Week 4 Readings

This week's readings by Chandra Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod were challenging and fascinating. Mohanty's writing discussed the effects of western feminist scholarship on the lives of women in all countries. She shows the errors in generalizations about "women" as a category for analysis at all, and even more so, the issues in generalizing "third world women."   She claims western feminists "construct 'third-world women' as a homogeneous 'powerless' group often located as implicit victims of particular cultural and socio-economic systems" (66).

Abu-Lughod's piece is titled, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" She poses an argument that addresses the issue with even asking that question: "It is deeply problematic to contruct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something" (788).

I noticed that these two articles really seemed to intersect in their discussions about veiling among middle eastern women. Abu-Lughod spends a good amount of time explaining how specifically western political rhetoric is dangerous and inaccurate in regards to the wearing of burqas by women in Afghanistan. She quotes Laura Bush and claims that she is justifying US bombings and war in Afghanistan by saying they are freeing women of having to be covered in public, which is supposedly providing them more freedom and liberation. Mohanty's article has something to say about this. She says that by using "purdah" as a symbol for "rape, domestic violence, and forced prostitution," it eliminates the cultural, social, and historical context under which those coverings came to be. On page 75, she goes on to say that while "the practice of purdah may be similar in certain contexts... this does not automatically indicate that the practices themselves have identical significance in the social realm."

Both of these articles stress the importance of not generalizing and creating large, and incorrect categorizations on peoples and cultures that are not the same. This is true especially in regards to women. In the opening of Mohanty's work, she points out that often what is used to unite women is their shared oppression. However, this oppression looks completely different for each particular woman based on so many different factors - race, geography, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, religion, etc. These articles reminded me of the importance of intersectionality when exploring feminism, and remembering that all women experience life based on a multitude of contexts and circumstances.