Carrying out feminist conversation in person and online is definitely celebratory, but as Mohanty explains throughout this volume, one must acknowledge the very real borders that lie between races, classes, disabilities, and religions in order to achieve an understanding of how best to employ feminist conversation. It particularly caught my attention in the Introduction under ‘Feminist Commitments’, where it stated that feminism without borders is not the same as ‘borderless feminism’, which sparked a revision of thinking in my own mind about the everyday limits of feminism. This volume really stands out as an educated and intelligent look at the ways in which feminism is evolving and developing in a society of ‘borders’. Rather than imagining Women as a cohesive group, through her essays, Mohanty analyzes the borders that divide and differentiate us. In brief, Mohanty's book serves as a critique of Western academic feminism, and how the project of Western feminism has collapsed the identities of Third World Women into a reductive "Other," united in their presumed exploitation and a monolithic notion of sexual difference. Mohanty is a prominent postcolonial feminist theorist and Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University. To kick off our Boshemia Book Club this autumn, we dove into Chandra Talpade Mohanty's Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |