Week 4 Sunday's reading

From an activist point of view, I found Mohanty's argument quite intriguing in terms of looking at the "Other" and analyzing the "Other" with the context of that culture. It is within "western feminists" writing and anthropological work that fights for women's rights in the East, that binaries of west and east, and indigenous and modern arrise as a result. Western feminist writing hold a lot of assumption that are not 100% correct or are not correct at all. Moreover, some of their presuppositions could be quite offensive to women such as that "we are all sisters in struggle." Mohanty's argues against this presupposition in that it creates a binary between Western women and Third World women. Such a dichotomy poses Western women as the norm since after all they have the privilege of writing about 3rd world women. Another issue present is the assumption that all Middle Eastern women are the same in their struggle. However, Mohanty argues that these are not struggles once one looks at the cultural context (as an example: Why women wear hijab in the Egypt?). There it is important to link deeply rooted context with observation.

Abu Lughod seems to be on the same page as Mohanty in the idea linking context (especially political and social history) with observation. She also draws upon the binaries that Mohanty describes with detail; "recreating an imaginary geography of West vs East, us vs Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas" (p. 784). Her argument or generous supply of examples of the wearing of the veil was quite interesting in terms of the context that the veil is worn. The West's perception of the veil as being oppressive is exactly what Mohanty and Abu Lughod write about in terms of looking at another culture from a western point of view, which creates an ahistorical and apolitical way of looking at Middle Eastern cultures.