ABSTRACT
Any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of “third world feminisms” must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic “Western” feminisms, and the formulation of autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies. The first project is one of deconstructing and dismantling; the second, one of building and constructing. This chapter suggests that the feminist writings and analyzes discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/representing a composite, singular “third world woman” – an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse. It argues that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality, on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the “third world” in the context of a world system dominated by the West, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world.
