Week 8 Response

Unfortunately, I found Monday's readings to be extremely difficult to get through because they felt a little repetitive. Because of and in spite of this, I found evidence of many of the previous authors we've encountered in the readings, especially in the Kandiyoti. For example, Kandiyoti's "Introduction" reflects Mohanty's arguments extremely well. When Kandiyoti claims that "women are neither homogeneous nor passive victims of patriarchal domination" and that they are "full-fledged social actors, bearing the full set of contradictions implied by their class, racial and ethnic locations as well as their gender," she echoes Mohanty's urge for Western feminists to study women as distinct entities, variable in time and place (17). Both Kandiyoti and Mohanty, in turn, employ Said's depiction of Orientalism's view of the Middle East as "ahistorical" when referring to third-world women (1).

However, I did have an objection to one of Kandiyoti's claims. She writes that the "privileged place of women and the family ... represents one of the few areas of relative autonomy left to societies whose ties of political and economic dependence severely restrict their choices in every other sphere" (8). I don't believe that this women/family life sphere is as autonomous as she thinks. Actions taken in this private sphere are often in response to "Western pressures," even as she acknowledges (8). The actions themselves may be decided by the nation and the people, but they ultimately tend to be in response to outside influences, in the form of dissent against Western society in the form of reassertion of Muslim values, or, in the case of Kemalism in Turkey, partial adoption of Western values. This decidedly limits the autonomy of women and the family, or the nation that makes decisions regarding them.