"Feminism, Postcolonialism and the Contradictory Orders of Modernity"
by Ato Quayson
Quay discusses the importance of "discursive representation," which is most often collapsed into political representation with regard to Third World women (586). Quayson discusses Chandra Talpade Mohanty's thoughts on feminism and postcolonialism, most significantly the idea that the "discursively created, oppressed Third World woman is nothing but a homogenized creation of Western feminist discourses whose intent is to set up an object that can be the presumed Other of the Western female culturally, materially and discursively. I can see how difficult these issues can be to unpack. I am an editor on the Undergraduate Women's Studies journal at McGill and just recently there was a debate over one of our submissions that led to a long exploration of (self) representation and the many interpretations of these representations. I was actually shocked to discover how many preconceptions I still had (very unconsciously) about cross cultural experiences.
One thing I take issue with in this article is the opening quote by C.L.R. James. I don't disagree with his point, but I do feel it should not be as essentialising as Quayson presents it. James writes, "But the woman is called career woman because her 'career' in modern society demands she place herself in a subordinate position or even renounce normal life" (190). I think that this point is very interesting. The discussion about how something modern (a career) is something that is abnormal for women. Even though women (in the "First World Countries" -- I don't like this terminology but it's hard to avoid) are encouraged to have careers, they are also being painted as somehow "abnormal." I'm thinking of extreme situations where women must take jobs in order to survive. At what point does gender not play a major role anymore? Is there a point of economic and social strife that allows gender difference to be overlooked in some way?
I also have a difficult time understand where feminist issues can be applied to all women and where only to certain women. These are very difficult questions, but I'm often left wondering if there can be a two-way discourse in postcolonial and "western" feminism -- There are certain aspects of postcolonial thought that are necessarily paradoxical and it comes out quite a bit when discussing women's rights, which often shows the faults of many philosophical systems.
Christianity keeps coming up in these readings and in the fiction, and yet we have not discussed it much. I'm still very interested in the effects of Christian conversion on the postcolonial thought, because it is taking in a Western thought system.