About the Book
Bringing together classic and new writings of the
trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues
facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital
links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy,
Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and
international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This
collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the
politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist
practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and
scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty
offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of
transnational feminist practice towards anticapitalist
struggles. Her probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist
thought "home", "sisterhood", "community" lead
the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism
fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.
About the Author
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Professor of
Women's Studies and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University.
She is the co-editor of Feminist
Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures and Third World Women and
the Politics of Feminism.
Introduction
Decoionization, Anticapitalist Critique, and Feminist
Commitments
This
volume is the product of almost two decades of engagement with feminist
struggles. It is based on a deep belief in the power and significance of
feminist thinking in struggles for economic and social justice. And it owes
whatever clarity and insight the reader may find in these pages to a community of
sisters and comrades in struggle from whom I have learned the meaning, joy, and
necessity of political thinking. While many of the ideas I explore here are
viewed through my own particular lenses, all the ideas belong collectively to
the various feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist communities in which I
have been privileged to be involved. In the end, I think and write in
conversation with scholars, teachers, and activists involved in social justice
struggles. My search for emancipator knowledge over the years has made me
realize that ideas are always communally wrought, not privately owned. All
faults however, are mine, for seeking the kind of knowledge that emerges in
these pages brings with it its own gaps, faults, opacities. These I accept in the
hope that they too prove useful to the reader.
Feminist Commitments Why "feminism without borders?" First, because it recalls "doctors without
borders," an enterprise and project that embodies the urgency, as well as
the internationalist commitmentthat I see in the best
feminist praxis. Second, because growing up as part of the post independence
generation in India meant an acute awareness of the borders, boundaries, and
traces of British colonialism on the one hand, and of the unbounded promise of
decolonization on the other. It also meant living the contradiction of the
promise of nationalism and its various limits and failures in postcolonial
India. Borders suggest both containment and safety, and women often pay a price
for daring to claim the integrity, security, and safety of our bodies and our
living spaces. I choose "feminism without borders," then, to stress
that our most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive
to borders while learning to transcend them.
Feminism
without borders is not the same as "border-less" feminism. It
acknowledges the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment
that borders represent. It acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border,
that the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities,
religions, and disabilities, are real-and that a feminism without borders must
envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and
division. I want to speak of feminism without silences and exclusions in order
to draw attention to the tension between the simultaneous plurality and
narrowness of borders and the emancipator potential of crossing through, with,
and over these borders in our everyday lives.
In my own
life, borders have come in many guises, and I live with them inside as well as
across racialized women's communities. I grew up in
Mumbai (Bombay), where the visible demarcations between India and Pakistan,
Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, British and Indian, women and men, Dalit and Brahmin were a fact of everyday life. This was
the same Mumbai where I learned multiple languages and negotiated multiple
cultures in the company of friends and neighbors, a
Mumbai where I went to church services-not just Hindu temples -and where I
learned about the religious practices of Muslims and Parsees. In the last two
decades, my life in the United States has exposed some new fault-lines-those of
race and sexuality in particular. Urbana, Illinois, Clinton, New York, and
Ithaca, New York, have been my home places in the United States,
and in all three sites I have learned to read and live in relation to the
racial, class, sexual, and national scripts embedded in North American culture.
The presence of borders in my life has been both exclusionary and enabling, and
I strive to envision a critically transnational (internationalist) feminist
praxis moving through these borders.
I see
myself as an antiracist feminist. Why does antiracist feminism 2 matter in
struggles for economic and social justice in the early twenty-first century?
The last century was clearly the century of the maturing of feminist ideas,
sensibilities, and movements. The twentieth century was also the century of the
decolonization of the Third World/South.! the rise and splintering of the communist
Second World, the triumphal rise and recolonization
of almost the entire globe by capitalism, and of the consolidation of ethnic,
nationalist, and religious fundamentalist movements and nation-states. Thus,
while feminist ideas and movements may have grown and matured, the backlash and
challenges to feminism have also grown exponentially.
So in this
political/economic context, what would an economically and socially just
feminist politics look like? It would require a clear understanding that being
a woman has political consequences in the world we live in; that there can be
unjust and unfair effects on women depending on our economic and social
marginality and/or privilege. It would require recognizing that sexism, racism,
misogyny, and heterosexism underlie and fuel social
and political institutions of rule and thus often lead to hatred of women and
(supposedly justified) violence against women. The interwoven processes of
sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism are an
integral part of our social fabric, wherever in the world we happen to be. We
need to be aware that these ideologies, in conjunction with the regressive
politics of ethnic nationalism and capitalist consumerism, are differentially
constitutive of all of our lives in the early twenty-first century. Besides
recognizing all this and formulating a clear analysis and critique of the behaviors, attitudes, institutions, and relational politics
that these interwoven systems entail, a just and inclusive feminist politics
for the present needs to also have a vision for transformation and strategies
for realizing this vision.
Hence decolonization, anticapitalist
critique, and solidarity.' I firmly
believe an antiracist feminist framework, anchored in decolonization and
committed to an anticapitalist critique, is necessary at this time. In the chapters that follow I
develop antiracist feminist frameworks or ways of seeing, interpreting, and
making connections between the many levels of social reality we experience. I
outline a notion of feminist solidarity, as opposed to vague assumptions of
sisterhood or images of complete identification with the other. For me, such
solidarity is a political as well as ethical goal.
Here is a
bare-bones description of my own feminist vision: this is a vision of the world
that is pro-sex and -woman, a world where women and men are free to live
creative lives, in security and with bodily health and integrity, where they
are free to choose whom they love, and whom they set up house with, and whether
they want to have or not have children; a world where pleasure rather than just
duty and drudgery determine our choices, where free and imaginative exploration
of the mind is a fundamental right; a vision in which economic stability,
ecological sustainability, racial equality, and the redistribution of wealth
form the material basis of people's well-being. Finally, my vision is one in
which democratic and socialist practices and institutions provide the
conditions for public participation and decision making for people regardless
of economic and social location. In strategic terms, this vision entails
putting in place antiracist feminist and democratic principles of participation
and relationality, and it means working on many
fronts, in many different kinds of collectivises in order to organize against
repressive systems of rule. It also means being attentive to small as well as
large struggles and processes that lead to radical change-not just working (or
waiting) for a revolution. Thus everyday feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist practices are as important as larger,
organized political movements.
While I
have no formulas or easy answers, I am a firm believer in the politics of
solidarity, which I discuss in some depth in the chapters that follow. But no
vision stands alone, and mine owes much to the work of numerous feminist
scholars and activists around the world. A brief and very partial genealogy of
feminist theoretical frames that have influenced my own thinking illustrates
this debt to a vital and challenging transnational feminist community.
In the
1970S and 1980s, socialist feminist thinkers including Michelle Barrett, Mary Mclntosh, Zillah Eisenstein, Dorothy Smith, and Maria Mies pointed out the theoretical limitations of an
implicitly masculinist Marxism. These scholars
clarified the intricate relationship between production and reproduction, 'the
place of the "family" and the "household" in the economic
and social relations of capitalist society, and the relation of capitalism to
patriarchy (Zillah Eisenstein coined the term "capitalist
patriarchy"). 5 At the same time, scholars such as Gloria Ioseph and Iill Lewis theorized
the racialization of gender and class in their early
work entitled Common Dliferences: Con.fIicts
in Black and White Feminist Perspectives. And in the
United Kingdom, Kurnkum Bhavnani
and Margaret Coulson critiqued the theoretical
limitations of such socialist feminist concepts as "family" and
"household" on Eurocentric grounds. Similarly, Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar wrote eloquently
about the race blindness of "imperial feminism" socialist, radical,
and liberal. In the United States, lesbians of color
such as Audre Lorde,
Barbara Smith, Cherrie Moraga, Merle Woo, Paula Gunn Allen, and Gloria Anzaldiia faced head-on the profound racism and heterosexism of the women's movement, and of U.S. radical
and liberal feminist theory of the second wave of feminism." Arguments
about the race, color, class, and sexual dimensions
of gender in the building of feminist analysis and community took centre stage
in 4 Feminism without Borders the work of these U.S. feminists of color. The Barnard Conference in the early 1980s
inaugurated the so-called sex wars, which brought the contradictions of sex,
sexuality, erotica, pornography, and such marginalized sexual practices as
sadomasochism to the forefront of feminist debate,"
The 1980s
also saw the rise of standpoint epistemology, especially through the work of
Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding.
This work defined the link between social location, women's experiences, and
their epistemic perspectives. And then there were the feminists from Third
World/South nations who had a profound influence on my own understanding of the
relationship of feminism and nationalism, and of the centrality of struggles fordecolonization in feminist thought. Kumari
Iayawardena, Nawal el Saadawi, Fatima Mernissi, Isabel Letelier, and Achola Pala all
theorized the specific place of Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and
African women in national struggles for liberation, and in the economic
development and democratization of previously colonized countries,"
More
contemporaneously, the work of feminist theorists Ella Shohat,
Angela Davis, Iacqui Alexander, Linda Alcoff, Lisa Lowe, Avtar Brah, bell hooks, Zillah Eisenstein, Himani
Bannerji, Patricia Bell Scott, Vandana
Shiva, Kumkum Sangari, Ruth
Frankenberg, Inderpal Grewal,
Caren Kaplan, Kirnberle
Crenshaw, Elizabeth Minnich, Leslie Roman, Lata Mani, Uma Narayan, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Leila Ahrned,
among many others, has charted new ground in the theorization of feminism and
racism, immigration, Eurocentrism, critical white
studies, heterosexism, and imperialism.? While there
are many scholars and activists who remain unnamed in this brief genealogy, I
offer this partial history of ideas to anchor, in part, my own feminist
thinking and to clarify the deeply collective nature of feminist thought as I
see it. Let me now turn briefly to the limits and pitfalls of feminist practice
as I see them in my own context and then move on to a discussion of
decolonization and feminist anticapitalist critique.
Finally, a road map introduces the reader to the organization of the book.
Feminist
practice as I understand it operates at a number of levels: at the level of
daily life through the everyday acts that constitute our identities and
relational communities; at the level of collective action in groups, networks,
and movements constituted around feminist visions of social transformation; and
at the levels of theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity in the scholarly and
writing practices of feminists engaged in the production of knowledge. While
the last few decades have produced a theoretically complex feminist practice (I
refer to examples of these throughout the book), they have also spawned some
problematic ideologies and practices under the label "feminist."
In my own
context I would identify three particular problematic directions within
U.S.-based feminisms. First, the increasing, predominantly class based gap
between a vital women's movement and feminist theorizing in the U.S. academy
has led in part to a kind of careerist academic feminism whereby the boundaries
of the academy stand in for the entire world and feminism becomes a way to
advance academic careers rather than a call for fundamental and collective
social and economic transformation. This gap between an individualized and
narrowly professional understanding of feminism and a collective, theoretical
feminist vision that focuses on the radical transformation of the everyday
lives of women and men is one I actively work to address. Second, the
increasing corporatization of U.S. culture and naturalization of capitalist
values has had its own profound influence in engendering a neoliberal,
consumerist (protocapitalist) feminism concerned with
"women's advancement" up the corporate and nation-state ladder. This
is a feminism that focuses on financial "equality" between men and
women and is grounded in the capitalist values of profit, competition, and
accumulation. A protocapitalist or
"free-market" feminism is symptomatic of the
"Americanization" of definitions of feminism-the unstated assumption
that U.S. corporate culture is the norm and ideal that feminists around the
world strive for. Another characteristic of protocapitalist
feminism is its unstated and profoundly individualist character. Finally, the
critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodernist skepticisrn about identity has led to a narrowing of
feminist politics and theory whereby either exclusionary and self-serving
understandings of identity rule the day or identity (racial, class, sexual,
national, etc.) is seen as unstable and thus merely "strategic."
Thus, identity is seen as either naive or irrelevant, rather than as a source
of knowledge and a basis for progressive mobilization. P Colonizing, U.S. and
Eurocentric privileged feminisms, then, constitute some of the limits of
feminist thinking that I believe need to be addressed at this time. And some of
these problems, in conjunction with the feminist possibilities and vision
discussed earlier, form the immediate backdrop to my own thinking in the
chapters that follow. On Solidarity, Decolonization,
and Anticapitalist Critique I define solidarity in terms of mutuality, accountability,
and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among
diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of
oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who
have chosen to work and fight together. Diversity and difference are central
values here-to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of
alliances. Iodi Dean (1996) develops a notion of
"reflective solidarity" that I find particularly useful. She argues
that reflective solidarity is crafted by an interaction involving three
persons: "I ask you to stand by me over and against a third" (3).
This involves thematizing the third voice "to
reconstruct solidarity as an inclusive ideal," rather than as an "us
vs. them" notion. Dean's notion of a communicative, in-process
understanding of the "we" is useful, given that solidarity is always
an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the
basis of particulars/differences. It is the praxis-oriented, active political
struggle embodied in this notion of solidarity that is important to my
thinking-and the reason I prefer to focus attention on solidarity rather than
on the concept of "sisterhood." Thus, decolonization, anticapitalist critique, and the politics of solidarity are
the central themes of this book. Each concept foregrounds my own commitments
and emerges as a necessary component of an antiracist and internationalist
feminism -without borders. In particular, I believe feminist solidarity as defined
here constitutes the most principled way to cross borders-to decolonize
knowledge and practice anticapitalist critique.
In what is
one of the classic texts on colonization, Franz Fanon (1963) argues that the
success of decolonization lies in a "whole social structure being changed
from the bottom up"; that this change is "willed, called for,
demanded" by the colonized; that it is a historical process that can only
be understood in the context of the "movements which give it historical
form and content"; that it is marked by violence and never "takes
place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them
fundamentally"; and finally that "decolonization is the veritable
creation of new men." In other words, decolonization involves profound
transformations of self, community, and governance structures. It can only be
engaged through active withdrawal of consent and resistance to structures of
psychic and social domination. It is a historical and collective process, and
as such can only be understood within these contexts. The end result of
decolonization is not only the creation of new kinds of self-governance but
also "the creation of new men" (and women). While Fanon's
theorization is elaborated through masculine metaphors (and his formulation of resistance
is also profoundly gendered the framework of decolonization that Fanon
elaborates is useful in formulating a feminist decolonizing project. If
processes of sexism, heterosexism, and misogyny are
central to the social fabric of the world we live in; if indeed these processes
are interwoven with racial, national, and capitalist domination and
exploitation such that the lives of women and men, girls and boys, are
profoundly affected, then decolonization at all the levels (as described by
Fanon) becomes fundamental to a radical feminist transformative project.
Decolonization has always been central to the project of Third World feminist
theorizing-and much of my own work has been inspired by these particular
feminist genealogies.
Iacqui Alexander
and I have written about the significance of decolonization to feminist anticolonial, anticapitalist
struggle 13 and I want to draw on this analysis here. At that time
we defined decolonization as central to the practice of democracy, and to the
re envisioning of democracy outside freemarket,
procedural conceptions of individual agency and state governance. We discussed
the centrality of self-reflexive collective practice in the transformation of
the self, reconceptualizations of identity, and
political mobilization as necessary elements of the practice of decolonization.
Finally, we argued that history, memory, emotion, and affectional
ties are significant cognitive elements of the construction of critical,
self-reflective, feminist selves and that in the crafting of oppositional
selves and identities, "decolonization coupled with emancipatory
collective practice leads to a rethinking of patriarchal, heterosexual,
colonial, racial, and capitalist legacies in the project of feminism and, thus,
toward envisioning democracy and democratic collective practice such that
issues of sexual politics in governance are fundamental to thinking through
questions of resistance anchored in the daily lives of women, that these issues
are an integral aspect of the epistemology of anti-colonial feminist
struggle" (xxxviii). The chapters that follow draw on these particular
formulations of decolonization in the context of feminist struggle. A
formulation of decolonization in which autonomy and self-determination are
central to the process of liberation and can only be achieved through
"self reflexive collective practice."
Contents
|
Acknowledgments |
vii |
|
Introduction:
Decolonization, Anticapitalist Critique, and
Feminist Commitments, |
1 |
|
Part
One. Decolonizinq Feminism |
|
1. |
Under Western Eyes:
Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, |
17 |
2. |
Cartographies of Struggle:
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, |
43 |
3. |
What's Home Got to Do with
It? (with Biddy Martin), |
85 |
4. |
Sisterhood, Coalition, and
the Politics of Experience, |
106 |
5. |
Genealogies of Community,
Home, and Nation, |
124 |
|
Part
Two. Demystifying Capitalism |
|
6. |
Women Workers and the
Politics of Solidarity, |
139 |
7. |
Privatized Citizenship,
Corporate Academies, and Feminist Projects |
169 |
8. |
Race, Multiculturalism,
and Pedagogies of Dissent |
190 |
|
Part
Three. Reorienting Feminism |
|
9. |
"Under Western
Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist
Struggles |
221 |
|
Notes |
253 |
|
Bibliography |
275 |
|
Index |
295 |
About the Book
Bringing together classic and new writings of the
trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues
facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital
links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy,
Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and
international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This
collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the
politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist
practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and
scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty
offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of
transnational feminist practice towards anticapitalist
struggles. Her probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist
thought "home", "sisterhood", "community" lead
the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism
fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.
About the Author
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Professor of
Women's Studies and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University.
She is the co-editor of Feminist
Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures and Third World Women and
the Politics of Feminism.
Introduction
Decoionization, Anticapitalist Critique, and Feminist
Commitments
This
volume is the product of almost two decades of engagement with feminist
struggles. It is based on a deep belief in the power and significance of
feminist thinking in struggles for economic and social justice. And it owes
whatever clarity and insight the reader may find in these pages to a community of
sisters and comrades in struggle from whom I have learned the meaning, joy, and
necessity of political thinking. While many of the ideas I explore here are
viewed through my own particular lenses, all the ideas belong collectively to
the various feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist communities in which I
have been privileged to be involved. In the end, I think and write in
conversation with scholars, teachers, and activists involved in social justice
struggles. My search for emancipator knowledge over the years has made me
realize that ideas are always communally wrought, not privately owned. All
faults however, are mine, for seeking the kind of knowledge that emerges in
these pages brings with it its own gaps, faults, opacities. These I accept in the
hope that they too prove useful to the reader.
Feminist Commitments Why "feminism without borders?" First, because it recalls "doctors without
borders," an enterprise and project that embodies the urgency, as well as
the internationalist commitmentthat I see in the best
feminist praxis. Second, because growing up as part of the post independence
generation in India meant an acute awareness of the borders, boundaries, and
traces of British colonialism on the one hand, and of the unbounded promise of
decolonization on the other. It also meant living the contradiction of the
promise of nationalism and its various limits and failures in postcolonial
India. Borders suggest both containment and safety, and women often pay a price
for daring to claim the integrity, security, and safety of our bodies and our
living spaces. I choose "feminism without borders," then, to stress
that our most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive
to borders while learning to transcend them.
Feminism
without borders is not the same as "border-less" feminism. It
acknowledges the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment
that borders represent. It acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border,
that the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities,
religions, and disabilities, are real-and that a feminism without borders must
envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and
division. I want to speak of feminism without silences and exclusions in order
to draw attention to the tension between the simultaneous plurality and
narrowness of borders and the emancipator potential of crossing through, with,
and over these borders in our everyday lives.
In my own
life, borders have come in many guises, and I live with them inside as well as
across racialized women's communities. I grew up in
Mumbai (Bombay), where the visible demarcations between India and Pakistan,
Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, British and Indian, women and men, Dalit and Brahmin were a fact of everyday life. This was
the same Mumbai where I learned multiple languages and negotiated multiple
cultures in the company of friends and neighbors, a
Mumbai where I went to church services-not just Hindu temples -and where I
learned about the religious practices of Muslims and Parsees. In the last two
decades, my life in the United States has exposed some new fault-lines-those of
race and sexuality in particular. Urbana, Illinois, Clinton, New York, and
Ithaca, New York, have been my home places in the United States,
and in all three sites I have learned to read and live in relation to the
racial, class, sexual, and national scripts embedded in North American culture.
The presence of borders in my life has been both exclusionary and enabling, and
I strive to envision a critically transnational (internationalist) feminist
praxis moving through these borders.
I see
myself as an antiracist feminist. Why does antiracist feminism 2 matter in
struggles for economic and social justice in the early twenty-first century?
The last century was clearly the century of the maturing of feminist ideas,
sensibilities, and movements. The twentieth century was also the century of the
decolonization of the Third World/South.! the rise and splintering of the communist
Second World, the triumphal rise and recolonization
of almost the entire globe by capitalism, and of the consolidation of ethnic,
nationalist, and religious fundamentalist movements and nation-states. Thus,
while feminist ideas and movements may have grown and matured, the backlash and
challenges to feminism have also grown exponentially.
So in this
political/economic context, what would an economically and socially just
feminist politics look like? It would require a clear understanding that being
a woman has political consequences in the world we live in; that there can be
unjust and unfair effects on women depending on our economic and social
marginality and/or privilege. It would require recognizing that sexism, racism,
misogyny, and heterosexism underlie and fuel social
and political institutions of rule and thus often lead to hatred of women and
(supposedly justified) violence against women. The interwoven processes of
sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism are an
integral part of our social fabric, wherever in the world we happen to be. We
need to be aware that these ideologies, in conjunction with the regressive
politics of ethnic nationalism and capitalist consumerism, are differentially
constitutive of all of our lives in the early twenty-first century. Besides
recognizing all this and formulating a clear analysis and critique of the behaviors, attitudes, institutions, and relational politics
that these interwoven systems entail, a just and inclusive feminist politics
for the present needs to also have a vision for transformation and strategies
for realizing this vision.
Hence decolonization, anticapitalist
critique, and solidarity.' I firmly
believe an antiracist feminist framework, anchored in decolonization and
committed to an anticapitalist critique, is necessary at this time. In the chapters that follow I
develop antiracist feminist frameworks or ways of seeing, interpreting, and
making connections between the many levels of social reality we experience. I
outline a notion of feminist solidarity, as opposed to vague assumptions of
sisterhood or images of complete identification with the other. For me, such
solidarity is a political as well as ethical goal.
Here is a
bare-bones description of my own feminist vision: this is a vision of the world
that is pro-sex and -woman, a world where women and men are free to live
creative lives, in security and with bodily health and integrity, where they
are free to choose whom they love, and whom they set up house with, and whether
they want to have or not have children; a world where pleasure rather than just
duty and drudgery determine our choices, where free and imaginative exploration
of the mind is a fundamental right; a vision in which economic stability,
ecological sustainability, racial equality, and the redistribution of wealth
form the material basis of people's well-being. Finally, my vision is one in
which democratic and socialist practices and institutions provide the
conditions for public participation and decision making for people regardless
of economic and social location. In strategic terms, this vision entails
putting in place antiracist feminist and democratic principles of participation
and relationality, and it means working on many
fronts, in many different kinds of collectivises in order to organize against
repressive systems of rule. It also means being attentive to small as well as
large struggles and processes that lead to radical change-not just working (or
waiting) for a revolution. Thus everyday feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist practices are as important as larger,
organized political movements.
While I
have no formulas or easy answers, I am a firm believer in the politics of
solidarity, which I discuss in some depth in the chapters that follow. But no
vision stands alone, and mine owes much to the work of numerous feminist
scholars and activists around the world. A brief and very partial genealogy of
feminist theoretical frames that have influenced my own thinking illustrates
this debt to a vital and challenging transnational feminist community.
In the
1970S and 1980s, socialist feminist thinkers including Michelle Barrett, Mary Mclntosh, Zillah Eisenstein, Dorothy Smith, and Maria Mies pointed out the theoretical limitations of an
implicitly masculinist Marxism. These scholars
clarified the intricate relationship between production and reproduction, 'the
place of the "family" and the "household" in the economic
and social relations of capitalist society, and the relation of capitalism to
patriarchy (Zillah Eisenstein coined the term "capitalist
patriarchy"). 5 At the same time, scholars such as Gloria Ioseph and Iill Lewis theorized
the racialization of gender and class in their early
work entitled Common Dliferences: Con.fIicts
in Black and White Feminist Perspectives. And in the
United Kingdom, Kurnkum Bhavnani
and Margaret Coulson critiqued the theoretical
limitations of such socialist feminist concepts as "family" and
"household" on Eurocentric grounds. Similarly, Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar wrote eloquently
about the race blindness of "imperial feminism" socialist, radical,
and liberal. In the United States, lesbians of color
such as Audre Lorde,
Barbara Smith, Cherrie Moraga, Merle Woo, Paula Gunn Allen, and Gloria Anzaldiia faced head-on the profound racism and heterosexism of the women's movement, and of U.S. radical
and liberal feminist theory of the second wave of feminism." Arguments
about the race, color, class, and sexual dimensions
of gender in the building of feminist analysis and community took centre stage
in 4 Feminism without Borders the work of these U.S. feminists of color. The Barnard Conference in the early 1980s
inaugurated the so-called sex wars, which brought the contradictions of sex,
sexuality, erotica, pornography, and such marginalized sexual practices as
sadomasochism to the forefront of feminist debate,"
The 1980s
also saw the rise of standpoint epistemology, especially through the work of
Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding.
This work defined the link between social location, women's experiences, and
their epistemic perspectives. And then there were the feminists from Third
World/South nations who had a profound influence on my own understanding of the
relationship of feminism and nationalism, and of the centrality of struggles fordecolonization in feminist thought. Kumari
Iayawardena, Nawal el Saadawi, Fatima Mernissi, Isabel Letelier, and Achola Pala all
theorized the specific place of Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and
African women in national struggles for liberation, and in the economic
development and democratization of previously colonized countries,"
More
contemporaneously, the work of feminist theorists Ella Shohat,
Angela Davis, Iacqui Alexander, Linda Alcoff, Lisa Lowe, Avtar Brah, bell hooks, Zillah Eisenstein, Himani
Bannerji, Patricia Bell Scott, Vandana
Shiva, Kumkum Sangari, Ruth
Frankenberg, Inderpal Grewal,
Caren Kaplan, Kirnberle
Crenshaw, Elizabeth Minnich, Leslie Roman, Lata Mani, Uma Narayan, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Leila Ahrned,
among many others, has charted new ground in the theorization of feminism and
racism, immigration, Eurocentrism, critical white
studies, heterosexism, and imperialism.? While there
are many scholars and activists who remain unnamed in this brief genealogy, I
offer this partial history of ideas to anchor, in part, my own feminist
thinking and to clarify the deeply collective nature of feminist thought as I
see it. Let me now turn briefly to the limits and pitfalls of feminist practice
as I see them in my own context and then move on to a discussion of
decolonization and feminist anticapitalist critique.
Finally, a road map introduces the reader to the organization of the book.
Feminist
practice as I understand it operates at a number of levels: at the level of
daily life through the everyday acts that constitute our identities and
relational communities; at the level of collective action in groups, networks,
and movements constituted around feminist visions of social transformation; and
at the levels of theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity in the scholarly and
writing practices of feminists engaged in the production of knowledge. While
the last few decades have produced a theoretically complex feminist practice (I
refer to examples of these throughout the book), they have also spawned some
problematic ideologies and practices under the label "feminist."
In my own
context I would identify three particular problematic directions within
U.S.-based feminisms. First, the increasing, predominantly class based gap
between a vital women's movement and feminist theorizing in the U.S. academy
has led in part to a kind of careerist academic feminism whereby the boundaries
of the academy stand in for the entire world and feminism becomes a way to
advance academic careers rather than a call for fundamental and collective
social and economic transformation. This gap between an individualized and
narrowly professional understanding of feminism and a collective, theoretical
feminist vision that focuses on the radical transformation of the everyday
lives of women and men is one I actively work to address. Second, the
increasing corporatization of U.S. culture and naturalization of capitalist
values has had its own profound influence in engendering a neoliberal,
consumerist (protocapitalist) feminism concerned with
"women's advancement" up the corporate and nation-state ladder. This
is a feminism that focuses on financial "equality" between men and
women and is grounded in the capitalist values of profit, competition, and
accumulation. A protocapitalist or
"free-market" feminism is symptomatic of the
"Americanization" of definitions of feminism-the unstated assumption
that U.S. corporate culture is the norm and ideal that feminists around the
world strive for. Another characteristic of protocapitalist
feminism is its unstated and profoundly individualist character. Finally, the
critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodernist skepticisrn about identity has led to a narrowing of
feminist politics and theory whereby either exclusionary and self-serving
understandings of identity rule the day or identity (racial, class, sexual,
national, etc.) is seen as unstable and thus merely "strategic."
Thus, identity is seen as either naive or irrelevant, rather than as a source
of knowledge and a basis for progressive mobilization. P Colonizing, U.S. and
Eurocentric privileged feminisms, then, constitute some of the limits of
feminist thinking that I believe need to be addressed at this time. And some of
these problems, in conjunction with the feminist possibilities and vision
discussed earlier, form the immediate backdrop to my own thinking in the
chapters that follow. On Solidarity, Decolonization,
and Anticapitalist Critique I define solidarity in terms of mutuality, accountability,
and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among
diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of
oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who
have chosen to work and fight together. Diversity and difference are central
values here-to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of
alliances. Iodi Dean (1996) develops a notion of
"reflective solidarity" that I find particularly useful. She argues
that reflective solidarity is crafted by an interaction involving three
persons: "I ask you to stand by me over and against a third" (3).
This involves thematizing the third voice "to
reconstruct solidarity as an inclusive ideal," rather than as an "us
vs. them" notion. Dean's notion of a communicative, in-process
understanding of the "we" is useful, given that solidarity is always
an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the
basis of particulars/differences. It is the praxis-oriented, active political
struggle embodied in this notion of solidarity that is important to my
thinking-and the reason I prefer to focus attention on solidarity rather than
on the concept of "sisterhood." Thus, decolonization, anticapitalist critique, and the politics of solidarity are
the central themes of this book. Each concept foregrounds my own commitments
and emerges as a necessary component of an antiracist and internationalist
feminism -without borders. In particular, I believe feminist solidarity as defined
here constitutes the most principled way to cross borders-to decolonize
knowledge and practice anticapitalist critique.
In what is
one of the classic texts on colonization, Franz Fanon (1963) argues that the
success of decolonization lies in a "whole social structure being changed
from the bottom up"; that this change is "willed, called for,
demanded" by the colonized; that it is a historical process that can only
be understood in the context of the "movements which give it historical
form and content"; that it is marked by violence and never "takes
place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them
fundamentally"; and finally that "decolonization is the veritable
creation of new men." In other words, decolonization involves profound
transformations of self, community, and governance structures. It can only be
engaged through active withdrawal of consent and resistance to structures of
psychic and social domination. It is a historical and collective process, and
as such can only be understood within these contexts. The end result of
decolonization is not only the creation of new kinds of self-governance but
also "the creation of new men" (and women). While Fanon's
theorization is elaborated through masculine metaphors (and his formulation of resistance
is also profoundly gendered the framework of decolonization that Fanon
elaborates is useful in formulating a feminist decolonizing project. If
processes of sexism, heterosexism, and misogyny are
central to the social fabric of the world we live in; if indeed these processes
are interwoven with racial, national, and capitalist domination and
exploitation such that the lives of women and men, girls and boys, are
profoundly affected, then decolonization at all the levels (as described by
Fanon) becomes fundamental to a radical feminist transformative project.
Decolonization has always been central to the project of Third World feminist
theorizing-and much of my own work has been inspired by these particular
feminist genealogies.
Iacqui Alexander
and I have written about the significance of decolonization to feminist anticolonial, anticapitalist
struggle 13 and I want to draw on this analysis here. At that time
we defined decolonization as central to the practice of democracy, and to the
re envisioning of democracy outside freemarket,
procedural conceptions of individual agency and state governance. We discussed
the centrality of self-reflexive collective practice in the transformation of
the self, reconceptualizations of identity, and
political mobilization as necessary elements of the practice of decolonization.
Finally, we argued that history, memory, emotion, and affectional
ties are significant cognitive elements of the construction of critical,
self-reflective, feminist selves and that in the crafting of oppositional
selves and identities, "decolonization coupled with emancipatory
collective practice leads to a rethinking of patriarchal, heterosexual,
colonial, racial, and capitalist legacies in the project of feminism and, thus,
toward envisioning democracy and democratic collective practice such that
issues of sexual politics in governance are fundamental to thinking through
questions of resistance anchored in the daily lives of women, that these issues
are an integral aspect of the epistemology of anti-colonial feminist
struggle" (xxxviii). The chapters that follow draw on these particular
formulations of decolonization in the context of feminist struggle. A
formulation of decolonization in which autonomy and self-determination are
central to the process of liberation and can only be achieved through
"self reflexive collective practice."
Contents
|
Acknowledgments |
vii |
|
Introduction:
Decolonization, Anticapitalist Critique, and
Feminist Commitments, |
1 |
|
Part
One. Decolonizinq Feminism |
|
1. |
Under Western Eyes:
Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, |
17 |
2. |
Cartographies of Struggle:
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, |
43 |
3. |
What's Home Got to Do with
It? (with Biddy Martin), |
85 |
4. |
Sisterhood, Coalition, and
the Politics of Experience, |
106 |
5. |
Genealogies of Community,
Home, and Nation, |
124 |
|
Part
Two. Demystifying Capitalism |
|
6. |
Women Workers and the
Politics of Solidarity, |
139 |
7. |
Privatized Citizenship,
Corporate Academies, and Feminist Projects |
169 |
8. |
Race, Multiculturalism,
and Pedagogies of Dissent |
190 |
|
Part
Three. Reorienting Feminism |
|
9. |
"Under Western
Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist
Struggles |
221 |
|
Notes |
253 |
|
Bibliography |
275 |
|
Index |
295 |