DOROTHY ATUHURA AND PHILIP TSCHIRHART

GLOBAL AND LOCAL FEMINISMS: MOHANTY, MAHMOOD, AND NGUYEN

Mohanty, C. T (1986). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Boundary 2 12(3), 333-358.

Under Western Eyes seeks to alert readers to the dangers of assuming that women are a coherent group acted upon by universal social, economic, and political processes. Mohantys essay argues that many researchers, particularly those trained within Western feminist scholarship, have tended to produce monolithic, universalizing, and essentializing constructions of women in the Third World. Mohanty illuminates two dimensions of the term Women as constructed as a category of analysis: o As a discursively constructed group, a cultural and ideological composite Other produced through representational discourses like science, literature, law, etc. o As material subjects of their own collective histories this is what the practice of feminist epistemology seeks to address. Rejecting a monolithic use of women as a category of analysis Mohanty encourages analysis of the production of women as socio-economic political groups within particular local contexts (p. 344). Mohanty emphasizes analysis of contradictions in womens local experiences suggesting that by understanding womens location we may better identify structures for effective political action and social change. Critiquing the methodology of second wave feminist writings on women in the third world Mohanty argues that an emphasis on empirical and universalizing data ignored significant context specific differences. Further she argues that concepts like sexual division of labor are useful only if conceptualized at the local contextual level of analysis. Mohanty argues that feminists must resist establishing originary power divisions conceptualizing power in a binary where all third world women are a unified and powerless group. Moving away from an emphasis on sisterhood (sameness) she moves towards crafting an argument for feminist solidarity (united in a struggle against sameness). She argues that Western feminists must be mindful of the hegemonic influence of the Western scholarly establishment otherwise they produce another discursive form of colonization that dismiss pluralism and ignores the local and specific realities of women. Connect Mohantys conceptualization of the term women to other feminist readings (in this class or elsewhere). Who is she in conversation with? What are the implications of her articulation of women as a category of analysis? What does an emphasis on contradictions look like in contemporary transnational feminist scholarship? How does her call for solidarity resonate with other readings (including the revisited version of this piece)? In what ways are you cognizant of your own use of categories of analysis? How do feminist scholars balance the subject/object distinction?

GLOBAL AND LOCAL FEMINISMS: MOHANTY, MAHMOOD, AND NGUYEN

Mohanty, C. T. (2002). Under Western eyes revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. Signs, 28(2), 499-535.

Mohanty's revised piece reiterates her previous challenge of the false universality of Eurocentric discourse (p. 504). Whereas she was more focused on differences in the first version, her revision re-emphasizes and suggests new modes of exploring how the local differences intersect with universal concerns especially how the politics and economics of capitalism affects lives in the world today. Categories for analysis: o Western/Third World: have ideological and analytical value; also useful in analysis of transnational difference and multiculturalism on the basis of commodification and consumption (p. 505) but analytically limiting amidst developments of similar and other categories within 'local'/national borders. o North/South or Western/non-Western or haves/have-nots: geo-economic value, no political value. Geographical boundaries are never clear-cut and this is limiting. o One-Third World/Two-Thirds World: quality of life value in the sense of social majorities/minorities (p. 506) not based on geographical or ideological conditions. Relevant for analysis of differences and similarities, power and agency, across different lives and spaces e.g. it has room for native or indigenous struggles that cannot be mapped on ideological processes. Lacks focus on some ideological processes e.g. the history of colonization. Mohanty proposes an anticapitalist trans-national feminist practice whose analytical framework is attentive to the micro-politics of everyday life as well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political processes (p. 509). Internationalizing pedagogical strategies for crossing borders and building bridges: o Feminist as tourist: a focus on the Other through a Eurocentric point of view, the distance and difference between the local and the global/Other is clearly marked out. The global/Other is appended to the local/national. o Feminist as explorer: A specific study of the Other. The local and global are at a distance and are different but an in-depth study of the Other is done. o Feminist Solidarity model: Mohanty's favorite. The local and global are not geospaces but rather categories for mapping differences and similarities and how they intersect or co-refer across cultures and borders.

What works have we looked at in this course that could be representative of the three pedagogical models Mohanty presents? When solidarity becomes predicated upon anti-globalizing effects, does the local and specific become secondary to the force of anti-globalization? In what way is Mahmood's project an anticapitalist transnational feminist project? In advancing feminist solidarity Mohanty pushes for an analysis of the languages of imperialism and places heavy emphasis on the analysis of stories, what narrative theories has your discipline developed? Can we adopt these to study transnational feminism? What does Mohantys term empire add to our discussion of neoliberalism? How does it draw upon an articulation of the One-Third/Two-Thirds World? What differences are there between post-colonial theory and a critique of US empire?

DOROTHY ATUHURA AND PHILIP TSCHIRHART

GLOBAL AND LOCAL FEMINISMS: MOHANTY, MAHMOOD, AND NGUYEN

Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press The woman's mosque movement negates assumptions that o All human beings have an innate desire for freedom, o That we all somehow seek to assert our autonomy when allowed to do so, o That human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them (p. 5). According to Mahmood, agency is the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (p. 8). Individual autonomy may be secondary to collective interests if we undertake cultural translation and not relativism. Agency should not only be restricted to resistance of norms since resistance is not itself a universal category. agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms (pp. 14-15). Mahmood problematizes post-structural feminism for conceptualizing agency along the binary model of subordination and subversion arguing that realities that are not reducible to re-signification, subversion are missed out (p. 14). What may be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actually be a form of agency but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment (p. 15). A woman's agency is a product of the historically contingent discursive traditions in which she is located (p. 32). Mahmood's focus is historical specificity and not universalism or essentialism. The distinct feminist modalities should not be collapsed into one form. o Analytical: is for offering a diagnosis of women's status across cultures (p. 10. o Political: is for changing the situation of women who are understood to be marginalized, subordinated, or oppressed (p. 10). To what extent is Mahmood's project a 'feminist' one? How relevant is it to feminism? Do you find Mahmood's conceptualization of agency emancipatory or problematic? Does being anti-secularist make these women feminists? How does religion, antisecularism, and feminism intersect? Is there anything problematic about her ethnographic stance? Does she, for example, identify these women as feminists or do they self-identify as feminists? How about the monolith moslem woman? As a Pakistani studying Egyptian women, how might we position Mahmoods feminism within Mohanty's explorer, tourist, or solidarity models?

GLOBAL AND LOCAL FEMINISMS: MOHANTY, MAHMOOD, AND NGUYEN

Nguyen, M. T. (2011). The biopower of beauty: Humanitarian imperialisms and global feminisms in an age of terror. Signs, 36(2), 359-383.

Nguyen crafts her argument to inform readers about the values of development and empowerment programs identifying them as an inseparable part of a neoliberal political philosophy perpetuating structural dominance. The authors emphasis is on appeals to beauty as they are linked to feminist and humanitarian claims to human rights and development. She argues it is beautys entanglement with humanitarian imperialisms and global feminisms that requires us to expand what it could mean to foster life in the long shadow of neoliberalism and war (p. 361). Articulates three dimensions of beauty o The promise of beauty identifying something as beautiful draws it in connection with the world o The distribution of beauty the absences of beauty implies ugliness and informs lessons about who has access to beauty or ugliness in relation to other politics. o Beauty as pragmatic a set of everyday techniques and strategies which are made to produce selves and present a promise of future beauty. Beauty as biopower: Beauty, as a discourse and concern about the vitality of the body but also of the soul can and does become an important site of signification, power, and knowledge about how to live. This is war by other means (p. 364). The example of veiling: The construction of veiling as not aesthetically pleasurable allows for a construction of ugliness which carries a civilizational dimension establishing a binary where those who desire beauty desire a place where beauty is imagined to live. Tracing the category beauty through discourses of human rights Nguyen focuses on the NGO Beauty without Borders as an exemplar. Nguyen argues that beauty is established as a human right through the unstable concept of dignity. Dignity rests on notions of self-esteem which operate as a Foucauldian technology of the self to prescribe empowerment and development. Tracing discourses surrounding beauty Nguyen argues that The integrity of the feminine body and psyche becomes the goal of multiple forms of global sisterhood, including its iteration as global feminism (p. 370). Nguyen critiques such global feminisms for ignoring the structural violence of geopolitics and transnational capital and instead emphasizing the liberal idea of womens freedom emphasizing beauty, individuality, and modernity. Beauty becomes not only a measure of moral feeling and human being, a signifier for the choices offered by liberal modernity and a metonym of womens rights as human rights, but also the medium through which a woman might access all these and more (p. 374). What other values are implicated in Western development and empowerment programs? How might we tease out their biopolitical implications? Beauty Without Borders is now defunct, are there other development organizations which continue to perpetuate similar discourses? How are they similar or different? Placing Mohanty (1986) and Nguyen (2011) into conversation with one another, what might we extract about the values of sisterhood and solidarity that undergird global feminisms?