Week 5: Mohanty/Abu-Lughod/Williams -- The New York Time

This week we read three scholars who critique Western feminisms. Chandra Mohanty (1988) critiques the slippage of Western feminists between Woman as a homogenized, analytical category and women as diversely positioned people in the world. Mohanty is concerned with how Western feminists frame women as a primordial social category wherein all women experience a common, shared oppression (65). This universal “sexual difference” is observed by Western feminists in the “Third World” as especially pronounced because of the “third-world difference,” which reinforces Western cultural imperialism and allegations of Oriental backwardness (80). Mohanty concludes the essay by meditating that while Western feminists are not the only participants in the production of Western cultural hegemony, but their contribution of the “monolithic ‘third-world woman’” may be useful in ongoing projects of “latent economic and cultural colonization of the 'non-western' world” (82). 

Lila Abu-Lughod (2005), writing almost three decades later, takes Mohanty’s warnings of the political utility of the “third-world woman” as her launching point. Abu-Lughod shows how analytical strategy descibed by Mohanty of the homogenization of third-world women has enabled justifications for interventions in the Middle East on the grounds of Muslim women who are universally oppressed and all “need saving.” Abu-Lughod argues that to move past an agenda of “saving” women, academics must work towards “recognizing and respecting differences -- precisely as products of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as manifestations of differently structured desires” (787).

Juliet A. Williams (2009) offers one way of doing this kind of thinking, which she calls “double critique.” Williams studies the Orientalist news coverage of temporary marriages to make “orientalist representations themselves the object of the inquiry rather than treating (mis)representation as a problem somehow to be gotten around” (617). This kind of “double critique” is powerful because “Instead of denying the inherent partiality of perspective, double critique mobilizes partiality as a fulcrum with which to bring into view that which is obscured when there is no critical outside” (629). Williams offers a way out of passive cultural relativism or ethnocentrism so as to recognize historically constituted differences. Ultimately, this mode of thinking might allow Western feminists to consider the conditions of third-world women without reinforcing Western hegemony, by always critiquing Western methodological limitations in studying the third-world in a way that can ever be omniscient. Acknowledging this limitation reduces the risk of producing Mohanty’s monolithic “third-world women.” 

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I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter from the New York Times called In Her Words, which highlights a few important headlines relevant to gender politics from that week. A few weeks ago, on January 23rd, 2020, I received a story about a report on gendered wealth inequality that emerged from the Davos World Economic Forum. The report in some ways moves past the shortfalls of “saving women” from culture in that the report recognizes structural factors as the origin of gendered oppression. Women hold less wealth because, as the policy director at Oxfam says, “there’s something deeply sick about the economy.” 

Yet, even in a structural approach, the report relies on the existing notions of cultural others and homogenized womanhood. In one part of the NYT’s summary, they write that “nowhere in the world do men do as much unpaid work as women. In Norway, a country often hailed as a gender equal utopia, women spend about an hour more on unpaid work than men ...  But in India, women spend almost six hours on unpaid labor and men spend less than an hour.” NYT does not explain why they choose these two countries to compare. It does not indicate if India had the worst metrics of those measured. NYT draws upon the common-sense ideology of “third-world difference” described by Mohanty as “that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries” (63). Without explanation for invoking India, the NYT readers understand that India is not like Norway because of this third-world difference that manifestly makes women more oppressed in India.

NYT also homogenizes women as Mohanty warns. The NYT explains the mechanism of this wealth inequality as follows:

“Because women tend to earn less than men, they have more of an economic incentive to give up their job and focus on work at home while the higher earner goes to work. But because they have so much to look after at home, they often can’t take on a higher-paid job that might require more commitment, creating a vicious cycle that traps women at the bottom of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the gender pay gap.”

This hyper-generalization lumps together every household on the globe and elides the infinite differences that exist between households. It, among many other things, presumes a nuclear family, presumes maternal caretaking, presumes universal gender wage gaps, all of which are true in some contexts but false in many others. This flattening of the nature of oppression to one form forecloses opportunities to explore how gendered oppression operates in decentralized ways, and thus, forecloses the generation of successful anti-oppression efforts. 

The organizations involved in the report -- including Oxfam, IMF, and the Gates Foundation -- all hire alumni of institutions like Yale, many of whom likely studied Western feminism in some form during their education. In a world that is increasingly attentive to “global patriarchy,” the ways we as students and academics study women and feminism have serious consequences for reports like these.

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Questions I would like to discuss more:

1. Abu-Lughod articulates a need for something that is neither ethnocentric or culturally relativist, and argues that we need a politics that recognizes and respects difference precisely as a product of history. What does this mean in practice relative to interventionism? What types of material responses might this produce?

2. Is "double critique" a viable anti-imperialist mode of study? Does Williams essay still reinforce a belief that third world women need to be represented by people lodged in the West? Why or why not?