Global and Transnational Feminist Political Thought

Chandra Talpade Mohanty's essay "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," first published in the journal Boundary 2 in 1984 and substantially revised in her later collection Feminism without Borders (2003), remains the most widely cited critique of what Mohanty calls the tendency of some Western feminist scholarship to construct a single, homogeneous category of "Third World women," defined by presumed poverty, ignorance, and victimhood, against an implicit and unmarked norm of the liberated Western woman. Mohanty argues that this move reproduces, within feminist scholarship itself, a colonial discursive structure that denies women in the global South the same historical specificity, agency, and internal diversity of experience routinely granted to women in Europe and North America, and she calls instead for feminist analysis grounded in specific, historically situated struggles rather than in a universalized, ahistorical category of global female oppression.