Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship And Colonial Discourses By Chandra Mohanty

Chandra Mohanty 's essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” discusses the methods employed by western feminist scholars to generate a homogenous identity of womanhood. Mohanty is critical of these methods due to its dependence on a dichotomy of power and as a consequence, the production of the “Other” figure. In her essay, Mohanty identifies how the production of this Other in regards to woman is the production of the “Third World Woman”, placed as subject to the Western, Idealized Woman. Ever critical for the correction of flawed methodologies, Mohanty asserts that “the application of the notion of women as a homogenous category to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the …show more content…
Mohanty calls this production “the “Third World Difference” – that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries. And it is in the production of this 'Third World Difference ' that Western feminisms appropriate and “colonize” the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions cultures, races and castes”(335). This appropriation and colonization is better understood in the production of the Third World, sometimes called the developing nations, as a homogenous narrative. These codified epistemologies carry significant negative connotations, particularly since they are linked, by necessity, to the figure of the First World, the developed nations, which Western Feminism is positioned within. In order to exult the ideas that the third world is in need of saving, third world women are by definition required to be positioned as victims on all levels. As a consequence, any form of autonomy and of voice is