Mohanty defines "Westeren Feminist"

After reading the articles for this week I was a little overwhelmed. I mean, I didn’t know exactly how but I knew it was a lot new, interesting and challenging information. Honestly I really enjoyed the article by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. In the article “ Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” Mohanty defines what the “third world woman” is along with what it means to be a “Western Feminist” while she explains these two important terms she also pertains to the third world scholars writing and their culture.
I would have to say when I first started reading this article I was confused. I felt as if she was raising too many issues in just this one article perhaps it would have been better if she broke them down a little better. However, her article was just like any other article that I have read this semester, I have to read it more then once to really comprehend it. In this article I liked how she really broke down the definition of colonization and talked about what it has now become “a denote a variety of phenomena in recent feminist and left writings in general.” (p.373) Colonization is a term that I find can be defined in several ways. When I begin to think about Colonization two words come to mind immigration and migration. These two words I feel describes what Colonization in a short, simple, and sweet way. The relationship between “Woman” and “Women” was talked about in the article. I found this to be pretty interesting and problematic. I do feel that every individual male or female are going to have their own personal views about the context of these two words. Personally, I really could not seem to find a difference between the two terms, besides the one letter difference and one being plural and singular. (Smile)
Western feminist representation of women in the third world and Western feminist self-presentation are two terms that were a must to recognize. Mohanty incorporates Marxists “maintenance” function of the housewife and real “productive” role of wage labor as some of the characteristics of the third world. Third world women may be viewed as women who do not have control over their own lives and powerless but they are still women. Because they are people they deserved to be respected. It is interesting to me to know that the same general point of women being “powerless” is prominent everywhere even globally. We know that as women we are struggling daily but what matters is what we decide to do about the struggle. “ What binds women together is a sociological notion of the “sameness” of their oppression…..between “women” as a discursively constructed group and “women” as material subjects of their own history”(p.374)
As women we must recognized how much power we have and be willing to stand up for what we believe in and know is right. In the case of the “Western Feminist” it is our charge as women to help them. If we all recognize that if one woman struggles then all women struggle, regardless of class, race, and national boundaries “It is time to move beyond the Marx who found it possible to say: they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” (p.379)