Week 4 Response

The two articles, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses by Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others by Lila Abu-Lughod critique the assumptions which shape the ways in which both the West at large and Western feminism represent women in the ‘third world.’ They additionally call for the reinsertion of history and cultural context into those representations. The exclusion of historical, cultural, and international contexts from discourses surrounding the “third world woman” within the West, both authors argue, is not only highly problematic, but it also has real effects on the quotidian lives of the women it aims to represents.

Situating Western feminist scholarly practices within discourses of power, Mohanty argues that the “analytical presuppositions” Western feminists employ when representing women in the third world work to create an ethnocentric universalism of representation via the exercise of discursive power (Mohanty, 64). In illuminating the effects that these analytical presuppositions have on women within the third world, Mohanty calls for a more contextualized and historically based representation and analysis in an attempt to correct the exertion of power Western feminism so often demonstrates over the representation of the third world.

Similarly, Abu-Lughod calls for a more complex understanding of Muslim women- one which prioritizes the historical over the cultural. Arguing that the cultural only becomes legible when taken within the historical structural context, Abu-Lughod urges her (Western) readers to refrain from reductive representations and from the apathy inducing notions of cultural relativism. Instead she calls for her readers to actively deal with difference in such a way that categories of difference work to create a more just world instead of reinforcing an asymmetrical balance of power. In pointing out the ways in which many current representations of Muslim women are based on the assumption that Western womanhood is universal, Abu-Lughod makes the important distinction between knowledgeably assisting Muslim women in their quest(s) for justice and imposing Western ‘knowledge’ (including a Western definition of justice) upon them.

In building on this course’s larger discussion of knowledge, it is in this way that both articles illuminate how power can be exerted not only through the ways in which knowledge gets constructed (by whom, for what purpose, etc.) but also through the ways in which that knowledge is enacted and with what assumptions in mind.