightly points out that there is
“a particular world balance of power within which any analysis of culture, ideology, and socio-economic conditions has to be necessarily situated” (Mohanty 1988:63).
In the previous chapter it was argued that postmodern feminist thinking provides new ways of thinking about women in development. I want to further argue here that postmodern notions also provide new ways of understanding power relations amongst women themselves across race and class, and across the first and third world. Mohanty (1988) in attempting to show how these power relations operate to reinforce colonial discourse, embraces
Foucaultian (1980) notions of power. She argues with Foucault, that it is unhelpful to structure power relations “in terms of a unilateral and undifferentiated source of power and a cumulative reaction to power” (Mohanty 1988:79). This is precisely what western feminist scholarship does when it presents third world women’s struggles as a unitary category with opposition presented as a response to power which is possessed by certain groups of people.
“The major problem with such a definition of power is that it locks all revolutionary struggles into binary structures - possessing power versus powerless” (Mohanty 1988:79). This
analysis which “homogenises and systematises” the experiences of different groups, “erases all marginal and resistant modes of experiences” (Mohanty 1988:80). And hence third world women are rendered powerless.
Similarly, I argue that the resistance strategies of the women of Vulindlela are marginal and often misunderstood. Their experience needs to be analysed using critical tools that locate their struggles historically and also understand their response to power as diffuse and operating in both the hidden and public realm. Mohanty (1988:81) argues when images are presented of third world women in “universal and ahistorical splendour” colonial discourse exercises “a very specific power in defining, coding and maintaining existing first/third- world connections”. African women remain coded and defined in much of western literature as they live with the legacy of first/third world colonial connections which perpetuates a form of cultural imperialism.