Reference no: EM133399256

Question: For the most part thus far in our class, we have focused on issues of power and powerlessness in the US, but as Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out, viewing such issues solely from a Western or Eurocentric perspective results in multiple blind spots regarding marginalized peoples from other parts of the world. Mohanty herself has decades of feminist scholarship and activist experience and has seen feminism both within and without the academy undergo numerous changes. In the 1980s, the primary shifts in feminist thought were challenges posed to the hegemony of its dominant Eurocentric perspective by women of color and non-Western areas of the world. As a result, since the 1980s, feminist thought in the US has become more sensitive to the different kinds of struggles faced by women facing different matrices of domination. This was especially eye-opening for white, liberal, economically privileged US feminists who tended to focus on attaining the positions of power and influence traditionally concentrated in the hands of men.

Mohanty remains committed to challenging Eurocentrism in her work, but believes that for the twenty-first century, "the politics and economics of capitalism" are a "far more urgent locus of struggle" (89). A feminist critique today should not only acknowledge Eurocentrism, but also the contemporary context of the widespread global proliferation of capitalism, increased privatization, and the growth of religious, ethnic, and racial hatreds.

The most "inclusive paradigm" for analyzing the effects of what she calls the oppressive effects of "global capitalism" or "globalization" is to begin by centering feminist analysis on the struggles and experiences of women and girls from the less affluent regions of the Third World and Global South (Third World/South). Throughout her essay, she gives examples of feminist studies of how the lives of Third World/South women and girls have been affected by Western corporate interests and transnational governing institutions like the World Trade Organization. She writes: "It is especially on the bodies and lives of women and girls from the Third World/South-the Two-Thirds World-that global capitalism writes its script, and it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of these communities of women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision anticapitalist resistance" (94). Only by centralizing the struggles of such marginalized groups of women and girls can we really come to terms with the oppressive impact of contemporary global capitalism.

What are your reactions to Mohanty's argument that we can only understand the full impact of global capitalism by examining the particular experiences of Third World/South women and girls--some of whom are among the most oppressed people in the world? Do you think that learning more about the struggles of women in comparatively disadvantaged parts of the world can be productive in your understanding of your own positioning within systems of oppression and inequality? (Note: Mohanty is NOT saying that we don't need to also pay attention to women's struggles locally or in our own countries.)