Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses

In this article, Chandra Talpede Mohanty affirms that the term colonialism has come to denote a variety of phenomena within recent feminist writings. In this way colonization has been used to characterize all types of systems and representations, from the economic level, political hierarchies and cultural productions in general, especially discourses in relation to women in the "third world". In this article the definition of colonization that she seeks to analyze is predominantly discursive, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of "scholarship" and "knowledge" about women in the third world. In this way a connection is established between "feminist scholarship and feminist political practice and organization determines the significance and status of Western feminist writings on women in the third world, for feminist scholarship, like most other kinds of scholarship, is not the mere production of knowledge about a certain subject "(334). This is how these feminists’ scholarly practices through writing, reading or criticism, are inscribed in cultural and ideological power relations that are part of another construction of diverse discursive representations. In this way, Mohanty affirms the main problem of the dominant "representations" of Western feminism are their combination with the imperial eyes with which women of the third world are looked at. In this way, her criticism is directed at Western feminist discourse on women in the third world. However, there is also the problem of the political struggle against class, race, gender and imperialist hierarchies that continue to classify women of the third world within categories that place gender as the main origin of oppression.

Finally, she talks about how certain categories are constructed within this analysis as the case of African women, similarly in the diaries of French nuns’ distinctions are made between indigenous men and women and black slaves. Men in this context are demonized and compared to the devil, while indigenous women are represented as souls lost in the barbarism and savagery of those lands. Thus, the nuns highlight the help received only by the Indian women and while they criticize their naked bodies or with scant clothing. They speak from a privileged position and highlight how the Indian women are subordinated to the wishes of their husbands or the men who surround them. In the same way they are controlled by other women, such as the mother superior, or by her confessors. In these two cases we are starting from the gender as the origin of oppression. Mohanty also says that taking women as a unit is another type of discrimination. Likewise, relationships are structured in terms of a source of power and a cumulative reaction to power. In these letters we see constantly referring to the hierarchies of the nuns that they take on a journey, in this way they recognize these power relations within the discourse that make their writing possible, therefore, this testimony / letter / diary they were written thanks to the permission / need to know what happened in order to be able to continue controlling / guiding these women in the distance. In this manner, two discursive presentations of the nuns are given in the text, representing themselves as Western women with an imperialist vision of indigenous women and, at the same time, representing themselves as women subordinated to a patriarchal power and structure.

Mohanty, Chandra T. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Boundary 2 (print). (1984): 333-358. Print.