August 18, 2005
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991.
A compilation edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism is comprised of essays generated by the 1983 international academic conference on “Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives.” The primary issues addressed in the collection include the troubling representation of a monolithic “Third World Woman” by Western feminists, the tension between cultural specificity and political alliance across cultures, and the role of activism and “real” women’s experiences in academic discourse. Organized into four parts, “Power, Representation, and Feminist Critique,” “Public Policy, the State, and Ideologies of Gender,” “National Liberation and Sexual Politics,” and “Race, Identity, and Feminist Struggles,” the book includes essays from fifteen authors who differ in their opinions about but who each address feminism in terms of multiple oppressions and identities such as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It is only by acknowledging each individual’s or each individual culture’s specific multiple and often contradictory identities that feminism can theorize effectively and succeed politically. The book as a whole, then, levies a critique of a more traditional, gender-based Western feminism. At the level of the academy, a revision of feminism would demand greater attention to the multiplicity of voices; more of an experiential, activist approach to academic work; and, implicitly, a rethinking of teaching practices along these more inclusive and rigorously critiqued feminist lines.
In Part One, “Power, Representation, and Feminist Critique,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes of being “Under Western Eyes” and contests the monolithic “Third World Women” created by Western feminism. Rey Chow analyzes “Violence in the Other Country” by noting the ways in which the media produces “The Third World.” Finally, Barbara Smith’s “The Truth That Never Hurts” argues that the relative inattention paid to Black lesbian fiction must be remedied, for the study of literature has the activist responsibility to combine practice with theory.
“Redrafting Morality,” M Jacqui Alexander’s study of the sexualization of gender and the subversive manipulation of legislative power under the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago begins Part Two, “Public Policy, the State, and Ideologies of Gender.” Carmen Barroso and Christina Bruschini research sex education in Brazil and conclude in “Building Politics from Personal Lives” that, based on women’s individual testimonials, Brazil’s state-run sex education is a valuable social program. “Women in Jamaica’s Urban Informal Economy” by Faye V. Harrison treats the relation between class and sexual disparity, while “Women and Crime in the United States” by Juanita Diaz-Cotto argues that economic, social, and political factors have led to an apparent increase in female arrests.
Part Three, “National Liberation and Sexual Politics,” begins with an essay by Angela Gilliam entitled “Women’s Equality and National Liberation,” in which she claims the contemporary emphasis on sexuality in the U.S. women’s movement fails to acknowledge the economic ramifications of oppression along sex lines. In contrast, “Evelyne Accad writes in “Sexuality and Sexual Politics” that only a sexual revolution will make political revolution effective, and that Marxist emphases on economy are in fact paternalistic. Nayereh Tohidi’s “Gender and Islamic Fundamentalism” is an analysis of Iran following the 1979 revolution and it details the ways in which “womanhood” was revolutionized and then subsumed by a misogynist government.
In the final part of the book, “Race, Identity, and Feminist Struggles,” Lourdes Torres writes of “The Construction of the Self in U.S. Latina Autobiographies,” noting that their multiple identifications make these autobiographies subversive and empowering. Basing her endorsement of “Socialist Feminism” on personal experience, Nellie Wong similarly favors a politics that encompasses multi-issue oppression. Ann Russo’s “We Cannot Live Without Our lives” analyzes the role of white women in antiracist feminism and argues that race must be treated as “integral to sexism and misogyny”—and must be treated in this way by scholars and activists of all races, including those who are white (302). Cheryl Johnson-Odim the book with her essay “Common Themes, Different Contexts.” She argues that so-called “Third World Women” must now move beyond mere criticism of Western feminists. Both the groups must come together to expand feminism globally without creating “others.”
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