Week 4 Response

Mohanty's article reflected several of the issues we've discussed and read about already but this time she applied it to feminism. Because feminist writings often advocate for equality and justice, it is easy to forget that the same risks of overgeneralization and knowledge production can greatly affect our perception. Just as Orientalists did with claiming to be the authority on colonized populations, these writings often come from someone claiming authority and yet constructing an "Other" - often with the result that the western woman is the desirable model, the "norm," while women in "third-world" countries are backwards and in many ways inferior (even the wording Mohanty uses is quite similar to Said).

As both Mohanty and Abu Lughod demonstrate, this claiming of authority and overgeneralization (e.g. referring to all women in a country as a singular group, despite social status, religion, etc.) can lead to a gross simplification of the issues at hand. Although it is appropriate to explore trends and try to find ways of improving the lives of the oppressed, Western definitions of oppression may differ drastically from standards in other cultures - such as the wearing of hijab as a personal statement of religious beliefs, not just patriarchal standards. I agree with both of these scholars that, although justice is a thing to be desired, any broad claims need to be very carefully examined and one needs to account for cultural differences (within the culture being studied as well as between the writer and her subject) before reaching any conclusions.