On Western Bloggs: In reaction to our first reading this week

Earlier this morning I read Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. When I start an article I prepare myself by getting a cup of tea, my tri-color hi-liter, and my multicolored post-it notes, so that I can mark and color ideas or quotes that I think are the author's main points. I also color things that spark ideas for myself, that I intend to blog about later, and, with a different color, I underscore interesting facts or anecdotes. The first seven pages of my version of this article are at least half technicolor. Rather than using this post as an attempt at a summary or outline, I'm going to write about the things in the article I felt compelled to label with stars and explanation points. Though I will write chronologically, please excuse my lack of smooth transitions and my propensity to write more about some points and less about others.

Methodology
"...my argument holds for any discourse that sets up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i.e., the yardstick by which to encode and present cultural Others." (336)

This strikes me as bearing similarities to question-begging. By already qualifying our questions, we set the stage and create the answers we want. If we ask "Are oppressed women oppressed?" then we necessarily have our own answer. The conceptions we have about the subjects we are asking about shape the questions themselves. On page 24 of Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto- Sterling there is an illustration of a Mobius strip. She writes "The Mobius strip is a topological puzzle.... a flat ribbon twisted once and then attached end to end to form a circular twisted surface."
This is the Image used in the book (but also taken from http://scidiv.bellevuecollege.edu/math/mobius.html)

One can see how this can be a useful illustration for the formation of the question about Women (versus woman) being asked. Conceptualizing of Third World Women as one particular type of woman, and ignoring specific cultures, histories, caste statuses, and socioeconomic classes is not an accurate portrayal; it has far-reaching implications, the least of which is an inability to recognize difference and intersectionality from a discipline that purports to hold these concepts dear.


Oppression as an identifying factor:
"By women as a category of analysis, I am referring to the critical assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the process of analysis."  "... in any given piece of feminist analysis, women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of a shared oppression." (337)

Irish Marion Young, in the 2nd chapter of Justice and the Politics of Difference discusses the "Five Faces of Oppression." She discusses group formation and the fact that oppression can not act as an overgeneralizing adjective in the discussion of group formation. Young writes, "...groups are not oppressed to the same extent or in the same ways. In the most general sense, all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings." (Young, 40) The inability to use oppression as a blanket term falls in line with our original author's idea that considering 'Women' to be a group that is inherently oppressed is too limiting a description, and robs the individual 'Woman' or any agency (that the Western Woman is assumed to have).

Always-already constituted group:
"Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of 'women' as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always-already constituted group, one which has been labeled 'powerless,' 'exploited,' 'sexually harassed,' etc., by feminist scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses." (338)

The negative qualities associated with women as a group are articulately listed, and call to mind the many ways in which women are blocked from resources or paths to agency as told by Marlyn Frye. In The Politics of Reality, Frye discusses oppression ( this essay can be found here ).She uses the mental image of a bird cage, where each way a woman turns she is blocked by a single wire, which should be easy enough to just fly around, but when the wires are arranged in a way to create a cage, the woman is blocked. The Mohanty article seems to suggest that Third World women do not share the same cage, but have different ones that are contingent upon their specific lives.


P.E.T.A. People:
"What is it about cultural Others that make it so easy to analytically formulate them into homogeneous groupings with little regard for historical specificites?" (340)

This just makes me think that the western women in question are just projecting their own insecurities about being pigeonholed into shallow gender roles. Are they treating Third world women like they treat bunnies that perfume is tested on them? Do they feel bad for these individuals while also infantilizing the idea of them? This argument is tangential and just a string of thought from my personal self, and should not be taken terribly seriously.

The Mobius Strip revisited:
The problem with this analytic strategy is that it assumes men and women are already constituted as sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into the arena of social relations." (340)


This needs very little explanation except to say that the mobius strips acts as a useful visual aid for understanding.

Western Eyes Revisited:
I am confused about the one-third and two-thirds world terminology. I am not so confused about what its literal meaning is, but more that it is posed in the revision as being new age jargon, and I've never heard of it before.

Page 509 lists changes that have occurred between the publication of the first and second article (16 years). These are jarring to say the least because, being 22 years old, I have not seen the changes happen, and assume that life now is as it has always been.

"The rise of religious fundamentalisms  with their deeply masculinist and often racist rhetoric poses a huge challenge for feminist struggles around the world. Finally, the profoundly unequal "informational highway" as well as the increasing militarization (and masculinization) of the globe, accompanied by the growth of the prison industrial complex in the United States, pose profound contradictions in the lives of communities of women and men in the most parts of the world." (508)

Well, that's terrifying in a way that I was not prepared for.

I was also struck by the conversation in the article about reading up the ladder, which reminded me of an anecdote that I learned in high-school: The Elephant and the Mouse, where the mouse is an 'oppressed' group and the Elephant is the group with power. The Mouse has to know  everything about itself AND the elephant, because if it does not know the Elephant's habits and whereabouts at all times, it risks being stepped on. The Elephant needs to know very little about the mouse, but when it sees the mouse it freaks out from fear.

Other stomach turning plot lines from the article:
The discussion on globalization and how it hurts women.


Global Identities:
"Most of the identities we can recognize have emerged during the era of modernity encompassing the rise of capitalism and the nation-state in the context of imperialism." (672)

I didn't find this article to be sprinkled with insightful tid-bits like the first two, but rather that it gave a comprehensive explanation of a history.