Week 4 Response

Although it took me a while to settle into Mohanty's essay, I eventually came to enjoy it very much. I was thinking about Said's "Orientalism" the entire time I was reading, even though she did not mention him until the very end. The comparison of Western women as "us" and the third-world women as "others" offered a fresh perspective on Orientalism, in contrast to the male-dominated examples we have been used to seeing. It was interesting to consider that even Western women, who have been deemed oppressed throughout history as well, can reposition themselves in positions of power by assuming knowledge over third-world women. I don't think Western women are necessarily on an agenda to gain power over third-world women; they are simply trying to uncover inequalities. However, they may be unintentionally causing more harm than good when they stereotype excessively.

I think the quote that best summarizes Mohanty's argument is that categorizing all third-world women as one group "assumes an ahistorical, universal unity among women based on a generalized notion of their subordination" (72). The most important word that I picked out here was "ahistorical" because it precisely reflects Said's views that Orientalism perceives the Orient as an unchanging, romantic, and backwards place. Mohanty also claims, in this way, that Western feminist discourse traps third-world women in this static environment as well.

This quote also ties in perfectly to the second reading for Monday, in which Abu-Lughod urges us to reconsider how we view the Middle East. We cannot view it as a backwards and unchanging place, nor can we assume complete "cultural relativism" and accept it for what it is (786). We must always consider that the way that the West interacted with the Middle East had a big influence on how it exists today. We cannot simply blame the Taliban's (or al-Qaeda's or Saddam Hussein's) oppressiveness on Islam; we must understand that the West, at one point, encouraged these people and brought them into power.

Therefore, when we go into the Middle East with the mindset that we are saving people "from something," we have to acknowledge that we cannot save them from Islam (788). Instead, we should be saving them from oppressive regimes (their "Muslim-ness" as a coincidence, not a defining factor) that we may have had some part in creating. As soon as we recognize this difference, we will be able to put our resources into real forms of aid, like education and healthcare, and not into the war on Islam.